Adolf Hitler<\/a> 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 \u201cdistasteful and even offence\u201d in its \u201ctrivialisation\u201d of its subject matter. \u201cI imagine very few intelligent people will watch it once they see a few seconds of it,\u201d he added.<\/p>\nAnd 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 \u201cSpringtime for Hitler\u201d; it was conceived as a \u201csatire of appeasement\u201d, says Geoff Atkinson, the man who wrote it. \u201cOnce it gets into the category of \u2018TV’s worst nightmares\u2019 or \u2018TV\u2019s worst shows\u2019, it\u2019s hard to escape that,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWhat can you say? It\u2019s a bit of a cliche: people say \u2018sitcom with Hitler\u2019 and think it must be terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccontroversial\u201d and \u201cmischief-making\u201d, which quickly brought him to Atkinson\u2019s attention. \u201cThere was a demand, and they had no back catalogue, so that meant there were opportunities,\u201d recalls Atkinson. \u201cIt was a very easy pitch, and I\u2019d already written the script\u2026 that side of it was charmed. The other side, probably less so.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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: \u201cBeing that we\u2019re Jewish, I said, \u2018What do you think about this?\u2019 And he said \u2018Well, as long as you come to bury Hitler, not praise him, I don\u2019t see any problem with it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Germanic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/heilhoney1.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
open image in gallery<\/p>\n
Germanic episode: A still from the credits of \u2018Heil Honey\u2019 (Galaxy)<\/p>\n
The pilot itself was met with muted backlash \u2013 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. \u201cWhen you\u2019re doing it,\u201d Atkinson says, \u201cyou\u2019re focused in on the show itself, so you\u2019re not consumed by the controversy. But we were aware of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
To some extent, it was a matter of pushing through the kneejerk offence and understanding what the series was actually attempting to do. \u201cThe first reaction was, \u2018Well, you can\u2019t do it, the idea is insensitive and wrong, and flawed,\u2019\u201d Atkinson continues. \u201cBut I think people could get through that, to a point where, actually, if you were to make the points Heil Honey was making, you\u2019re destroying Hitler by laughing at him. I think that\u2019s a legitimate defence \u2013 in the same way you\u2019d laugh at Putin now. There was goodwill for the show \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s departure a few episodes in. Atkinson claims that, while the pilot was a positive experience, the episodes that followed saw the set become \u201cquite unpleasant\u201d and \u201ctoxic\u201d, and the show lost its \u201cBritish sense of irony\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe comedy became sort of 1970s slapstick,\u201d he says, \u201cand 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Waiting in the wings was Sky\u2019s takeover of BSB, which Atkinson describes as the \u201cfinal knife\u201d in the show\u2019s prospects. Heil Honey was cancelled, having never aired anything but its pilot. \u201cIt was a really odd feeling,\u201d recalls Atkinson. \u201cThere 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\u2019t a bad thing, but deep down, you were very sad.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"\u2018Heil](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/heilhoney3.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
open image in gallery<\/p>\n
\u2018Heil Honey I\u2019m Home\u2019 transplanted one of history\u2019s biggest monsters into a trite sitcom framework (Galaxy)<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 \u201cI 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\u2019re locked in time, without the chance to put right what was wrong.\u201d Atkinson says that he has considered adapting the story of the making of Heil Honey into some kind of fiction \u2013 an abstraction that would allow characters to have \u201ctalked about it\u201d and discussed the potential ethical implications of the premise explicitly. \u201cBut is that sort of being cowardly? Are you sort of taking the easier option, rather than just going for it and doing the sitcom?<\/p>\n
\u201cI would love to start again,\u201d he continues, \u201cand just do a short series \u2013 to show that it can work. But that’s a tough one.\u201d For a series that now endures only in infamy, it\u2019s hard to see that happening. <\/p>\n
Even Atkinson is loath to describe Heil Honey as some kind of totally unappreciated gem \u2013 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\u2019s a show that pushed a concept far beyond the limits of good reason \u2013 but maybe exactly the sort of bold commission that you so seldom see on TV these days.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s hard to describe \u2013 without being there, and now 35 years on, you kind of wonder if you\u2019re deluding yourself, inventing a version of it that suits yourself,\u201d says Atkinson. \u201cBut I think that what I’m describing is probably true. I hope it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-48772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}