Saturday, April 16, 2005

Watching...

The Benny Hill Show. Back when we all lived in caves and only got 5 or 6 TV stations, Benny Hill was on, somewhere, all the time. Now there are 867 stations, splintered off to target every possible subcultural divot, and is Benny Hill on any of them? I don't know, I don't have cable anymore. But when I did, it seemed to me he wasn't.

I had to get this DVD from the library. Sure, it's 412 iterations of the same lowbrow post-Vaudevillian raunch. But, along with Pete Townshend, Benny Hill was the principal ambassador of what our 13-year-old minds conceived of as a particular strain of working class Anglo culture (Matt Johnson having not been invented yet).

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