ERIC SYKES: ALTHOUGH HE first came to fame as a writer for radio, the comic actor Eric Sykes, who has died aged 89, was fascinated – almost to the point of obsession – with silence. As a very young man, working at the clattering Lancashire cotton mill where his father was a supervisor, he was already dreaming of silent comedies. "I was trying to create the act that didn't have one word in it, the complete mime act, and I'm still trying," he said in 1971.
He fulfilled his ambition by writing and directing several films that were virtually wordless: The Plank (1967, remade in 1979), Rhubarb (1969, remade as Rhubarb Rhubarb in 1980) and Mr H Is Late (1987). He crammed these simple but very funny entertainments with the best available comic talent, including Arthur Lowe, Tommy Cooper, Charlie Drake, Charles Hawtrey, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Jimmy Edwards.
Silent humour was a field Sykes was driven to explore because he spent his life struggling with a hearing impairment. The heavy, black-framed glasses he wore contained no lenses and were actually a hearing aid. As he became older, the lenses became irrelevant, for he was also by then virtually sightless, and registered as blind. Yet this remarkable performer continued to appear on TV, in films and on stage, well into his 80s.
“If you understand comedy, you understand life,” he said. “Drama, death, tragedy – everybody has these. But with humour you’ve got all these, and the antidote. You have found the answer. It doesn’t follow that because you are a good comedy writer, you’re a happy fellow. I’ve got one of the most miserable faces in the world. I am only happy when I am working. If I’m not working, I get screwed up because my time is going, my life is slipping by.”
Sykes was one of the finest post-war comedy writers. He wrote the radio show Educating Archie (1950-58) and, with Spike Milligan, co-wrote some of the best episodes of the Goon Show. He and Milligan shared an office for many years as colleagues at Associated London Scripts. Sykes also created many of Frankie Howerd’s funniest routines.
An untidy, unco-ordinated, lugubrious man with a mildly irritated air and a reedy, doleful voice, Sykes did not look or sound at all like a comedian. One aspect of his appeal was he was more like the bloke behind the counter of a DIY shop, or a harassed minor local government official.
Sykes and A . . ., and Sykes, the BBC TV series in which he starred with Hattie Jacques, ran from 1960 to the late 1970s. The comic world he created was enclosed. There was about him an air of faded, working-class gentility and stifling respectability, of best suits on Sundays and highly polished boots, of boiled ham and limp lettuce salads and the best teaset specially got out for visitors.
Sykes was born in Oldham, Lancashire, and worked as a painter and a greengrocer’s assistant before following his father into the mill. His early ambitions to become a comedian were frustrated by second World War service, but it was during this period that he made the acquaintance of a number of budding comics, including Milligan, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. He joined the RAF as a wireless operator but was seconded into the army and also served aboard naval vessels.
Back in civilian life, he began supplying material to the friends he had made during the war, for radio shows such as Stars in Battledress and Variety Bandbox. He was trying his luck as an actor with Oldham Rep when Howerd, another friend from the services, contacted him and in 1949 he joined Howerd as full-time writer while also doing scripts for the top radio shows of the day. Because he worked alone, he was at one point the highest-paid comedy writer in Britain.
Strangely for such a talented man, Sykes seemed to dislike writing and saw it mostly as a means of achieving his true ambition, which was to be a principal comedian. He never did become a star solo stand-up performer, however, but in the late 1950s found his forte writing and acting in TV situation comedy.
In the Sykes shows, he played Hattie Jacques’s nervous, well-meaning but totally ineffectual brother and the humour came from calamity-prone Sykes’s unwitting threats to the ordered, suburban world of his sister. The show was gentle, appealing and warm-hearted, and ended when Jacques died in 1980.
After that Sykes was teamed with the blustering, hard-drinking comic Edwards for a series of theatre tours with the play Big Bad Mouse. After Edwards died in 1988, Sykes paired with Terry Scott for successful tours of the vintage farce Run for Your Wife.
While experimenting with his own soundless film comedies, Sykes appeared in a number of other movies: Village of Daughters, 1962; Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, 1965; and Monte Carlo or Bust!, 1969), often playing a much put-upon servant or apprehensive henchman.
One extraordinary venture was Shalako (1968), a bizarre western starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot, in which he played a butler. Other films included Heavens Above! (1963), One Way Pendulum (1964), Theatre of Blood (1973) and Absolute Beginners (1986).
In 2001, Nicole Kidman asked for him to be cast as her servant in The Others. He had good roles in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) and, on television, as Mollocks, the servant of Dr Prunesquallor, in a BBC adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast in 2000, and featured in the 2007 series of Last of the Summer Wine.
He was awarded the Guild of TV Producers and Directors’ lifetime achievement award in 1961, and also given a lifetime achievement award by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain in 1992 and another by the Grand Order of Water Rats in 2001, among a host of honours from the world of showbusiness. He was made an OBE in 1986 and a CBE in 2005.
Sykes married Edith Milbrandt in 1952. She survives him, along with three daughters and a son.
Eric Sykes: born May 4th, 1923; died July 4th, 2012
