Hattie Jacques

Robin Le Mesurier obituary

Obituary of Robin Le Mesurier, musician and son of Hattie Jacques and John Le Mesurier, whose boyhood antics inspired an episode of Sykes.

The story of Joan Le Mesurier's love triangle

Married to one of television's best-known actors - John Le Mesurier, the beloved Sergeant Wilson of Dad's Army - Joan caused a scandal when she plunged into an affair with her husband's closest friend and Britain's most famous comic, Tony Hancock.

It's That Man Again - Tommy Handley and ITMA

On Sunday 9 January 1949, just after the 5pm repeat broadcast of the latest episode of ITMA, the nation's favourite comedy show, there was a shock newsflash: Tommy Handley, the star of the programme, had died from a cerebral haemorrhage.

As second in the long-running series of naughty comedies (they did it 28 times!), this was the first to gather all those seaside-postcard characters. Down at Haven hospital the chaps in stripey pyjamas (Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Leslie Phillips) are revolting - against fearsome matron Hattie Jacques. A great stream of silly jokes and, like nurse Shirley Eaton, irresistible.

Radio Times review

If you have a favourite Carry On, the chances are it features in this edition. Episode one covered the film series's faltering early steps, up to Carry On Jack. Now we're wading into the golden period, the mid-to late 60s, with genre spoofs Carry On Spying, Cleo, Cowboy and Screaming.

Barbara Windsor is starkly absent from this affectionate celebration, but her co-stars Jim Dale, Amanda Barrie and Julian Holloway reminisce with joy. The extraordinary Fenella Fielding returns to a former haunt used in Screaming, Anita Harris revisits Follow That Camel's Saharan location (Camber Sands), while Angela Douglas is taken Up the Khyber (Snowdon). There's also a lovely tribute to Hattie Jacques and rare behind-the-scenes footage of Sid James and Kenneth Williams at work.

Radio Times review

It's easy to pooh-pooh the Carry On films. Yes, they were formulaic and increasingly smutty but they stormed the UK box office in the 1950s and 60s, before becoming a primetime staple on BBC One and ITV in the 70s. Many now have a period charm and are still amusing.

With mainstays Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques long dead, this affectionate three-part history calls in semi-regulars. It takes Shirley Eaton and Liz Frazer back to Pinewood Studios, Rosalind Knight and Sally Geeson to film locations, and reunites Bernard Cribbins and Juliet Mills for the first time in 50 years. Rather touching.

5 reasons Tommy Cooper biopic is best in a long time

We've had Hattie Jacques, Eric Morecambe and Kenneth Williams to name but a few. However ITV's two-hour-long film dedication to the life of Tommy Cooper, Not Like That, Like This, is the best biopic there's been for a while.

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!"

Despite his fame and success, it's not difficult to cast Eric Sykes - who died earlier this year at the age of 89 - as the unsung hero of post-war British comedy. Unlike his sometime cohorts Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan, he was never wholly taken to the nation's bosom. There are no stories, as there are of Hancock's Half Hour, of the pubs clearing as everyone rushed home to catch his latest show. But none of this is to disparage a brilliant, raging comic mind that contributed to the Goon Show scripts, wrote for Hancock and developed his own TV show Sykes: a twisted kaleidoscope of '70s suburbia that ran from '72-'79 and pitched him against the formidable Hattie Jacques. Forming the basis for BBC2's Eric evening, The Late Great Eric Sykes promises contributions from Eddie Izzard, Russ Abbot, Michael Palin and Bruce Forsyth, with a screening of a classic Sykes episode and a 2001 Arena profile rounding things up. So pull up the floorboards and have your rhubarb at the ready!