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Benny Hill, who has died aged 67, was not only Britain's, but the world's most popular comedian - the sensation of tv shows which were screened in more than 100 countries and achieved audiences that even Charlie Chaplin never matched.

In America, where Tony Hancock and Morecambe and Wise made small impression, Benny Hill was a winner from the second in 1976 when Thames Television put out his programmes in New York.

The secret of his appeal across the Atlantic, he reckoned, was that he made no extra movement to attract to Americans.

By 1985 not a one day would happen without The Benny Hill Show being screened somewhere in America, and many stations would air the programme twice a night. At San Jose penitentiary the prisoners threatened mayhem unless they were allowed to see him. Hill's American earnings in the mid-1980s amounted to dollars 5 billion a year, and he was only as pop in Europe, especially in France and Italy.

Indeed, his fans mutiplied in countries as disparate as Cuba, Israel, China and Japan.

The Russians pointed their television aerials towards Finland to clean up his show - until, under the dispensations of glasnost, they were allowed to have the plan on their own network.

This universal response might indicate that Benny Hill's humour was essentially visual. And it was true, as he himself observed, that "I can get my face slapped in six different languages".

Yet his stock-in-trade was the lubricious double entendre, and his head was hard upon the essentially British obsession with knickers, bosoms and bottoms, and with the faithless wives and feeble husbands to whom these impedimenta belonged.

It was the man that Donald McGill had created in his seaside postcards.

Inevitably the formula aroused the antagonism of the sexually correct. But the whole point about Benny Hill was that, even as he was chased all over the set by erotically dressed and nubile girls - "Hill's Angels" as they were known - he contrived by his very ridiculousness to strip lust of its wildness and menace.

"King Leer", accoutred in his baggy football shorts, was more of a soiled cherub than a sexual demon, a promoter of pranks rather than a purveyor of evil. The stamp was built by the round schoolboy's face, by the good-humoured twinkle in the eye, by the sly and collusive smirk, and by a sound which combined outrageous innuendo with yokel idiocy.

Hill would point out, a trifle disingenuously perhaps, that it was the men who came off worst in his sketches, as in actual life. They appeared as complete idiots. By comparison, the girls retained their dignity.

Nevertheless, in 1986 Ben Elton took the problem to inform the universe that he could see nothing singular in a small old man running after girls. Hill, who always insisted that he was chased (if not chaste), ignored this offering.

The accuracy was that his undeniable predilection for smut obscured his considerable comic range. Only when Hal Roach - a onetime manufacturer of Laurel and Hardy, who had described Hill as the only modern comedian to match the greats of the past - expressed concern about his salaciousness did Hill make some effort to pick up his act - cutting down both the amount of dancing girls and the profundity of their cleavage.

All to no avail. In 1988 the Broadcasting Standards Council denounced the shows as "increasingly offensive", and the following year the mind of idle entertainment at Thames Television cancelled Hill's contract.

But Hill did not intend to open up his record after a simple 34 years. Describing the conclusion as a grace in disguise - "one gets complacent" - he negotiated a lucrative contract to realize a new series in New York.

And by December 1991, when he was the case of an Omnibus programme, English television producers were again eager to entice him back. Thames Television, meanwhile, had missed its franchise.

Benny Hill was born Alfred Hawthorn Hill at Shirley, a suburb of Southampton, on Jan 21 1925. His grandmother had been with Bertram Mills Circus and his father had shown similar inclinations before abandoning the Big Top to get a surgical appliance outfitter. Alas, to young Alfred's schoolfellows it was simply too plain that "Hillie's Dad sells Frenchies".

The boy was educated at Taunton Grammar School in Southampton, where his academic career was undistinguished - although the English master, Horace King, later Speaker of the Home of Commons, apparently recognized his comic potential.

At any rate, while yet at school young Hill joined Bobbie's Concert Party, a semi-professional group which put on lunchtime shows. After leaving school at 15, he took a total of casual jobs, including that of milkman.

He would take his cavalry and cart round Southampton indulging the illusion that it was Dodge City. This experience would bear fruit many days later, in 1971, with the No 1 hit record Ernie - "the fastest milkman in the West."

From the age of 13 Hill had been running in pubs during the evenings, telling jokes after the way of his hero Max Miller. At 17 he left Southampton for London, where he worked backstage on various revues and slept rough on Streatham Common, before the military police claimed him for the Army.

Hill began his military career as a driver mechanic, but was soon transferred to Combined Services Entertainment. To start with he called himself Alf Hill, but "that sounded too often like a Cockney turn. So I changed it to Leslie Hill, only that seemed more like a cocktail pianist.

Eventually, being an adorer of Jack Benny, I took his name."

After demobilisation Benny Hill played in working men's clubs, and teamed up with Alfred Marks for Starlight Hour on the BBC Light programme. But times were hard. In 1951 he could only find work as second comic and "give" to Reg Varney, a use for which he competed with Peter Sellers. Varney insisted that Hill should adhere to being a true man or leave - so the job only lasted seven weeks.

Unemployed, Hill began writing comedy sketches for television. By 1954 he was enjoying considerable success as the emcee of Showcase, a program designed to make opportunities to new talent; and Ronnie Waldman, head of Idle Entertainment at the BBC, gave him his fortune in his own tv show.

Benny Hill was the foremost great comic star to be made by television - previously comedians had transferred to the average after success on the boards or in radio. But the format which he created for his programmes owed something to his early ambition to be the chief comic in a touring revue -the form of outfit which boasted its complement of girls, a juggler perhaps, and a straight man who double as the baritone.

And Hill's stage apprenticeship was reflected in his business for every point of his tv shows, for which he wrote both the textbook and the music. For years his principal helpmeets were Henry McGee, a conventional straight "feed", the beaming, balding, gurgling comic actor Bob Todd and the irrepressible Patricia Hayes.

Hill himself built up a line of characters. His favorite was Mervyn Twit, as camp as his creator. The better known was the bespectacled and blinking Fred Scuttle, a poor fool dressed in various shreds of authority.

Before the seventies The Benny Hill Show's popularity was chiefly confined to Britain. By the end of the 1950s Hill was a star turn at the Royal Variety Show, and in 1966 the Variety Club of Great Britain named him as the top television personality.

The class before there had been a breath of things to do when the present made a hit at the Montreux Festival - though without carrying off any of the prizes.

In the first level of his success Hill showed no disposition to vacate the theatre. In 1955 he appeared with crushing effect in the revue Paris by Night; next year he took over the lead in The Dave King Show; and in 1959 he brought the theatre down in the musical romp Fine Fettle at the Castle Theatre.

He even, like Frankie Howerd, tackled Shakespeare, offering a well-rounded Bottom in a BBC tv production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964).

Benny Hill also gave some notable performances in films, playing an officious fireman in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and Prof Simon Peach, a computer expert with a weakness for amply upholstered women of a certain age in The Italian Job (1969). His other credits included Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and The Better of Benny Hill (1974).

Most of Hill's early television work was done for the BBC, with occasional excursions to Associated Television. In 1969 he sign a compact with Thames Television which set him on course for world-wide fame.

But his huge earnings never changed his way of life. "I don't covet images or belongings", he explained. "My television set and television are rented, any paintings aren't worth a lot and money is of short interest."

Indeed, Hill could have earned far more than he did. He simply worked for joy or to avoid loneliness, and turned down millions of dollars to do live shows at Las Vegas. He did the odd commercial, though, especially if it involved going abroad.

Travel, indeed, was Hill's only lasting passion, and with his fluent French and competent Spanish and German he was well equipped. He was especially fond of Marseilles, where he would stay at the Hotel Splendide and sally forth on 20-mile walks, returning with ideas for future shows jotted down on the support of an envelope.

Otherwise Hill remained frugal to the aim of eccentricity. He kept his parents' semi-detached house in Southampton, and employed buckets to get the drops from the leaking roof when he spent Christmas there.

In London he lived in flats where chaos reigned and visitors were not encouraged. A level in Teddington was acquired for its propinquity to the Thames studios.

Hill's other recreations were watching television, listening to the wireless, and writing. He was likewise a great boxing fan. Occasionally he would go shopping, carrying plastic bags stuffed with notes - although all he actually wanted, he claimed, was "a roof, three meals a day, a passport, an aircraft ticket and a plain shirt."

He manifested a preference for young working-class girls - "I get a flush out of winning them to places they would not usually visit", he explained.

Educated and intellectual women he avoided like the plague, and matrimony made no appeal.

He had proposed once, he said, at the age of 23, but had been turned down.

"Secretly I was relieved", he recorded. "It was like watching your mother-in-law driving your new car over the cliff edge. You have mixed feelings about it."

This disposition never changed. "I cause a mental age of almost 17", he remarked in 1990. "Far too new for marriage."

from The Telegraph 22 April 1992