While we’ve recently been hearing endless songs about Santa, snow and sleigh bells, the Christmas Number One exactly 50 years ago was “Ernie – The Fastest Milkman In The West” written and sung by British comedy legend Benny Hill.
As it stayed Number One for four weeks, it must have sold a huge number of 45’s. Youngsters, ask your grandparents!
So as “Ernie” celebrates its half-century, it’s fitting that a digital TV channels is repeating some of the shows Benny made for Thames Television when there were only three TV channels. Youngsters, ask your grandparents!
Benny’s shows attracted up to 21 million viewers – a figure unimaginable in today’s fragmented TV world of digital channels and streaming services – and was sold to 97 countries.
Benny reigned supreme until the late 1980’s when his shows risqué humour and the inclusion of young female dancers in skimpy costumes was criticised by the press – including, unbelievably, The Sun, (in)famous for its Page Three Girls!
A young Ben Elton said Benny’s shows encouraged assaults on women – a horrible, totally unjustified accusation to make about someone.
Interestingly, after Benny’s death in April 1989, Elton backtracked and denied he’d said it. But he did – on “Saturday Live” and in “Q” magazine.
The multi-talented Benny was the first TV comedian to use camera trickery to play several characters in the same sketch; starred in “The Italian Job” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”; and wrote hilariously funny lyrics, limericks and poems,
He was also the master of delivering a cleverly constructed double entendre while maintaining a look of total innocence that inferred that any naughty interpretation was in the mind of the viewer.
Whatever you think of Benny, it’s worth remembering that in 2002 The Independent newspaper voted him the third greatest British comedian of all time, behind Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.
I’ll end by quoting one of the lines from “Ernie” which audaciously crams eleven syllables into one breathlessly delivered line and never fails to make me smile. “…and a rock cake caught him un-der-neath his heart!”
Try saying that with a mouthful of Christmas cake!