Denis Norden

As seen on The Late Great Eric Sykes, 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!"

As part of Radio 2's current Comedy Season here are big star profiles today, tomorrow and Wednesday, all three from independent producers. Alexander Armstrong tells the Peter Sellers story tonight which, after Radio 4's Saturday night Archive special, is a bit of an overload. (Don't rival Controllers and schedulers speak to each other these days?) From The Goons on radio in the 1950s to Hollywood fame in the 60s the gulf between public and private person is once more explored. Eric Sykes and Denis Norden are among the interviewees.

In Radio 2's Very Nearly an Armful - a quote from The Blood Donor, as any self-respecting baby boomer will know - the comedy writer Stephen Merchant analysed their lasting appeal, with the help of Denis Norden, Ben Elton, Beryl Vertue and David Mitchell.

It was to Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir that the two working-class lads, thrown together in a TB sanitorium in their late teens, sent their first efforts at comedy scriptwriting. Norden recognised their raw talent instantly and later put them "in a class of their own". They broke more new ground than any of their contemporaries, he said.

Apart from anything else, Galton and Simpson pioneered what Norden called "the jokeless radio comedy", by which he meant a series (Hancock) which relied on situation and character, rather than an endless stream of gags. It was the beginning of the sitcom.

Its apogee was Steptoe and Son, each half-hour episode a perfect little mini-drama of aspiration, conflict and disappointment, distinguished as much by the fine playing of Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett as it was by the masterly writing of Galton and Simpson.

A dinosaur was the star turn of The Wrong Door, an entertaining new sketch show set, for lack of a more plausible explanation, in a parallel universe. Mum, Dad, Nan, this is Philip, says Melanie, introducing her new boyfriend. Philip is a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who devours the family dachshund. No one mentions that he is a reptile. Well, you don't, do you? Philip will, I hope, be a recurring delight.

Personally, I liked the robot. Where, he roared in a towering temper, beheading skyscrapers and peering into their innards, were his fucking keys? Denis Norden once said that, if he could find his spectacles in the morning, that was happiness enough for one day.