After doing so many reviews myself, I decided that others might want to make contributions. David Hawkins has done some reviews for Region 2 DVD's. Now William Brown has written his own review for The Benny Hill's World Tour: New York DVD. Thanks for the review, William!
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(May 30, 1991)
Color [58:08]
Cast: Benny Hill with Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Anna Dawson, Jon Jon Keefe, Johnny Hutch, Lorraine Doyle, Sue Upton, Mike Mulloy (also, uncredited: Derek Deadman), Hill's Angels & Hill's Little Angels.
N.Y.C. Cast: Andrew Alburger, Joey Faye, Lanny Flaherty, Stacey Ann Logan, Lee Meredith & Caryn Rosenthal.
Hill's Angels Choreographed by: Libby Roberts
Vocal Backing: The Ladybirds
Musical Director: Ronnie Aldrich
Executive Producers:Philip Jones & Don Taffner
Producer and Directed by: Dennis Kirkland
A D.L. Taffner/U.K. Ltd. Production
Highlights: Ask Dr. Ruth!, A Streetcar Named Desirée, Raiders of the Lost Jungle.
This program, made after TBHS was cancelled by Thames Television, originally aired on May 30, 1991 on the USA Network. It was to be the first of a proposed series of specials to be filmed in different places of the world, but only this one special came out of it. It was later aired in two parts in Britain as Benny Hill: Unseen, Part 1 airing on April 12, 1994 and Part 2 on May 16, 1994 (with the order juggled around from how it's presented here). This was sort of a "half-and-half" show - outdoor scenes videotaped in New York City with a cast of American actors (not unlike his 1977 Australian special Benny Hill Down Under whose cast, aside from Benny himself, was all Australian), the in-studio segments made at Teddington Studios with his regular cast (like his regular Thames shows). Because it was made by an independent television production concern, headed by American syndicator Don Taffner who'd handled U.S. distribution of Thames product, its contents were never edited into the half-hour syndicated episodes.
The show leads off with what is indexed as Father Knows Best. It's actually a series of quickies, the first being Benny and Little Angel Richard Whatling (the only Little Angel I noticed in the entire show, the end credit notwithstanding) praying at each edge of the bed, followed by Benny as a bartender switching accents with German patron Bob Todd and British patron Henry McGee; a bank robbery where all customers are ordered face down but Sue Upton is face up; and Benny as a father laying down the law to his cross-dressing son.
The next chapter, Welcome to New York, leads off with Benny as his Fred Scuttle character getting out of a taxi in New York and having a tussle with three police officers (two of whom are Andrew Alburger and Lanny Flaherty, the latter bearing a moustache; not sure of the female officer, though) in Central Park, then a shot of Times Square at night with Benny posing in front of the title flashing on the Spectacolor screen at One Times Square. This leads to the Opening Number: New York Rap (not in the menu), introduced by the familiar voice of Henry McGee, with Benny (wearing a New York Mets baseball cap, glasses and a T-shirt that says "I (heart) NY" on the front and "I (heart) LA TOO" on the back) taking on the rap genre as only he could - but the "dancing" from the Angels is somewhat mechanical and stiff (quite literally at the start), and this is but one example of something that sounds good on paper but falls flat in execution - which happens throughout much of this show. Lorraine Doyle is visible in the background along with the rest of the cast. Check out Bob Todd's blue fright wig. This is followed by Benny at a park bench in Central Park, introducing the next sketch and being harassed by a vagabond (played by veteran American comic supporting actor Joey Faye) - but it's Benny who ends up being arrested, by officer Lanny Flaherty.
Next up is Ask Dr. Ruth! with Benny impersonating famed sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer (sitting in an oversized chair, as if to accentuate the real Dr. Ruth's being very short), comedienne Roseanne Barr, and a boorish male chauvinist pig in the audience wearing the super-thick coke bottle glasses he first wore in the 1986 "R. Dibble, Handyman" sketch, and a mullet (a 1980's hairstyle). Bob Todd is another audience member, a Scandinavian with an accent reminiscent of Yogi Yorgessen or the Wally Walrus character from Woody Woodpecker ("I vent to Yale," he says, but it turns out he'd been to jail), and Anna Dawson also poses a question to the good doctor. Some interesting wordplay in some of Dr. Ruth's explanations, and a bit of poignancy with Benny's bespectacled boor, and certainly a classic within this show, but again it doesn't play as well as his earlier parodies.
This is followed by How to Meet Beautiful Women, with Benny playing both the main character and the narrator. The upshot is that Benny's luck with beautiful women is all bad, in marked contrast to the narrator's instructions. Look for Lee Meredith (the original "Ulla" from the 1968 movie version of Mel Brooks' The Producers) as the blonde in the red dress at the start, walking past Benny at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. In the bit where Benny's in the shower, he offers a rehash of the gag he'd done before in the 1975 "Mighty Deodorant for Men" ad parody. In fact, quite a few bits were done before, and better. When Benny fakes a fainting spell, he's tended to by Lee Meredith and another girl (probably Stacey Logan?), but he heads off after a paramedic (Lanny Flaherty) comes to the scene. The "sports car" gag from Eddie in August is also redone, this time with Joey Faye at the wheel, around the area of the Fulton Fish Market. At another point, he's standing in front of a building with the "Travelsavers" logo displayed in front (Travelsavers was an actual company that provided travel arrangements for this special). The skit ends with Benny in a hospital, tended to by Lorraine Doyle, then Bob Todd (in that order), after a mugging where he was worked over good by Lanny Flaherty.
Within the same chapter, is Benny standing in front of the GE Building at New York's Rockefeller Center, the gag being that as he moves while explaining the city's landmarks, a "Made in Japan" sign is displayed in front the building (at that time, the Japanese owned a share of real estate in Rockefeller Center). This was apparently done to provide Benny with an excuse to make his famous cry, "Philip!" at the end. This leads in to A Streetcar Named Desirée, with Benny as both the Marlon Brando character (here called "Frank") and the somewhat nutty "Desirée," Anna Dawson as Desirée's sister Stella, and Jon Jon Keefe, Bob Todd and Derek Deadman as the Brando character's card-playing cronies. Early in the sketch, Frank calls for the mental hospital - but after Desirée cuts the cards (literally), having beaten them in what appeared to be strip poker, it is the three of them who end up going insane and being taken away, by Henry McGee and two attendants. This was one of the better sketches in this show - but it appears to be another case of working better in conception than execution, with parts of the sketch consisting mainly of one-liners.
Next is The Audition, with Benny's Chow Mein character as a stand-up comic and ventriloquist, auditioning for Henry McGee and Sue Upton. Again, the wordplay and other bits (such as the drinking beer and reciting the alphabet at the same time) were done better in the past.
This is followed by a solo bit, Raiders of the Lost Jungle, with Benny as a director giving directions to assorted actors. This appears to be in the vein of earlier sketches such as Programme Planner (from 02/22/73) and Germany Calling (a.k.a. Tische und Sonn, from 12/05/73), only he isn't on the phone. Some cute stuff there ("Don't do that - this is a family film").
Then we go to the Common Cold Research Centre Music Show. In the interview segment with Henry McGee, there's the usual misunderstandings ("dickless" for "Nicholas," for example), although that type of wordplay had been done better in his 04/25/79 In London Tonight sketch. The number itself has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Among the members of the choir are Jon Jon Keefe, Johnny Hutch, Mike Mulloy, Bob Todd, Sue Upton, Lorraine Doyle, Anna Dawson, and a few Angels I couldn't recognise (one of whom apparently was in drag, with a painted moustache).
The show ends with Benny in a New York City Bar, getting into a mixup with gangsters (alternating between studio segments with his regular cast - with Bob Todd, Johnny Hutch and Jon Jon Keefe as the gangsters - and shots in New York with Joey Faye, Lanny Flaherty, Andrew Alburger et al.) and a gag involving two similar-looking suitcases. This leads to the closing chase sequence (starting off at New York's fabled Restaurant Row on 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, and going through Central Park), indexed as End Credits.
As noted above, this was made after Benny Hill was "sacked" (per the words of his producer/director, Dennis Kirkland) from Thames. As many in his entourage noted, Benny was never the same after that, with his trademark "sparkle" lost in the process. Therein lies a part of the problem. While he certainly tries to recreate "the magic," he seems to be operating on cruise control, more so than even on his last Thames shows. There also seemed to be an attempt to get back to the groove of his 1970's works, which were renowned for his spoofs of TV shows and films, with special emphasis on the American market. His attempt at "relevance" was "New York Rap," although his advancing age in this case mitigated against it. Perhaps when he was younger (and thinner), he could've carried off this foray into the rap/hip-hop realm with the effortless aplomb for which he had been famous, but this was no longer the case. Other examples of playing to the American audience were Ask Dr. Ruth! and A Streetcar Named Desirée. Those two bits were my personal favorites, as was Raiders of the Lost Jungle - but as I emphasise, in part because Benny's "sparkle" pretty much disappeared, the execution fell flatter than the conception. Common Cold Research Centre Music Show is a prime example of how Benny at this point had been straining towards the bottom of the barrel for ideas. (The last two bits were never shown on TV during this show's original airing.) And the regurgitation of many bits he had done years before, and better, was another indication that as a writer, he was increasingly running on empty. Physically, he began to show the effects of the massive weight gain that followed the cancellation of his Thames series. Practically the one good thing that could be said about this show was that it ranked as a classic alongside the best of his Thames shows, that is if compared with the DVD/CD The Benny Hill Collection. (Although again, his last few Thames shows, lackluster and relatively unfocused as they were, were a step above this.)
For the first time since his 05/30/78 special, Mr. Hill handled outdoor location shooting on videotape instead of film. Indeed, the whole show was on videotape. Of the New York cast, Lee Meredith and the late Joey Faye were the most recognisable faces. One of the other New York actresses, Stacey Ann Logan (a.k.a. Stacey Logan), went on to do much Broadway work, including Crazy for You, Beauty and the Beast (as "Babette"), and Sweet Smell of Success. The other credited actress, Caryn Rosenthal, became a New York-based voice artist, with one animé film and a stage play in Philadelphia to her credit. (If anyone else can make out Ms. Logan and Ms. Rosenthal in the New York-based sketches, please E-mail us.) Lanny Flaherty's credits include the films Natural Born Killers and the infamous Kevin Costner flick Waterworld, while Andrew Alburger's only other known credit in film was True West (he's done much stage work around the country, though).
Of his regular cast, taping with "The Lad Himself" at Teddington Studios for the last time, they've fallen even further into the background than was the case on his post-1980's works. Johnny Hutch, for instance, has even less to do than on the final few Thames shows he was in. It appears only Anna Dawson has any form of prominence among the cast, as the audience member in Ask Dr. Ruth! and as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desirée, followed by Henry McGee (in his usual straight man roles in The Audition and Common Cold Research Centre Music Show. One wonders why Derek Deadman (who was in the A Streetcar Named Desirée sketch) wasn't listed among the cast in the end credits.
The picture in the studio sequences is quite good, with blacks and color levels comparable to his regular shows; indeed, one could say it's better than much of the material offered. The fast-motion outdoor sequences appeared to have come out in single-field (having worked as an editor in the audio and video field, I can attest to the quality thereof), with it being most evident in the opening shots of the How to Meet Beautiful Women sketch where Benny was standing at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. Given the kind of broadcast equipment used at the time, the outdoor picture quality was a slight step below the studio picture, but at the same time is better than on the 1970-71 and 05/30/78 shows where he used videotape-based outdoor location shooting.
The audio is quite clear and the dialogue understandable, though in some of the location-based shots (the Rockefeller Center "Made in Japan" gag, for example), the sound seems a bit muffled, though it could've been how it was made. Certainly there's more detail in the sound than in his earlier, more classic shows.
Unfortunately, there is no bonus material in this DVD.
The packaging is a regular amaray case. The front cover has Benny wearing a "USA Network" jacket, flanked by a bunch of New York-based actresses (with Lee Meredith at bottom right). The back cover has a shot from the How to Meet Beautiful Women sketch.
The way this DVD is authored is strange, to say the least. After the FBI warning and the logo of Image Entertainment (which put out this DVD), we go straight to the show itself. It's only after the show ends (if played all the way through) that the menu comes up. Only two options are offered, "Go to the Tour"/"Pick a Sketch" on the main page, and "Main"/"Begin the Tour" on the menus page. The A&E DVD's (and even Warner Home Video's compilations of the best of his BBC works, The Lost Years) were far more coherent in this regard.
It is a hard call on this one. Again, some parts of the show work very well in concept, but fall way short of the mark in execution. While it is historical in that it marked the last time he would work with his cast in a sketch comedy context (though he would appear with them again for a shot in the documentary The World's Favourite Clown prior to his death), in a way it's sad to see how he operated at his absolute peak, and then see him in this show. (It could be argued that even his Australian Benny Hill Down Under special was a stronger effort than this de facto swan song.) While this shows Benny towards the tail end of his career, far from his best, again it's preferable in many spots to The Benny Hill Collection - and that's saying something. Still, I would recommend this pretty much solely for the most die-hard of Benny Hill fans.
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Audio: **** 1/2
Video: **** 1/2
Extras: -0
Programs: **** (conception), ** (execution)
Overall: ** 1/2