Eric Sykes

At 89 years old, Eric Sykes has this physical status:

Eric Sykes (4 May 1923-2004) was an English radio, television, and film writer, comedian, actress, and producer whose film career spanned more than 50 years.

He wrote for and appeared with many other well-known comedians and writers of the time, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Peter Sellers, John Antrobus, and Johnny Speight.

Sykes first came to fame in the 1950s as a writer and actor, especially because of his appearances on The Goon Show scripts.

In the early 1960s, he appeared with Hattie Jacques in several popular BBC comedy television series.

Early life

Sykes was born in Oldham, Lancashire, on May 4th; his mother died three weeks later, leaving him and his two-year-old brother Vernon motherless. Their father was a labourer in a cotton mill and a former army sergeant. When Sykes was two, his father remarried and he obtained a half-brother named John. Sykes was educated at Ward Street Central School in Oldham. He joined the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and qualified as a leading aircraftman.

Personal life

As an adult, Sykes became partially deaf. His hearing began to deteriorate in the Second World War, and he underwent an operation in 1952 and another two years later. He was obviously deaf after recovering from the second procedure. His spectacles had no lenses on them but they were a bone-conducting hearing aid. Disciform macular degeneration, triggered in part by age and possibly smoking, left Sykes partially blind and labeled as blind. He was a patron of the Macular Disease Society. In November 1966, he quit smoking cigarettes but continued to smoke cigarettes until 1998. In 1997, he underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery and had a stroke in 2002.

Edith Eleanore Milbrandt married Edith Eleanore Milbrandt on February 14, 1952, and the three children and a boy were born. Sykes' 60th wedding anniversary was celebrated in the year.

Sykes and his companion Jimmy Edwards appeared in Rhodesia in the 1970s as part of a show for Ian Smith.

Following a petition submitted by Members of Parliament (MPs), Sykes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1986 and promoted to Commander (CBE) in the 2005 New Year Honours for services to drama. Sykes was an honorary president of the Goon Show Preservation Society.

Sykes was a descendant of Oldham Athletic and served as an honorary director of the club in the 1970s.

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Career

Sykes' entertainment career began during the Second World War while serving in a Special Liaison Unit when he met and worked with then flight lieutenant Bill Fraser. Denis Norden and Ron Rich, both RAF servicemen, also assisted in the creation of troop entertainment shows. Sykes, accompanied by Norden and Rich, and others went to a nearby prison camp in search of stage lighting; the camp was later discovered to be the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which had recently been freed by the Allies. Sykes, Norden, and Rich organized a food drive among their comrades to feed the starving camp prisoners.

Sykes decided to try his luck in London after the war ended, resulting in the hottest winter in living memory (1946–47). He rented accommodation in the hopes of finding jobs quickly, but by the end of the first week, he was freezing, hungry, and penniless. On Friday night of his first week in London, he had the opportunity to meet Bill Fraser, who was then playing in a comedy at the Playhouse Theatre, marking a turning point in his life and career. Fraser brought the impoverished Sykes to the theatre, sold food and drinks, and then asked if Sykes would like to write for him. Sykes started delivering scripts for Fraser and Frankie Howerd, and then discovered himself as a comedy writer. He began working with Sid Colin, founder of the BBC Radio Ventriloquism show Educating Archie, which began in 1950, and also Variety Bandbox. Archie's work on education culminated in him meeting Hattie Jacques for the first time.

Sykes began to write for television as early as 1948, but Sykes made an extremely popular switch from radio to television, directing a number of series episodes and one-off shows for the BBC. His appearances include The Howerd Crowd (1952), Frankie Howerd's Korean Party, Nuts in May, and The Frankie Howerd Exhibition, as well as Fred Emney and Edwin Styles from The Big Man (1954) starring Fred Emney and Edwin Styles. Sykes made his first screen appearance in the army film comedy Orders Are Orders (1954), which also included Sid James, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Bill Fraser, and Donald Pleasence.

Spike Milligan's tiny office in Shepherd's Bush, 130 Uxbridge Road, was shared from around 1953. (Sykes and Milligan later formed Associated London Scripts (ALS) with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, a writers' company that existed for more than a decade until being effectively abandoned in 1967). Sykes began working with Spike Milligan on scripts for The Goon Exhibition in 1954, easing Milligan's load. The Goon Show special called Archie in Goonland, a cross between The Goon Show and Educating Archie, was their first joint script. The special was broadcast in June 1954 and featured the regular Goon Show cast (Harry Secombe was then seen in both) and Peter Brough, his dummy Archie Andrews and Hattie Jacques. It was not a success, but neither recording nor the script have survived, and neither recording nor the script have survived. Sykes and Milligan are among the co-writers of all but the first six of the 26 episodes of Series 5 (1954-55) and three episodes (1955–56); Sykes and Milligan also wrote The Missing Christmas Parcel, a Goon Show Christmas special that was broadcast on television during the Children's Hour on December 8, 1955.

Sykes wrote and performed in a BBC Christmas spectacular, a spoof pantomime called Pantomania, which attracted many well-known BBC stars of the time; it was led by Ernest Maxin, who went on to produce some of the most famous comedy routines for Morecambe & Wise. Sykes signed a scriptwriter and variety show host for the newly formed independent television company ATV in the same year, as well as continuing to write and perform for the BBC.

Sykes produced, wrote scripts, and served as script editor on the pioneering Rediffusion TV comedy The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d, the first attempt to translate the Goons' humour to television, in 1956. Peter Sellers appeared on the program, as well as Kenneth Connor, and Valentine Dyall. During this year, he made his second film appearance, playing a small part in the Max Bygraves film Charley Moon, which also featured Bill Fraser, Peter Jones, Dennis Price, and (as a child) Jane Asher. Sykes also wrote for and appeared in The Tony Hancock Exhibition from 1956–57, where he briefly collaborated with Hattie Jacques.

His next venture for the BBC was Sykes Directs a Dress Rehearsal, playing a harrassed director in a fictional TV studio rehearsal room right before going live to air. He wrote and appeared in another all-star spectacle called Opening Night, which commemorated the 1956 National Radio Show at Earl's Court later this year. He created Closing Night, which closed the 1957 show in 1957.

By this time, Sykes had developed hearing loss, but he had to lip-read and watch other performers for their cues; by this time, he had developed hearing difficulties. He wrote and appeared in an edition of Val Parnell's Saturday Spectacular in 1957, the first of two shows in this series that he wrote for Peter Sellers. The first went out under the name of Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers, and the second, in 1958, was dubbed The Peter Sellers Show.

Sykes wrote and directed the one-off BBC special Gala Opening in 1959, starring 'Professor' Stanley Unwin and Hattie Jacques, as well as a small supporting role in Tommy Steele's Tommy the Toreador.

Eric Sykes and his old friend and colleague, Hattie Jacques, co-starred in a new 30-minute BBC TV sitcom Sykes and a... that Sykes co-produced in collaboration with writer Johnny Speight, who had worked with him earlier in the 1950s on the two Tony Hancock series for ITV. Eric and his wife were living in suburbia with simple plots centring on everyday life, but Sykes soon found that by moving the wife's husband from husband to sister, more plot lines were introduced and allowed either one or both to become romantically entangled with other people.

In the new model, Sykes portrayed Eric Sykes, a bumbling, accident-prone bachelor who lives at 24 Sebastopol Terrace, East Acton, and his unmarried twin sister Harriet played by Jacques. The other regular cast members included Deryck Guyler as local constable Wilfred "Corky" Turnbull and Richard Wattis as their snobbish, busby neighbor Charles Brown. Wattis left the program after series 3 was cancelled, and his departure was explained by Mr Brown's migrant to Australia. Hugh Lloyd, John Bluthal, Leo McKern, and Arthur Mullard were among the other guests.

The first series (five episodes, all written by Johnny Speight) premiered on January 29, 1960 and became a big hit, establishing 'Eric and Hat' as one of Britain's most popular and enduring comedy partnerships. The second series of six episodes (written from storylines suggested by Speight) was mainly written by Sykes, although one episode was co-written by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan. Sykes wrote the majority of the subsequent episodes.

Nine short seasons of Sykes and a... were released between 1960 and 1966, as well as a short 1962 special on the BBC's annual Christmas Night with the Stars program. In the BBC archives, twenty-five episodes from the original fifty-nine episodes have survived. Sykes introduced the Plank, the wordless slapstick comedy that appeared in Episode 2, Series 7 of Sykes and a... on March 3, 1964 under the name.

Sykes co-starred with Warren Mitchell in Clicquot et Fils, a one-off, 30-minute comedy written by Associated London scripts co-writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson in December 1961. This was the premiere episode of a recent BBC series Comedy Playhouse, which became an important proving ground for several popular TV comedy shows.

Sykes was playing a travelling salesman in the comedy Village of Daughters in 1962, but it was not without a British cast including John Le Mesurier (who was then married to Hattie Jacques) and Roger Delgado. This was followed by a supporting role in the MGM British comedy Kill or Cure, starring Terry-Thomas with a cast of British comedy stalwarts, including one of Ronnie Barker's first film appearances. Both films were produced by the same writer-director team behind Margaret Rutherford's hit film, Murder She Said.

Sykes produced what was to be the last series of Sykes and a... as well as appearing in three major films. He appeared in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, as part of an all-star cast of British and American television and film luminaries. Jack Cardiff directed The Liquidator, and Rod Taylor starred Sykes in a secondary role. Anton Rodgers (who replaced Peter Sellers) with Sykes in his third film of the year was the Boulting brothers' Rotten to the Core. Sykes appeared in another spy film The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966), written by Galton and Simpson.

Sykes converted one of his routines into a 45-minute wordless colour short, The Plank, which includes, among others, Sykes, Tommy Cooper, Jimmy Edwards, Graham Stark, Hattie Jacques, and future Goodies star Bill Oddie. (The film was later remade for Thames Television in 1978). Sykes and his old friend Jimmy Edwards began touring with Big Bad Mouse in 1967, although they didn't keep more or less to a script, they gave them permission to ad lib and audience. They would return to the show on and off until 1975, including Australia.

Sykes and Jacques appeared in the 1967-19 Sykes Versus ITV film with Tommy Cooper and Ronnie Brody, who were back on television. In 1968, he appeared in a British-American film co-production, the Edward Dmytryk western Shalako, starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot.

Sykes co-starred with Spike Milligan in the ill-fated television sitcom Curry and Chips, a satire on racial mistrust written and written by Johnny Speight for London Weekend Television in 1969. Milligan, a British Indian, played Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani half-Irish man who arrives at work and finds himself boarding with his ineffective foreman Arthur Blenkinsop (Sykes), who must constantly defend Kevin against his racist coworkers. As Arthur and Kevin's landlady, the supporting cast included pop singer Kenny Lynch, Geoffrey Hughes, Norman Rossington, Sam Kydd, Jerrold Wells, and Fanny Carby. The series sparked a slew of lawsuits over the use of racial epithets and poor words (although Sykes refused to swear during his career). Following a string of six episodes, it was cancelled on the Independent Broadcasting Authority's instructions.

Sykes also appeared in the film Monte Carlo or Bust! in 1969, which was also titled as Those Daring Young Men in Their Jalopies.

Sykes made a guest appearance in an episode of Till Death Us Do Part in 1970. This was followed by a six-episode series, Sykes and a Big, Big Show, for the BBC, and a one-offset for Thames Television, with Sykes and a Lid Off.

The BBC revived the series under the name Sykes seven years after the cancellation of Sykes and a... Between 1972 and 1979, 68 color episodes of Sykes were produced; forty-three of the shows were re-workings of scripts from the 1960s series, which had not been available in monochrome. They included a remake of the 1960s episode Sykes and a Stranger, guest-starring Peter Sellers as the stranger in what was supposed to be Sellers' last TV role. Sykes and Jimmy Edwards appeared in a Big Bad Mouse performance for Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia.

Sykes appeared in the Douglas Hickox thriller Theatre of Blood in 1973.

Sykes wrote and starred in another television special, Eric Sykes Shows a Few of Our Favorite Things in 1977. He also wrote the script for Charley's Aunt's (1977) television adaptation and appeared as Brassett in the role.

In 1979, a half-hour TV special was produced for Thames TV's third version of The Plank.

During 1980, Sykes and Rhubarb Rhubarb appeared in two Thames Television specials broadcast in two Thames Television specials – The Likes of Sykes and Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb. Jimmy Edwards, Bob Todd, Charlie Drake, Bill Fraser, Roy Kinnear, Beryl Reid, and Norman Rossington appeared in the latter film, which Sykes also produced, on Rhubarb, a remake of his 1969 short film Rhubarb. It was his last screen appearance with Hattie Jacques. Extras used the word "rhubarb" to simulate low-level background dialogue in The Goon Show, and the film borrowed an idea from the British showbiz tradition in which extras used the word "rhubarb" to characterize low-level background dialogue. Sykes wrote, produced, and starred in the offbeat comedy If You Go Down in the Woods Today for Thames, 1981, with a cast including Roy Kinnear, Fulton Mackay, and George Sewell.

Sykes appeared as Chief Constable in the slapstick police comedy film The Boys in Blue, which starred comedy pair Cannon and Ball with Jon Pertwee, during 1982. He appeared in and wrote The Eric Sykes 1990 Show, a wordless slapstick comedy involving a couple (Richard Briers and Sylvia Syms) moving to a new house with Sykes as the husband's laborious couple's (Richard Briers and Sylvia Syms) moving into a new home. It starred Tommy Cooper, Bernard Cribbins, Jimmy Edwards, Irene Handl, Bob Todd, and Andrew Sachs. Mr. H. Is Late, a silent film for Thames, was released in 1988. Sykes appeared in the children's film Gabrielle and the Doodleman in 1984, which also featured Windsor Davies (who would later appear with Sykes in the BBC's Gormenghast) and Gareth Hunt.

He appeared as Mad Hatter in the Anglia Television serial adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in 1985, alongside Michael Bentine, Leslie Crowther, and Leonard Rossiter, and he also appeared in the Julien Temple film musical Absolute Beginners (1986), which stars Patsy Kensit. In 1986, Sykes appeared in "The Six Napoleons," an episode of the Granada TV adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories starring Jeremy Brett.

With a cast that included Jack Smethurst, David McCallum, and Katy Manning, Sykes toured Australia (1987-1988). Sykes starred in 1989, in his first series since the Sykes series ended in 1979, as the golf club secretary in the ITV situation comedy The Nineteenth Hole, written by Johnny Speight. It was not a success and lasted for just one season, but it was sacked by ITV for being unfunny, racial, and sexist.

Sykes appeared in both episodes of Paul Merton's Palladium Story, a documentary film based on the history of the London Palladium. Sykes, alongside Tim Whitnall, Toyah Willcox, and Mark Heenehan, provided narration for the BBC pre-school television series Teletubbies from March 1997. It's his voice that announces "teletubbies!" "Eh-oh! he says the show's theme song and during the title sequence and on the show's theme song. In December 1997, he appeared in The Lion and Bear Magical Event, gaining his number one single. Sykes appeared in one episode of Dinnerladies as Stan's father (Duncan Preston).

In 2000, Sykes appeared as Mollocks, the servant of Dr Prunesquallor, in the BBC's mini-series version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, which was the last film to feature both Milligan and Sykes together (though they did not appear together on film). He appeared in One of his few leading roles in the blockbuster supernatural thriller film The Others, starring Nicole Kidman. In 2005, Frank Bryce appeared in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

In 2007, he appeared in Last of the Summer Wine and in New Tricks, as well as appearing in a small part in an episode of the sitcom My Family. He appeared in Son of Rambow last year, and he had a small part in the film Son of Rambow. Sykes appeared in Hallowe'en Party in October 2010, the ninth episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot's twelfth series.

Harper Perennial's autobiography, If I Don't Write It, Nobody Else Will, was published in 2005. He wrote books and some of them, including UFOs are Coming Wednesday (1995, Virgin Publishing), Smelling of Roses (1997, Virgin Publishing), The Great Crime of Grapplewick (1984, MacMillan London Ltd). These three books were released as The Eric Sykes Compendium by Virgin Publications in 1997: ISBN 978 0 735 1193 0.

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Honours and Awards

• 1961 Guild of TV Producers and Directors' Lifetime Achievement Award
• 1964 BBC Television Personality of the Year
• 1980 Pye Colour TV Award
• 1980 The Golden Rose of Montreux (for The Plank)
• 1985 The 25th Golden Rose of Montreux
• 1986 OBE
• 1988 Freedom of the City of London
• 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award from Writers' Guild of Great Britain
• 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Comedy Awards
• 1998 Honorary Fellowship of the University of Lancaster
• 1998 Eric Morecambe Award from Comic Heritage
• 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grand Order of Water Rats
• 2001 Bernard Delfont Award for outstanding contribution to show business from the Variety Club of Great Britain
• 2002 Oldie of the Year
• 2004 CBE
• 2009 Aardman Slapstick Visual Comedy Award for the outstanding contribution to the field of visual comedy he had made over his career