Eric Sykes

Did You Know?

• Sykes's mother died three weeks after his birth, leaving him and his two-year-old brother Vernon motherless.
• He 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, where he met and worked with flight lieutenant Bill Fraser. He also collaborated with fellow RAF servicemen Denis Norden and Ron Rich on troop entertainment shows. While preparing for one such show in 1945, Sykes, Norden and Rich went to a nearby prison camp for stage lighting, which turned out to be the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; they organised a food collection among their comrades for the starving inmates.

After the war, Sykes moved to London during the severe winter of 1946–47. Penniless and hungry by the end of his first week, he met Bill Fraser by chance on a Friday night. Fraser, then appearing in a comedy at the Playhouse Theatre, took Sykes to the theatre, gave him food and drink, and asked if he would write for him. Sykes began writing scripts for Fraser and Frankie Howerd, soon becoming a sought-after comedy writer.

He formed a partnership with Sid Colin and worked on the BBC radio ventriloquism show Educating Archie from 1950, as well as Variety Bandbox, which led to his first meeting with Hattie Jacques. Sykes began writing for television in 1948 and from the early 1950s successfully transitioned from radio to television, writing episodes and one-off shows for the BBC. His credits include The Howerd Crowd (1952), Frankie Howerd's Korean Party, Nuts in May, The Frankie Howerd Show, and The Big Man (1954).

He made his first screen appearance in the army film comedy Orders Are Orders (1954), which featured Sid James, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Bill Fraser and Donald Pleasence.

Personal life

Sykes became partially deaf as an adult, with his hearing deteriorating during the Second World War. He had an operation in 1952 and another two years later, after which he discovered he was profoundly deaf. His spectacles contained no lenses but were a bone-conducting hearing aid. Disciform macular degeneration, caused by age and possibly smoking, left him partially sighted and he was registered as blind; he was a patron of the Macular Disease Society.

He stopped smoking cigarettes in November 1966 but continued cigars until 1998. He underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1997 and experienced a stroke in 2002. Sykes married Edith Eleanore Milbrandt on 14 February 1952; they had three daughters and a son, and marked their 60th wedding anniversary in the year he died. In the 1970s, he and Jimmy Edwards performed in a show for Ian Smith in Rhodesia.

Sykes was appointed OBE in 1986 and promoted to CBE in the 2005 New Year Honours for services to drama, following a petition by MPs. He was an honorary president of the Goon Show Preservation Society and a follower of Oldham Athletic, serving as an honorary director of the club in the 1970s. Sykes died on the morning of 4 July 2012 at his home in Esher, Surrey, after a short illness, with his family present. He has a memorial plaque in St Paul's Church in Covent Garden.