Spike Milligan Eric Sykes Popular Books

Spike Milligan Eric Sykes Biography & Facts

Eric Sykes (4 May 1923 – 4 July 2012) was an English radio, stage, television and film writer, comedian, actor and director whose performing career spanned more than 50 years. He frequently wrote for and performed with many other leading comedy performers and writers of the period, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Peter Sellers, John Antrobus and Johnny Speight. Sykes first came to prominence through his many radio credits as a writer and actor in the 1950s, most notably through his collaboration on The Goon Show scripts. He became a TV star in his own right in the early 1960s when he appeared with Hattie Jacques in several popular BBC comedy television series. Early life Sykes was born on 4 May 1923 in Oldham, Lancashire; 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 gained 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, qualifying as a wireless operator with the rank of leading aircraftman. Career Sykes's 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. Sykes also collaborated with fellow RAF servicemen Denis Norden and Ron Rich in the production of troop entertainment shows. Whilst preparing for one of these shows in 1945, Sykes, accompanied by Norden and Rich, went to a nearby prison camp in search of stage lighting; the camp turned out to be the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which had recently been liberated by the Allies. Sykes, Norden, and Rich organised a food collection amongst their comrades to feed the starving camp inmates. When the war ended, Sykes decided to try his luck in London, arriving in the middle of the coldest winter in living memory (1946–47). He rented lodgings, expecting to find work quickly, but by the end of the first week he was cold, hungry, and penniless. The turning point in his life and career came on the Friday night of his first week in London: he had a chance meeting in the street with Bill Fraser, who was by now featuring in a comedy at the Playhouse Theatre. Fraser took the impoverished Sykes to the theatre, offered him food and drink, then asked if Sykes would like to write for him. Sykes began providing scripts for both Fraser and Frankie Howerd and soon found himself in demand as a comedy writer. Forming a partnership with Sid Colin, he worked on the BBC radio ventriloquism show Educating Archie, which began in 1950, and also Variety Bandbox. Working on Educating Archie led to him meeting Hattie Jacques for the first time. 1950s Sykes had begun to write for television as early as 1948, but from the early 1950s Sykes began to make an ultimately successful transition from radio to TV, writing a number of series episodes and one-off shows for the BBC. His credits in this period include The Howerd Crowd (1952), Frankie Howerd's Korean Party, Nuts in May, and The Frankie Howerd Show, as well as The Big Man (1954) starring Fred Emney and Edwin Styles. Sykes also made his first screen appearance at this time in the army film comedy Orders Are Orders (1954), which also featured Sid James, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Bill Fraser, and Donald Pleasence. Sykes's small office above a grocer's shop at 130 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush, was shared from around 1953 by Spike Milligan. (Sykes and Milligan later jointly formed Associated London Scripts (ALS) with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, a writers' agency which lasted for well over a decade until being effectively dissolved in 1967). Late in 1954, Sykes began collaborating with Spike Milligan on scripts for The Goon Show, easing Milligan's workload. Their first collaborative script was for a Goon Show special called Archie in Goonland, a crossover between The Goon Show and Educating Archie. The special was broadcast in June 1954 and featured the regular Goon Show cast (Harry Secombe was then appearing in both) plus Peter Brough, his dummy Archie Andrews and Hattie Jacques. It was not a success, however, and neither recording nor the script has survived. Sykes and Milligan are credited as the co-writers of all but the first six of the 26 episodes in Series 5 (1954–55) and three episodes of Series 6 (1955–56); Sykes also wrote a 15-minute Goon Show Christmas special, The Missing Christmas Parcel, broadcast during the Children's Hour on 8 December 1955. In 1955, Sykes wrote and performed in a BBC Christmas spectacular, a spoof pantomime called Pantomania, which featured many well-known BBC personalities of the era; it was directed by Ernest Maxin, who went on to produce some of the most famous comedy routines for Morecambe & Wise. That same year Sykes signed a contract as scriptwriter and variety show presenter for the newly formed independent television company ATV, while continuing to write and perform for the BBC. In 1956, Sykes performed, wrote scripts, and acted as script editor for the pioneering Rediffusion TV comedy The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d, the first attempt to translate the humour of the Goons to television. It starred Peter Sellers, with Sykes, Kenneth Connor, and Valentine Dyall. During this year he also made his second film appearance, playing a minor role in the Max Bygraves film Charley Moon, which also featured Bill Fraser, Peter Jones, Dennis Price, and (as a child) Jane Asher. During 1956–57, Sykes also wrote for and performed in The Tony Hancock Show, where he again worked with Hattie Jacques. His next venture for the BBC was a one-hour special, Sykes Directs a Dress Rehearsal, playing a harassed director in a fictional TV studio rehearsal room, just before going live to air. Later that year he wrote and appeared in another all-star spectacular called Opening Night which celebrated the opening of the 1956 National Radio Show at Earl's Court. In 1957, he created Closing Night, which closed the 1957 show. By this time Sykes had developed hearing problems; he subsequently lost most of his hearing, but learned to lip-read and watch other performers say their lines to get his cues. In 1957, he wrote and appeared in an edition of Val Parnell's Saturday Spectacular, the first of two shows in this series that he wrote for Peter Sellers. The first went out under the title of Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers, and the second, in 1958, was called The Peter Sellers Show. In 1959, Sykes wrote and directed the one-off BBC special Gala Opening, with a cast that included 'Professor' Stanley Unwin and Hattie Jacques, and played a small supporting role in the Tommy Steele film Tommy the Toreador. 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 collabo.... Discover the Spike Milligan Eric Sykes popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Spike Milligan Eric Sykes books.