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The Common Market Square Dance

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Production[]

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Episode: 15
Date: December 27, 1972
Time: 49:28
Musical Director: Ronnie Aldrich
Vocals: The Ladybirds
Choreography:
Producer: Keith Beckett
Director: Keith Beckett
Writer: Benny Hill
Pro. No.: VTR 6617

Episode[]

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Highlights[]

  • Benny's Ballad: When I Was a Lad
  • Portable TV
  • Yackanory (Benny tells the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" in a strong overly-exaggerated German accent)
  • Fred Scuttle: Striptease Cabaret
  • Langley Base Army Camouflage Unit

Cast[]

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Quotes[]

  • Coming Up

Trivia[]

  • In the opening tag, Benny appears as a minister at a church mission with a secret word in his church message.
  • Nicholas Parsons covers the show intro.
  • Quickies feature a string of TV and movie bloopers, such as:
    • An actor (Benny Hill) doing a scene with an actress (Jenny Lee Wright) missing her contact lens
    • The voices on two singers (Benny Hill and Pat Ashton) get reversed
    • An actor (Benny) jumps off a ship called the "QE TU" and tries unsuccessfully sneaking off-screen (His co-stars are Pat Ashton and Diana King)
    • A performer (Benny) singing "Knock Three Times" has his set come down on top of him
    • Horrible camera angles plague a movie scene with two actors (Benny Hill and Pat Ashton)
    • A romantic musical scene between two actors (Benny and Pat) is marred when the actor forgets his lines
    • An intence movie scene with two actors (Benny and Pat) is marred with quick cuts, clothes that don't match and flipped camera frames
    • An actor (Benny) is thrown off by the musical key of his co-star (Pat Ashton)
    • A dancer (Jenny Lee Wright) knocks over part of her stage (The figures back stage are Jackie Wright, Walter Goodman and Bob Todd)
    • The QE Tu actor jumps off ship again and gets hit on the head by the fake life preserver
    • A film scene between two actors (Benny and Pat) suffers with weird camera actors, a weird actor replacement (Jimmy Thompson) and the camera crew appearing in a mirror
  • The "Ted and Harold and Enoch" poster in the Fred Scuttle sketch is probably a hidden jab at former British politicians Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell, but in any case was left over from The Westminster Funsters puppet show in Cinema: The Vintage Years.
  • The mid-episode quickies feature a string of commercial bloopers featuring:
    • Dick Woodcock (Benny Hill), the Head of Research for an unnamed paint company, stumbling over a set of paint cans on a set
      • The name Dick Woodcock was a play on that of Dick Woodbridge, a paint consultant who did a series of commercials for Brolac Paints in the early 1970s.
    • A natural food commercial is turned askew by crew (Benny and Jackie Wright) misspelling the name of the company with large white letters on a field (Benny also does the screams of the director)
      • The name of the natural food company, St. Evil, is a parody of St. Ivel, an actual brand sold in the U.K.
    • Woodcock splashes a glass of grime on to a stage hand (Bob Todd) while trying to hit the wall
    • An actress (Benny) can't blow the seeds off a dandelion for a hair spray commercial (Benny does the off-screen screams of the director again)
    • Woodcock splashes the wall again, but the cleaner also takes off the wall pattern
    • The actress (Benny) sneezes into the dandelion (their last one)
    • A pirate (Benny) tries selling Jack Carter Rum; his co-star (Jimmy Thompson) accidentally sit on his hook (Jackie Wright also appears as a pirate)
    • An actress (Benny) selling dog food is urinated on by the dog in her lap
  • In The Portable TV, Benny plays Robert T. Ironsides from the American TV-Series, "Ironsides," which ran from 1967 to 1975. He also plays the character in Murder On The Oregon Express.

Sequence[]

Gallery[]

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