UK Royal Mail Rejects Benny Hill Stamp
Time To Boycott The UK!
The great New York Post reports that the usual suspects are dead set against a postage stamp
Benny Hill not fit for stamp?
Britian’s postal service has rejected “Benny Hill” for a stamp because his girl-chasing ways are no longer politically correct.
Royal Mail, as the post office is called there, had been considering a stamp to honor the famously naughty British comic as part of group of stamps to mark the 40th anniversary of his network, ITV, according to a report yesterday in London’s Daily Telegraph.
But, according to the minutes of a committee making the decision, the PR arm of the Royal Mail raised an objection saying Hill’s antics were “in direct opposition to [the] company’s policies on harassment in the workplace.”
“Benny Hill” ran on British TV for 20 years — from 1969-89 — and was one of its first and most successful exports. For a generation of Americans in the 1970s, it was the first British TV show they ever saw.
The show was a half-hour sketch comedy, full of slapstick and scantily clad girls (“Frasier” star Jane Leeves was a “Benny Hill” girl for a short time) usually being spied on by the leering Hill.
Alfred Hill, the actor who played Benny, died in 1992.
Also of interest:
Sometime in 2001, the rumor mill grinded out the news that Bill Clinton might be getting a TV show. I reckoned then (as I still do) that Bill Clinton had already had a show for years on Thames television. He was just calling himself Benny Hill.
“Yes! It’s the Bill Clinton Show!”