Ernie - Benny Hill

 

Benny Hill doesn't fit with recent thinking on what is acceptable and what isn't. Apparently a fat-faced man being chased around a park by a string of nurses in short skirts to a saxophone soundtrack isn't funny anymore but maybe not all of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Morecambe & Wise or Spike Milligan accord entirely with the dire restrictions of such correctness.

And the careers of the likes of Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle can be examined elsewhere as to how far they succeeded in living out their professed principles. They both did brilliant work but didn't Ben write the Queen musical and isn't Alexei still Corbynite.

No, Benny Hill was a proper poet to be admired because the appreciation of work like his was precisely what all my school education, and some of it beyond, on poetry was concentrated on.

It is heavy on alliteration, rhyme, hyperbole, epic and drama. There will be assonance whether he meant it or not. Hill is not a poet given to enjambment but you can't have everything. At least anybody who comes across this poem can be expected to understand it which is more than can be said of Ezra Pound.

What he does is exactly what we were educated to believe meant 'poetry'. 

I think it's 'verse' but the definition of 'poetry', with plenty of input from me, is available elsewhere.

It has taken a lifetime to recover from the education the system in place at the time visited upon me. I don't know if I'd have been better off without it
And so it bounds along as the greatest of all those heavily nuanced presentations, like The Gay Caballero, that filled out his once prime time television shows.

You just do what you do. Like Frankie Howerd, and even the greats like Tommy Cooper or Ken Dodd. Like Robb Wilton, Julian Clary and maybe even Ronnie Corbett. They just did what they did and they got away with it. And that's all anybody wants to do, for as long as they can, unless something that they do becomes a timeless masterpiece. Or no longer acceptable.

There is a war on, as there usually is. Some of them are being fought to defend the sort of harmless fun that we can live with against tyrants who'd prefer us to be beholden unto them. I'd rather have Benny Hill, thank you very much. There wasn't much point taking all those years to educate me about poetry only to find that a poet who did many of the things I'd been taught to recognize turned out to be verboten.