There’s a better than even chance that the first thing you think of when someone, say like me, says The Walking Dead, is not The Benny Hill Show.
And fair enough too – one show is all about trying to avoid either becoming undead chow or grist for sociopathic leader’s twisted mill, while the other was a mix of slapstick, burlesque and ripe double entendres that was less apocalytpic than innuendo-laden.
So not a natural fit then? Yes well that was until the most recent episode of The Walking Dead‘s sixth season “The Next World” in which Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Daryl (Norman Reedus) went out on a supply run, found and lost a truck full of food, and found/lost/found/lost/found an engagingly slippery fellow by the name of Paul Monroe aka Jesus (Tom Payne).
Their on-again, off-again encounter with the man who they’d eventually take back to Alexandria for medical treatment culminated in a race around a particular farm where Daryl and Jesus raced hither and yon, with Rick trying to predict their movements to riotously comedic effect.
Well it would have been damn funny if Jesus was being an annoyingly duplicitous so-and-so and they didn’t lose all that food to the bottom of a lake, right in the middle of a food-starved apocalypse.
But now, possibly following a comment on the Talking Dead, the Chris Hardwicke-hosted chat show follow-up to The Walking Dead, by Austin Nichols who plays Spencer on the show where he encouraged someone anyone to combine this footage with Benny Hill’s music theme, officially known as “Yakety Sax” by “Boots Randolph, it is as side-splittingly funny as you always knew it could be.
Sit back and laugh and resist the urge to see if one of the zombies in the middle of the sequence doesn’t look just a bit like Benny Hill.