TV Review: The Late Great Eric Sykes| Harry & Paul|How Safe Are Britain’s Roads?

The Late Great Eric Sykes

BBC2, Saturday, 8.45pm

Harry & Paul

BBC2, Sunday, 10pm

How Safe Are Britain’s Roads?

BBC2, Wednesday, 11.20pm

THREE days before he died in the summer, aged 86, Eric Sykes told his agent Norma Farnes that what he’d like more than anything would be the chance to pop into Orme Court one last time.

This was his office in London’s Bayswater, and having been fortunate enough to share an hour in his company there, I knew what the place meant to him. In the 1960s it had been a fun factory, with top gagsmiths firing jokes at each other across the hallway. Comedy was a serious business for these guys with Sykes and Spike Milligan failing to agree where to position a “the” for maximum laughs and the latter settling the matter with a lobbed paperweight.

When I visited Orme Court, I noticed that Milligan, who had been dead three years, still had a pigeon-hole and what’s more he had mail. I hope Sykes’ pigeon-hole remains active although he’s pretty much the last of his generation. Almost all his associates featured in The Late Great Eric Sykes, including Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers and regular co-stars Hattie Jacques and Derek Guyler, are gone. Guyler played Corky, the bumbling bobby, and typically Corky would say “Hello, hello, what’s all this then?” and Eric would say “Don’t come dashing in here like Starsky and Hutch!” He was being ironic, of course. No one did any dashing in Sykes’ comedy.

Farnes took us on a tour of the office, which seems to have been left untouched. Sykes fired his gags from a big Sherman tank of a desk. There was the cupboard where he kept his cigars, latterly just for sniffing. And there was the photograph of his mother. She died giving birth to him, at least this was what he was told, and he bore much guilt for that. But she was his inspiration. In a clip from an old interview he said: “When I’m in trouble or a bit down I’ve only got to think of her.” The photo’s position in direct eyeline from the Sherman was deliberate. “Eric was absolutely certain that she guarded and guided him,” said Farnes.

Sykes didn’t have a catchphrase and his style wasn’t loud or look-at-me. His heroes were Laurel and Hardy who no one mentions anymore, which seems to be the fate of practitioners of gentle comedy (notwithstanding that with Stan and Ollie or Eric around, there was a high probability of being hit on the head with a plank). Denis Norden, one of the few old chums not yet potted heid, described him as diffident, and not surprisingly it was the gentle comedians of today who queued up to sing his praises (no sign of Frankie Boyle). Eddie Izzard rhapsodised about him getting a big toe stuck in a bath-tap; Michael Palin said: “He just did the things you’d see your dad do, or someone in a garage.” And right at the end Farnes recalled Eric’s reaction to the dramatic revelation that his mother had actually hung on for a week after he was born: “So she did hold me!”

If you’re a fan of, say, Keith Lemon or some such terrifyingly trendy comedian, your perspective on Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse is probably similar to the way Eric Sykes was viewed in his later years (Were they funny? Are they still alive?). Well, call me old-fashioned, but I love them. As they’ve got older, their comedy has got more ripe, more melancholy, more grumpy and, in the choicest sketches, funnier.

Apologies for the namedropping in this week’s column, but I remember Whitehouse telling me he didn’t realise The Fast Show gang were undergoing a collective mid-life crisis until he watched back the final instalments. Harry & Paul has picked up this theme, adding nice layers of bafflement and reactionary attitude. It’s as if everything the pair have done in their careers has been building to the moment – oh blessed relief! – when they could affix ginormous codger’s ears, sit in high-back leather armchairs and bluster to each other: “Would you say this one was… quare?”

For the new series they introduced the Minor Royals and some boasting, self-mythologising Irish New York cops (who get outdone by a boasting, self-mythologising Irish New York firefighter). They continued to spoof TV itself with send-ups of Question Time and The Killing – all highly promising. But I think my favourite character is still Marcus who sells useless tat at exorbitant prices to posh thickos.

As a recent victim of road-rage (me on my bicycle, being told by the driver of a Range Rover: “I hope you crash!”), I mind how I go a bit more. How Safe Are Britain’s Roads? was watched with mild alarm. Surely they’d be a lot safer if documentary teams didn’t talk to cameras while driving?