211 Sykes

First  watched : 1975

For  a  guy  who  worked  in  TV  for  the  best  part  of  50  years,  with  his  own  show  for  a  dozen  of  them,  Eric  Sykes  is  curiously  uncelebrated  these  days. You  don't  see  tribute  shows with  comedy's  young  guns  - and  the  ubiquitous  Barry  Cryer - lining  up  to pay  homage . He  wrote  for  and  performed  with  all  the  greats - Tommy  Cooper, Spike  Milligan, Tony  Hancock - but  he's  become  the  forgotten  man  of  British  comedy. Perhaps  that's  because  there  was  no  apparent  edge  to  him ; apart  from  his  struggle  with  deafness , he  lived  a  long  and  happy, scandal-free  life , never  swore   and  his  work  stayed  firmly  in  the  mainstream.

Having  said  all  that  I  was  never  a  great  fan  of  this.  I  remember  Tuesdays  being  a  particularly  dull  telly  night  and  Sykes  was  a  part  of  that. He  lived  with  his  unmarried  sister  Harriet ( Hatti  Jacques )  in  an  unremarkable  terraced  house   regularly   visited  by  snooty neighbour  Richard  Wattis  and  under-worked  policeman  Corky  ( Derrick  Guyler ) . It  seemed  small, cramped  and  airless, each  episode  much  like  another. Part  of  the  reason  was that  up  to  Wattis's  death  in  1975  most  of   the  shows  were  colour  remakes  of  Sykes's  early  sixties  series  Sykes  And  A ...  which  had  exactly  the  same  premise.

It  came  to  an  end  with  Jaques's  death  in  1980. Apart  from  a  reviled  ITV  sitcom  The  Nineteenth  Hole  which  lasted  for  one  series  in  1989 , Sykes  never  had  a  regular  series  again  alhough  he  worked  steadily  as  an  actor  into  his  eighties.He  died  in  2012  aged  89.