The strange and unlikely rendezvous has just been made into an audio drama by writer Jonathan Morris.
The year was 1992. Michael Jackson was still arguably the most famous person on the planet. British comedian Benny Hill, however, was convalescing at London's Royal Brompton Hospital following a heart attack eleven days earlier, his TV show had been canned and two months later he would be dead.
And in this unusual, singular situation, Jackson was the fan.
This unlikely meeting is, exactly thirty years later, the subject of a brand new audio drama, entitled 'When Michael Met Benny'. The piece, written by Jonathan Morris, explores what may have taken place in that room.
"The idea from this came when I saw something on the internet saying 'did you know that Michael Jackson was a huge Benny Hill fan and that they met, and Jackson visited Benny Hill in hospital a few weeks before he died, and there are photos of it?', which just struck me as an incredibly unlikely situation," Morris tells Euronews Culture.
"They were two very, very different people and yet they had this connection. Michael Jackson wasn't just a Benny Hill fan, he adored him. Benny was his favourite comedian in the world. He collected every videotape, he was obsessed by him. So I just thought: there's a play there."
When Michael Met Benny is being released as a free drama podcast by Morris' audio production company, Average Romp. It stars Daniel Anthony as Michael and Phil Nice as Benny.
"It could be the next Frost/Nixon," quips Morris, who has also written for Doctor Who and impersonation favourite Dead Ringers. Indeed, writing convincing narrative voices to portray two such extraordinary stars is no mean feat.
"I wanted to capture the voices of the real people involved. And do so fairly and honestly," Morris explains. "It was particularly difficult with Michael Jackson because he gave very few interviews, and in the interviews he did give, you can tell he's being quite guarded in what he says. He was a very private person. So how he would have been with Benny Hill is not how he would have been with other people, because in this situation he's the lower status person, he's the fan visiting his hero."
Benny Hill in a Jacko video?
"When the meeting took place, there were a couple of other people in the room with them," Morris notes. "One of whom was Hill's TV producer, Dennis Kirkland, who wrote a biography of Benny Hill after Benny's death. And he mentioned Benny Hill making a joke about offering Michael a Coca-Cola and Jackson refusing it because he had a Pepsi deal at that time.
"There was also a genuine discussion about them teaming up to do a sketch either as part of a new Benny Hill Show or having Benny Hill turn up in a Michael Jackson video. And so in the play, I have them working out the sketch where Jackson does a dance move and then Benny Hill copies it, and then they speed up the tape so that Benny Hill is actually dancing faster than Michael Jackson. That's the sort of stuff that, according to the producer, they actually talked about."
Who was Benny Hill?
A question that very much depends on your generation. The majority of people under the age of 30 don't have the reference. But one or two age groups up from that and you'll have virtually no-one in the UK or the US that hasn't heard of him. He'd been a radio and TV star since the 1950s but really hit big in the very late 1970s when his sketch show - a heady mix of frenetic burlesque, madcap pantomime and double entendre - won ratings on both sides of the Atlantic.
