Hail Honey I'm Home!
| Television series | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Hail Honey I'm Home! |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| year | 1990 |
| Production company |
British Satellite Broadcasting , Noel Gay Television |
| length | 25 minutes |
| Episodes | 8 in 1 season |
| genre | Sitcom |
| idea | Geoff Atkinson |
| production | Harry Waterson |
| music | Kate Robbins |
| First broadcast | September 30, 1990 on Galaxy |
| occupation | |
Hail Honey I'm Home! is a British sitcom ( Britcom ) from 1990. The series is about the fictional coexistence of the couple Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun with their Jewish neighbors Goldenstein and sparked such heated controversy that it was canceled after the pilot episode was broadcast.
action
The first episode begins with a tablet claiming the story is based on a US sitcom, believed to be lost, by a certain Brandon Thalburg Jr. that was recently discovered in an archive in Burbank .
The Hitlerites live together in an apartment in Berlin in 1938. Adolf comes home one night and greets his partner Eva Braun with the words “Heil honey, I'm home!” Eva is annoyed by his time-consuming obligations as a guide and that he missed the "Schnitzel Evening". Meanwhile, Hitler is looking forward to a meeting with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and asks Eva not to tell her Jewish neighbors, the Goldensteins, about it. Rosa Goldenstein, who is a friend of Eva, guesses the prominent guest during a charade and plans to pair him up with her 22-year-old niece Ruth. When Hitler returns from an appointment, the Goldensteins are sitting in his apartment, waiting for the visitor. Angry Hitler consoles himself with thoughts of the attack on Poland and tells Eva to make the intrusive guests drunk with schnapps . He then drives to the airport to meet Chamberlain.
When he comes back with the Prime Minister, Eva has not been able to get rid of the dead drunk Rosa and Arny Goldenstein. Hitler uses the opportunity to present himself to Chamberlain as a normal guy who is on friendly terms with his neighbors. The Briton confronts Hitler with his invasion of Czechoslovakia and demands that he sign his declaration “Peace in Our Time”. After Rosa betrayed Hitler's tanks and warships to the Prime Minister, he threw the neighbors on edge. Chamberlain recognizes the madness of his counterpart, but is finally appeased by his signature. He leaves the apartment with Ruth, who has arrived earlier. The pilot ends with Adolf and Eva settling down on the couch, calling each other by their nicknames ("Mr. Sausage" and "Hoochie Coochie Girl") and kissing.
Production and Background
The series was conceived by Geoff Atkinson , who would later be involved in successful formats such as Getting On - Nasty Old Bones . The screenwriter had two ideas for new TV series and finally decided against a design that he himself referred to as " Beverly Hills, 90210 with 16-year-old Jesus ". The executive producer Paul Jackson wore the concept of healing Honey I'm Home! approached BSB and quickly got an acceptance. A total of eight episodes were produced; Juliet May directed the pilot episode . In contrast to the pilot, a cartoon was produced as an intro for the remaining seven episodes that were never aired and circulated on various websites. Patrick Cargill is the guest appearance seen as Neville Chamberlain in his last TV role.
Atkinson endeavored to give the pilot's comic plot a historical framework and chose a - fictional in this way - meeting between Hitler and the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The twice-referenced invasion of Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938 was a consequence of the Munich Agreement , in which the republic was obliged to cede the Sudetenland to the German Reich. Chamberlain, one of the signatories of the agreement, did not meet with Hitler afterwards - unlike what is shown in the series. The meeting of the two men did not take place in Berlin, but on Obersalzberg . The Briton presented the slogan “Peace for our time!” To his compatriots (one day before the invasion) in the belief that by signing the agreement he had contributed to securing a longer-term peace in Europe.
occupation
| role | actor | annotation |
|---|---|---|
| Adolf Hitler | Neil McCaul | |
| Eva Braun |
DeNica Fairman Maria Friedman |
Episode 1 Episode 7 (?) |
| Rosa Goldenstein | Caroline Gruber | |
| Arny Goldenstein | Gareth Marks | |
| Ruth | Laura Brattan | |
| Neville Chamberlain | Patrick Cargill |
Episode list
| No. | title |
|---|---|
| 1 | Episode One |
| 2 | Hitler Moves In |
| 3 | Eva's New Shelves |
| 4th | Ziggy Comes to Stay |
| 5 | The Mom Who Came to Dinner |
| 6th | A Close Shave for Adolf |
| 7th | Hitler in the Closet |
| 8th | Without Prejudice |
reception
The pilot was broadcast on September 30, 1990 on the Sunday evening program of the BSB channel Galaxy . The reactions were devastating and led to the broadcast being stopped immediately. Critics accused the creators of playing down National Socialism and feared that Hitler might try - albeit unsuccessfully - to get rid of the Goldensteins in the further course of the plot. When Sky took over competitor BSB the following November, there was no interest in taking the series back into the program. The American author and editor Marian Calabro called Heil Honey I'm Home! 1992 as "probably the most tasteless sitcom in the world".
Screenwriter Geoff Atkinson reflected on the series in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2017 . He never wanted to trivialize the Holocaust , but admitted that today he would put slapstick aside in favor of satire and drama. He wanted the series to be understood as a parody of US sitcoms from the 1950s, including I Love Lucy . One of the side effects of this is that actor Neil McCaul speaks his character with a New York accent. The author named Mel Brooks ' Nazi parody Spring for Hitler as inspiration , unlike the 1968 film Heil Honey I'm Home! but not to the point where people realize they can laugh about it. The crew is said to have doubted the project itself and Atkinson - as a result of the media turmoil - got embarrassed to have to explain to his three-year-old son who Adolf Hitler was. This eventually led him to later refer to the sitcom as his "problem child". According to his own account, Atkinson also wanted to make fun of bullys ( bullies ) with his portrait of Hitler :
“I worried the argument would be 'You can't make fun of Hitler.' But he cries out for it. If you have a monster like that, and everyone says, 'You can't make fun of him,' then we've made him even more a monster. That's what fascists want, to keep people in fear of them, when surely we should be debunking and destroying them. "
"I was concerned the argument might be 'You can't make fun of Hitler.' But he's screaming for it. If you have a monster like this and everyone says 'you can't make fun of him' then we make him even more of a monster. That is what fascists want to intimidate people while we should expose and destroy them. "
The BBC later dubbed the series “the most notorious of all British sitcoms” and found that from the hackneyed dialogue to the drama - McCaul's Hitler was more reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin than the real thing - everything pointed to a parody. The show was not really well done and the idea was only enough for an interesting sketch . In an indie documentary entitled Hitler: The Comedy Years , the series concept was summarized as "crazy postmodernism ". In 2000, Channel 4 listed the show as 61st of the 100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell . The Guardian included the series in a loose compilation of TV shows that were canceled at the right time. Surprise at Heil Honey I'm Home! less the early date of the cancellation than the fact that the sitcom had gotten this far in the first place. The "hardly believable and incredibly inappropriate" comedy is still incomparable, from the gaudy golden interior of the Goldensteins to the main plot with Chamberlain. In the IMDb , the series received an average rating of 5.4 out of 10 points.
Web links
- Hail Honey I'm Home! in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Hail Honey I'm Home! at Fernsehserien.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Mark Lewisohn: Heil Honey I'm Home! The BBC Guide to Comedy, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c Shirley Li: Hitler sitcom creator explains most controversial TV pilot ever made. Entertainment Weekly , April 17, 2017, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Heil Honey I'm Home! - Episode List. IMDb , accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ Zachary Solomon: Heil Honey, I'm Home! Jewish Telegraphic Agency , September 2, 2014, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ Marian Clabro: Zap! A Brief History of Television. Four Wind Press, 1992, ISBN 0-02-716242-7 , p. 150 (English).
- ^ Jacques Peretti: Hitler: The Comedy Years . UK 2007, 48 minutes.
- ↑ Comment on The 100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell. SOTCAA, December 2000, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ Phil Harrison: Heroes to Heil Honey I'm Home - are these the smartest TV cancellations ever? The Guardian , June 29, 2017, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ Heil Honey I'm Home! IMDb , accessed March 24, 2019 .