Funny, Peculiar: the true story of Benny Hill Mark Lewisohn Sidgwick & Jackson, 515pp, £16.99 ISBN 0283063696

Which British TV comedian was admired passionately by Charlie Chaplin and adored by Greta Garbo? Which British TV comedian devised pioneering production techniques for visual comedy? Which British TV comedian became a devoted, unassuming connoisseur of France decades before it became fashionable, and was able to conduct interviews in fluent French? Which British TV comedian was visited backstage after a live show by an enthusiastic Maurice Chevalier? Which British TV comedian had a long and mutually complimentary meeting with Jacques Tati?

Or, to put it another way: which British TV comedian died alone in his tatty, cavernous flat, bloated, his vast fortune unspent, derided for his outdated, offensive and sexist gags? The answer, in the words of the screamingly excitable crowd that once spotted him striding along the Croisette in Cannes, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and long shorts, is: "Benny-Eeeeeel! Benny-Eeeeeeel!"

Mark Lewisohn's fascinating and exhaustively researched biography of the great man takes us through his early days as an abysmal solo variety turn but reasonably successful straight man to Reg "On the Buses" Varney, through his startling fame on the BBC and the increasing licentiousness of his Thames Television show, to his sacking and the political correctness debate, and then the astonishing Indian summer of global fame, when his (largely silent) comedy was sold in bite-sized half-hour chunks all over the world.

Lewisohn's title implies that there is something indelibly "peculiar" about Benny Hill, that his wasn't simply a case of innocent seaside-postcard naughtiness misread by politically correct puritans. There is certainly plenty of evidence for the prosecution. Benny confessed to Bob Monkhouse (a lovely touch for the comedy cognoscenti, this) that he fantasised about being sucked off by humble factory girls who would call him "Mr Hill" because it was "respectful". Inevitably, no woman was as close to the always unmarried Hill as his mother. As a boy, from modest beginnings in Southampton, Hill would rub those cherubic cheeks against his mother's fur coat while on walks and murmur: "Lovely mummy."

As for his father - well, for any biographer, this is almost too good to be true. Hill Sr ran a backstreet shop that sold "surgical appliances". The Captain, as he was called, was a curt, mustachioed fitness buff who fitted trusses to gentlemen customers and sold condoms all over the world through a mail-order business. Part of the work involved testing their thick, rubbery strength on a huge wooden phallus in the middle of the workshop - where the young Hill would have to bring his father's lunch. Lewisohn wonders aloud if the sight of that giant penis, coupled with the general unsexy air of furtiveness, was enough to screw anyone up for the rest of their lives.

Very possibly. But plenty of other comics were spectacularly messed up without this priceless black-comic family background. Actually, Lewisohn has an equally telling anecdote, this time about Benny's fondness for food and aversion to waste. Out on a picnic, young Benny (or Alfie, as he was then known; "Benny" was a stage name derived from Jack Benny) was eating a jam sandwich. He was attacked by a swarm of wasps. But rather than throw away the sandwich, he ran along the riverbank, his head invisible in a cloud of angry insects, frantically gobbling up the sandwich to get rid of it. That could almost be from his later TV show, when Benny would be chased through a public park by a crowd of fist-waving parkies and scantily clad dolly-birds to the honking tune "Yakety Sax".

Benny Hill started as a live turn in the Thirties, and went into entertainment for the services during the Second World War - though not before he had been arrested by military policemen at the stage door of the New Theatre, Cardiff, for attempting to avoid the call-up. He was always terrible, and his persistence testifies to his ambition, and how tolerant the variety business was of poor performers. Audiences were enraged by his tentative delivery and appalling material. When he sang, "A - you're adorable, B - you're so beautiful", a heckler shouted, "C - you're a cunt." Others threw nails on the stage to prevent him going down on one knee for his (execrable) Al Jolson impression.

Television was his salvation. He didn't need to project, and could develop his ingenious and pointed flair for silent comedy. And his cheesy, saucy, pseudo-variety act, with jokes notoriously stolen from other comedians, particularly Americans, somehow attained a spruceness and an archness that it had never had live.

Despite this, Benny Hill was never loved here as Morecambe and Wise were loved. He had something too naughty, even sinister, for a family audience, and was too lowbrow for a middle-class revue following. This was typified by his highly unfortunate cameo in the film The Italian Job as a mad-scientist figure obsessed with fat women: "I like 'em big . . . BIG." It was Mr Hyde without any trace of Dr Jekyll: Benny Hill as sweaty pervert and potential sex criminal.

And finally, as his TV show became desperately cruder and cruder when the ratings and his popularity waned, Benny Hill took off sensationally in the US of A. Conservative networks and audiences there tolerated his chancy material because Benny was exotic and British. Repeatedly, defenders of his show claimed that he was not sexist because the men ended up looking as absurd as the women, and that Benny was chased by the women and not the other way around. These were always specious arguments, and Lewisohn, understandably, does not endorse them. Women never got laughs on their own account in The Benny Hill Show, and the one "Hill's Angel" who ever made it big - Jane Leeves of Frasier fame - is ostentatiously unforthcoming on the subject of her former employer.

But Lewisohn eloquently defends Hill's genius for visual comedy and argues convincingly that, though he did steal from others, Morecambe and Wise and the Monty Python gang stole from him. Now he has been the subject of a National Film Theatre retrospective - but unlike the endlessly repeated Good Life and Dad's Army, poor old Benny has been off our screens (though not the screens of the Americans or the French or the Germans) for a decade. I'd like to see him again, just to see the extraordinary, smirking, bespectacled face that ruled comedy for 40 years.

Peter Bradshaw is a novelist and film critic of the Guardian

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