Last week, a friend of mine told me about a British sitcom that was taken off air after one episode: Heil Honey I’m Home – about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun living next door to a Jewish couple, with hilarity ensuing.
I thought my friend was joking.
He wasn’t. This actually happened.
In 1938, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live in Berlin, next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. Hitler and Braun have little in common with their historical counterparts, acting more like a stock sitcom husband and wife. The Goldensteins are similarly hackneyed characters. The show is a spoof—not of the Third Reich, but of the sort of sitcoms produced in America between the 1950s and 1970s “that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid”. In this spirit the title, plot and dialogue are deliberately vapid and corny and characters are applauded whenever they arrive on set.
The first episode (the only one ever broadcast) opens with a caption card explaining Heil Honey’s fictional back-story: it supposedly comprises the rediscovered “lost tapes” of an abandoned, never-aired American sitcom created by “Brandon Thalburg Jnr”. The episode’s plot centres around the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain coming to the Hitler house. Not wanting the Goldensteins to interrupt the visit, Hitler instructs Braun to keep it from Rosa, but this she fails to do. Rosa duly invites herself over with hopes of matching Chamberlain with her dull niece Ruth. Hitler gets the Goldensteins drunk in an attempt to make them leave before Chamberlain arrives, but they stay. Arny and Eva end up leading the visiting Prime Minister in a conga line around the living room while Hitler hides the “peace for our time” agreement in the icebox.
What a shame for the creators they did not wait until now to create the show (instead of 1990) – it might go over well now in Europe, given the climate of Jew hate there these days.
