Does anyone know if the Benny Hill Annuals are included in the Thames megaset?
I would hate to buy the Annuals and megaset and waste money if so.

The Annuals contain the same episodes as the Megaset. It's just different packaging and the Annuals are PAL, of course. I'm not going into the cut/not cut issue, though the megaset looks to be missing about 19 minutes if I did the PAL => NTSC time conversion correctly. Of course that's 19 minutes out of nearly 50 hours, so

Cool TY!

PAL to NTSC conversion doesn't cause a time loss when it comes to US television shows. The phenomenon of 4% "PAL Speedup" only applies when you convert 24fps film masters (US movies and US TV shows) to PAL.

If you convert NTSC masters to PAL, there is no speedup, and likewise, there's no time change converting a PAL master to NTSC.

Incidentally, taking something that was shot entirely on film for PAL territories (at 25fps) and converting it to 24fps does not cause a 4% speedup, but rather a 4% slowdown, meaning the US runtime would be longer, not shorter.

The US/NTSC-release episodes and UK/PAL-release episodes are identical except the UK (and Australian) DVDs include the "ad breaks" (the title screen and music playing in/out the commercial break), while the US ones have them snipped out.

Both sets have at least one episode that is edited/censored from its original broadcast (the Club Bizarre Hill's Angels sketch), where a dancer with a see-through top is edited-out of the episode (replaced by slow-mo/mirrored footage from elsewhere in the sketch). Presumably, the tape for this came from a repeat (or syndication) copy, as it would have been edited to remove the multiple occurrences of bare breasts in that sequence. A US superfan has told me that he saw the uncut sequence during the original 1980s US syndication run (the half-hours), but never since.

Also, the Australian special episode has not been released anywhere, unfortunately (some sequences were on the old VHS compilation volumes).