Eric Sykes - Career - 1960s

1960s

At the turn of the decade Eric Sykes and his old friend and colleague Hattie Jacques co-starred in a new 30-minute BBC TV sitcom, Sykes and A..., which Sykes created in collaboration with writer Johnny Speight, who had worked with him earlier in the 1950s on the two Tony Hancock series for ITV. The original concept for the new series had Eric living in suburbia with his wife, with simple plots centring on everyday problems, but Sykes soon realised that by changing the house-mate from wife to sister it offered more scope for storylines and allowed either or both to become romantically entangled with other people.

In the revised concept, Sykes played a version of his established stage persona, a bumbling, work-shy, accident-prone bachelor called Eric Sykes, who lives at 24 Sebastopol Terrace, East Acton, with his unmarried twin sister Harriet, played by Jacques. The other regular cast members were Deryck Guyler as local constable Wilfred "Corky" Turnbull and Richard Wattis as their snobbish, busybody neighbour Charles Brown. Wattis left the show after series 3 and his departure was explained by having Mr Brown emigrating to Australia. Other guests included Hugh Lloyd, John Bluthal, Leo McKern and Arthur Mullard.

The first series (five episodes, all written by Johnny Speight) premiered on 29 January 1960 and were an immediate 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) were mostly written by Sykes, although he co-wrote one episode each with John Antrobus and Spike Milligan. All subsequent episodes were written solely by Sykes.

Nine short seasons of Sykes and A... were made between 1960 and 1965, ranging between six and nine episodes each, plus a short 1962 special in the BBC's annual Christmas Night with the Stars programme, now lost. Twenty-five of the original fifty-nine episodes have survived in the BBC archives. It was during this series that Sykes introduced one of his best known creations, the wordless slapstick routine The Plank, which originally appeared in Episode 2, Series 7 of Sykes And A..., first broadcast on 3 March 1964 under that title.

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

In 1962 Sykes played his first starring film role, being a travelling salesman in the comedy Village of Daughters, set in an Italian village, but featuring a mostly British cast including John Le Mesurier (who was at that time 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 the first film appearances by Ronnie Barker. Both films were made by the same writer-director team behind the popular Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple film, Murder She Said.

During 1965, Sykes made what proved to be the final series of Sykes and A... and appearing in three major films. He had a small role in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, joining an all-star cast of British and American TV and film luminaries. The spy spoof The Liquidator was directed by Jack Cardiff and starred Rod Taylor with Sykes in a secondary role. His third film of that year was the Boulting brothers' Rotten to the Core starring Anton Rogers (who replaced Peter Sellers) with Sykes. Sykes had a minor film role in another spy comedy The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966), written by Galton and Simpson.

In 1967 Sykes expanded one of his routines into a 45-minute wordless colour short, The Plank which features, 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.) Also in 1967 Sykes and his old comrade Jimmy Edwards started touring with the theatrical farce Big Bad Mouse which, while keeping more or less to a script, gave them rein to ad lib and address the audience. They would return to the production on and off until 1975, touring the UK twice and also taking the show abroad, including to Australia.

Returning to television, Sykes and Jacques appeared in the 1967 special Sykes Versus ITV with Tommy Cooper and Ronnie Brody. In 1968 he had a supporting role in an Anglo-American film co-production, the Edward Dmytryk western Shalako, starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot.

In 1969 Sykes co-starred with Spike Milligan in the ill-fated television sit-com Curry & Chips, a satire on racial prejudice created and written by Johnny Speight and made for London Weekend Television. Milligan, who had grown up in British India, played Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani half-Irish man who comes to work in a British factory and ends up boarding with his ineffectual foreman Arthur Blenkinsop (Sykes), who has to regularly defend Kevin against his racist workmates. The supporting cast included pop singer turned actor Kenny Lynch, Geoffrey Hughes, Norman Rossington, Sam Kydd, Jerrold Wells and Fanny Carby as Arthur and Kevin's landlady. The series provoked a storm of complaints about its liberal use of racist epithets and bad language (although Sykes refused to swear, as he did throughout his career). It was cancelled on the instruction of the Independent Broadcasting Authority after six episodes.

Sykes also made another minor film appearance in 1969 in the comedy Monte Carlo or Bust!, which was also titled as Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies.