‘Heil Honey I’m Home’: the incredibly tasteless British TV show
It may have been axed almost immediately, but it still beggars belief that the incredibly short-lived British sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! even made it onto the airwaves at all.
Comedy has regularly flirted with bad taste, and while it was clearly designed to be a spoof and parody of wholesome American-style comedies, the subject matter was never going to fly with the general public. Still, writer Geoff Atkinson’s creation managed to win approval from the various people required to sign off on greenlighting a TV series, none of whom seemed to realise the offence it would cause.
The premise focuses on Neil McCaul’s Adolf Hitler and DeNica Fairman’s Eva Braun, who find themselves living next door to Arny and Rosa Goldenstein, a Jewish couple. From there, the show was presumably meant to derive amusement from the hijinks caused by Hitler and his mistress being unable to get along with their new neighbours, which hardly screams ‘hilarity’.
The pilot episode saw Neville Chamberlain stopping by to visit the Hitlers, with Adolf making a point of telling Braun to ensure the Goldensteins don’t find out. Failing in her task, Rosa ends up trying to set the then-Prime Minister up with her niece Ruth, which for unexplainable reasons culminates in a conga line erupting in the living room as Hitler hides the agreement born from Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” speech in the fridge.
Heil Honey I’m Home! premiered on September 30th, 1999 on the short-lived channel Galaxy and was promptly cancelled after its first episode. Eight full instalments had been filmed, and there were plans for the first of many planned seasons to reach 11, replete with a subplot that saw Hitler nefariously planning to murder the Goldensteins.
Suffice it to say, the backlash was swift and vocal, with the secretary general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews understatedly describing it to the Los Angeles Times as being “in very bad taste”. The “trivialisation of the Second World War, Hitler, or the Holocaust” was very accurately branded as “very distasteful and even offensive”.
Atkinson remained steadfast in his belief that the intentions behind Heil Honey I’m Home! weren’t to outright shock the audience but to delve into the appeasement of Hitler prior to the beginning of World War II. Obviously, that didn’t come across at any point during the show’s very brief run on-screen, and it beggars belief that anybody thought it would be a good idea.
Mounting a sitcom with Hitler as the main character was a ludicrous decision from the very beginning. All it took was one episode for everybody else to agree with Heil Honey I’m Home! being immediately banished and only spoken of in hushed tones when reflecting on just how misguided certain productions have the potential to be from their very inception.
