Cancelled too soon”, you say? These are words often applied to certain TV shows – what is by now an ossified canon of one-season wonders, from Freaks and Geeks to Firefly. But what about a TV show that never made it past episode one? When it comes to premature cancellations, one scandalising British sitcom from 1990 surely stands unbeaten.
Next week marks the 35th anniversary of the only episode of Heil Honey I’m Home! that ever made it to air. Produced for the short-lived TV channel Galaxy, the series was a high-concept parody of classic American sitcoms (I Love Lucy for one), following the domestic life of Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun, who live next door to a Jewish family, the Goldensteins. The premise, as you might assume, proved controversial even before it ever made it to air: the secretary general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the LA Times around its premiere the series was “distasteful and even offence” in its “trivialisation” of its subject matter. “I imagine very few intelligent people will watch it once they see a few seconds of it,” he added.
And so, when British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), the company that owned Galaxy, was bought by Sky, Heil Honey was promptly cancelled. A run of episodes that had already been filmed were shelved, never to air or even be released online. And yet, it would be wrong to dismiss Heil Honey as the outlandish, abjectly ill-conceived disaster it may appear on paper. There was an intent behind its provocation that makes it more than just a real-world “Springtime for Hitler”; it was conceived as a “satire of appeasement”, says Geoff Atkinson, the man who wrote it. “Once it gets into the category of ‘TV’s worst nightmares’ or ‘TV’s worst shows’, it’s hard to escape that,” he tells me. “What can you say? It’s a bit of a cliche: people say ‘sitcom with Hitler’ and think it must be terrible.”
Atkinson, a veteran comedy writer now best known for his work on the topical puppet satire Spitting Image, had dreamt up the premise of Heil Honey years earlier. Keen to steal a bit of attention away from Rupert Murdoch-run Sky, Galaxy head of programming John Gau began asking around for something “controversial” and “mischief-making”, which quickly brought him to Atkinson’s attention. “There was a demand, and they had no back catalogue, so that meant there were opportunities,” recalls Atkinson. “It was a very easy pitch, and I’d already written the script… that side of it was charmed. The other side, probably less so.”
Into the role of Adolf Hitler and Ava Braun stepped British actors Neil McCaul and DeNica Fairman (the latter replaced by Maria Friedman in the unaired post-pilot episodes). Channelling the sort of left-field comedy revisionism that would later see Taika Waititi play the Fuhrer as a flamboyant clown in the Oscar-winning JoJo Rabbit, McCaul’s Hitler looked the part, but acted nothing like the real deal, instead playing the role of archetypical sitcom husband, complete with a broad transatlantic accent. (McCaul declined to be interviewed for this piece.)
It’s worth mentioning, perhaps, that several people working on the show were Jewish, including Gareth Marks and Caroline Gruber, who play the Goldensteins. After being offered the part, Marks consulted his father. He later recalled to Air Mail: “Being that we’re Jewish, I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ And he said ‘Well, as long as you come to bury Hitler, not praise him, I don’t see any problem with it.’”
The pilot itself was met with muted backlash – unsurprising, given the obscure nature of the channel it aired on. Subsequently, BSB announced the commission of a full season, news that then prompted outcry from various media figures and Jewish groups. “When you’re doing it,” Atkinson says, “you’re focused in on the show itself, so you’re not consumed by the controversy. But we were aware of it.”
To some extent, it was a matter of pushing through the kneejerk offence and understanding what the series was actually attempting to do. “The first reaction was, ‘Well, you can’t do it, the idea is insensitive and wrong, and flawed,’” Atkinson continues. “But I think people could get through that, to a point where, actually, if you were to make the points Heil Honey was making, you’re destroying Hitler by laughing at him. I think that’s a legitimate defence – in the same way you’d laugh at Putin now. There was goodwill for the show – within the business, there was a sense in the late 1980s, early 1990s, that lampooning was what you did. You should be allowed to make these things.”
Despite their best intentions, however, the show fell apart, lambasted from the outside by outraged commentators, while suffering significant problems internally as it filmed its first season. Comedy writer Paul Wayne (who once won an Emmy for his work on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour) was brought in, which ultimately led to Atkinson’s departure a few episodes in. Atkinson claims that, while the pilot was a positive experience, the episodes that followed saw the set become “quite unpleasant” and “toxic”, and the show lost its “British sense of irony”.
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“The comedy became sort of 1970s slapstick,” he says, “and this was set in an era before that. There were lots of things that made it slightly less exciting and fun than it should have been.”
Waiting in the wings was Sky’s takeover of BSB, which Atkinson describes as the “final knife” in the show’s prospects. Heil Honey was cancelled, having never aired anything but its pilot. “It was a really odd feeling,” recalls Atkinson. “There was this sense of disappointment, because of the frictions on it. In some ways to stem the kind of suffering that the show had become wasn’t a bad thing, but deep down, you were very sad.”
Today, the pilot is available to watch in somewhat low resolution on YouTube, while the remaining episodes are kept private. Atkinson has the DVDs, but doubts they will ever air – “I think the problem is you’d want to qualify them, and that’s not a good thing to do with comedy. If you broadcast them now, they wouldn’t land in the way you wanted them to. They’re locked in time, without the chance to put right what was wrong.” Atkinson says that he has considered adapting the story of the making of Heil Honey into some kind of fiction – an abstraction that would allow characters to have “talked about it” and discussed the potential ethical implications of the premise explicitly. “But is that sort of being cowardly? Are you sort of taking the easier option, rather than just going for it and doing the sitcom?
“I would love to start again,” he continues, “and just do a short series – to show that it can work. But that’s a tough one.” For a series that now endures only in infamy, it’s hard to see that happening.
Even Atkinson is loath to describe Heil Honey as some kind of totally unappreciated gem – but a valiant failure might not be too far off the money. I recommend that anyone curious seek out the pilot online, if only to see what all the fuss is about. It’s a show that pushed a concept far beyond the limits of good reason – but maybe exactly the sort of bold commission that you so seldom see on TV these days.
“It’s hard to describe – without being there, and now 35 years on, you kind of wonder if you’re deluding yourself, inventing a version of it that suits yourself,” says Atkinson. “But I think that what I’m describing is probably true. I hope it is.”
