Everything Right about “What’s Wrong With Benny Hill”
The Vera Fletcher Hall was delighted to welcome back Giles Shenton and Mark Carey with their production of What’s Wrong With Benny Hill? on Saturday 26 October. Giles Shenton is an actor and promoter for high-end small scale shows and Mark Carey is an actor and writer. Mark, some VFH audience regulars may remember, joined us with his one-person show Into The Breach which played in Tricia and Will Bland’s beautiful garden in 2021.
What’s Wrong With Benny Hill? is a comedy with music, featuring Mark and fellow actor, Dani Carbery, and explores the last few years of Benny Hill’s life, which was spent reclusively in Teddington, and his fall from being lauded as a top comedian to being vilified as an off-colour, unfunny, somewhat sleazy has-been. The play is biting in its exploration of the wider issue of cancel culture and who gets to be arbiter of what is funny. It points out the inconsistences which permitted and encouraged the isolation of Benny Hill but continued to applaud very similar material from comedians such as Spike Milligan and the Monty Python team. The writing and the performances from both actors were remarkable and the content animated the audience in discussion both during the interval and at the end of the show.
Giles will be bringing Mark Carey’s new thriller, Dead on Cue, to the Vera Fletcher Hall on Saturday 29 March 2025, so mark that one in diaries.
Meanwhile, our theatre team is putting together a mini-Film Festival to mark the 50th year since the death of local literary icon R C Sherriff. We will be presenting four films with screen plays by Sherriff in February and March next year. Details will be available at our Christmas screening of Scrooge on Friday 6 December.
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