Benny Hill, Desperate Housewives & LAX

This column first appeared in the Age on February 5, 2005

Who would have thought that a documentary on the life of that little gnome of a man, Benny Hill, would reduce me to tears? I watched him when I was a kid of course, and by that time he was a fat sixty-year-old chasing bosomy blondes 40 years younger than him to ridiculous music. I laughed at him, not with him, and certainly had no idea of his status as one of the first comic's that television (as opposed to theatre or radio) produced. I didn't know that his use of television trickery like multiple exposures, speeded up film and trick editing was original and ahead of its time, or that by the early 1950s, The Benny Hill Show was the top-rating program on British TV and would stay on top for more than twenty years.

After watching Living Famously: Benny Hill (tonight, 7.30 pm, ABC) I finally developed the respect this strange little man deserves. His childhood resembled that of Harry Potter's (when he wasn't at school) in its archetypal English suburban grimness. Despite becoming a multi millionaire and achieving international fame he always lived in a rented flat, with a couch and a TV and lived on chips and fish fingers. He caught the bus or walked to work, the people he worked with adored him, he dated women but never seemed able to develop ongoing relationships with them, and if he was gay, as was rumored, there isn't much evidence of that either. He cried in Charlie Chaplin movies, and again when Chaplin's family told him that Charlie had been a great fan of his work. His heart was broken when his show was cancelled in 1988. While you suspect he was the ultimate sad clown, no one who was close to him ever saw the smile drop, except, perhaps, his long term friend and producer Dennis Kirkland, who climbed over the balcony of his flat one day to find him dead on the couch of a heart attack - with the TV still on.

Desperate Housewives (Monday, Channel 7, 8.30pm) is also a show about facades and what might lurk behind the smiles of people who put a brave face on things. This intelligent soap is about a group of women who are neighbors, and friends of sorts, and live on picture-perfect Wisteria Lane. The show is narrated by one of their group, Mary Alice, who killed herself in the show's opening scene last week. Former Melrose Place star Marcia Cross is great as Bree Van De Kamp, a kind of Stepford wife on speed, and Terri Hatcher is a (sexy) delight as the divorced Susan Mayer. If I hadn't been told that this show was one of the best things to come out of America in a long time I would probably have loved it's camp and funny charm. But it's not - as claimed - subversive, its 'feminist' politics are thirty years old (The Woman's Room did it better), and if Americans thinks that Desperate Housewives is cutting edge it just shows you how right of centre the edge is these days. Personally, I'm just as happy watching the trashy and unpretentious LAX which Channel 7 is burying at 11.00 pm on Tuesday nights. It stars that other Melrose great, Heather Locklear, as one tough gal in charge of the runways at LAX, whose prepared to drive her car into the wheel of a plane to stop it moving if she has to. Now that's feminism.

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