A comedy great. RIP Classic! .................and look at them cars!!! [video=youtube;H2RoudtrVv8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2RoudtrVv8[/video]
Indeed John. Repeats of Sykes are being shown on Sky Gold channel from 8am on weekends. Eric Sykes - Hattie Jacques - Richard Wattis and Derek Guyler. All now gone but not forgotton. Simple comedy but very funny and still is to this day. R.I.P. Eric and thanks for all the laughs.
Hey. Dont knock them cars. Lol. I had one of those types back in the day. Thankfully it was a company car.
My first car was a clapped out Hillman Imp and my Dad used to own a Ford Corsair...............Hang on, I'm about to have one of those depressing "Getting Old" moments!! Quick where's miff's thread?
Older posters will remeber him fondly. A very funny man. Condolences to his family and al his friends of which we were all a part. RIP Sykesy.
A tribute from Garry Bushell July 4. On the day scientists discovered the God particle, a true god of comedy has died. We forget now how big a household name Eric Sykes was. Eric’s BBC1 sitcom Sykes ran for seven successful years – he and Hattie Jacques bickered so realistically that many viewers were convinced they actually were brother and sister. Yet on the occasions I was lucky enough to have met him, with our mutual friend Johnny Speight, I was always struck by his quiet modesty and the gentleness of his humour. Unlike rather too many of today’s comics, Eric Sykes was in it for the laughs and for the craft, not the lucre, the ego-trip and the glory. He was firmly convinced in the power of laughter: “One Ken Dodd show is worth six months on the National Health,” he said. Eric was as much a writer as a performer, at one time in tandem with sitcom geniuses Galton & Simpson. He wrote for Hancock, Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Norman Wisdom and The Goons – he shared an office with Spike Milligan for years. The son of a millworker, Eric Sykes was born on 4 May, 1923 in Oldham, Lancashire. He was one of the last of the great performers who honed their craft during WWII – the best argument for restoring National Service I can think of. He sparkled in several RAF concert shows before being seconded to the army for the Normandy landings. But typically he would insist that he’d bluffed his way into them: “They asked if I had theatrical experience and I thought, I'd been to the theatre three times before the war...” A radio writer and performer in the 1950s, he was from the first generation of comedians to move to television and carried off serious acting roles in Gormenghast, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Others with aplomb. By the end of his life he was stone deaf and virtually blind but he continued to perform. Ironically Eric’s silent films were his greatest achievements. He wrote and directed brilliant and virtually wordless comic gems including The Plank (1967, remade in 1979), Rhubarb (1969, remade as Rhubarb Rhubarb in 1980) and Mr H Is Late (1987). “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.” Amen to that. RIP Eric.
