He was never a chat-show fixture, regaling the hapless audience with dire golfing anecdotes. He often seemed ill at ease when introducing his programmes.
By the 1980s, many younger comedians derided Hill’s output, but Anthony Burgess believed ‘Orwell would have loved him’, and, in 1991, he received the Charlie Chaplin International Award for Comedy.
Alfred Hawthorne Hill was born on 21st January 1924 in Southampton, where his father managed a surgicalappliances shop. Mark Lewisohn’s indispensable biography Funny, Peculiar makes the Hill family sound like a British Lion comedy film, with Lionel Jeffries as the stern and parsimonious Hill senior.
After leaving Taunton’s School in Southampton, Hill tried a variety of jobs - including as a milkman - and was a dance-band
