Michael Palin

Michael Palin: our very silly man in Brazil

Michael Palin is still globetrotting for the BBC and as amiable as ever. What keeps the old Python happy?

Sykes, who died in July aged 89, was a master at teasing big laughs from unpromising material: a plank, a missing cat, fishing... And he was steeped in comedy greatness, writing for Hancock and Howerd, and collaborating with Spike Milligan on The Goon Show.

But it's for his TV sitcoms (Sykes and a... in the 60s, just plain Sykes in the 70s), that he's probably best remembered. He, Hattie Jacques as sister Hat and Deryck Guyler as local policeman Corky, made a formidable, beloved trio.

He overcame disability and a tough upbringing to earn massive respect among his peers. Eddie Izzard and Michael Palin are among those to doff their caps.

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!

This tribute to Eric Sykes, one of Britain's best-loved comedy actors and writers, who died in July, forms an evening of programmes dedicated to the man. An episode from series seven of his sitcom Sykes - in which the lofty Eric and the cuddly Hattie Jacques played an unlikely pair of oddly sexless twins, leading fanciful lives in Sebastopol Terrace, Acton - follows at 10.30pm, plus a repeat of an Arena documentary at 10.55pm.

The comedy writer and actor had a career in film, TV and radio that spanned more than 50 years, and saw him work with Tony Hancock, among many others. Sykes was part of a new wave of comedy and was catapulted to fame in the postwar years when hit shows such as Variety Bandbox and Educating Archie made him the highest-paid comedy writer in the country. His popularity continued as he became one of the brains behind The Goons and Sykes ran for a further 20 years. Comedians Eddie Izzard and Russ Abbot, Monty Python star Michael Palin, entertainer Bruce Forsyth and film director Mike Newell are just some of the celebrities paying their respects to a man whose comic influence will continue to be felt for many years to come.

Q&A: John Cleese

'The worst thing anyone's ever said to me? "Are you Michael Palin?"'

It's been more than 40 years since the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC One and we never looked at comedy - let alone spam, parrots or lumberjacks - in the same way again. This documentary marks the first time the surviving Pythons have come together for a project since 1983's The Meaning of Life]. Directed by Alan Parker, it features interviews with Terry Jones, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, as well as archive chat from late Graham Chapman. All tell the story of how they met at Oxbridge and The Frost Report, created trail-blazing television, made the transition into movies and ultimately became a British institution. Which, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected.

When John Le Mesurier's wife Joan left him for what turned out to be a brief and disastrous relationship with his best friend Tony Hancock, he became Joan's confidante. He'd comfort her in her unhappiest days with Hancock, telling her: "I love him too, I know exactly how it is, darling."

Everybody loved John Le Mesurier and the contributors here, including Joan, who left Hancock and returned to her husband (he never referred to her affair again) speak of him with unconditional adoration. Le Mesurier was peerless; that wonderful, urbane delivery and the crushed-velvet voice made him unforgettable as Sgt Wilson in Dad's Army.

To those who knew him best, he was charming, warm and delightful. Michael Palin worked with him on Jabberwocky and wonders fondly where Le Mesurier would be in 2012: "Playing a patient in a bed in Casualty?" Palin is a devotee of Le Mesurier's reassuring presence: "[when he appeared] I just felt comfortable. I knew he knew what to do."

Those recalling Robert Bathurst's portrayal of John Le Mesurier in BBC4's Hattie might have thought him too good to be true. Au contraire. No one - from Clive Dunn and Ian Lavender to Michael Palin and JLM's third wife - has a bad word to say about a man who endured repeated cuckolding, perpetual career disappointments and terminal illness with a half-smile and drifted through life with an ineffably British sense of opaque understatement and vague melancholy. Much time is understandably spent on Dad's Army, but this doc also serves as a frustrating 'what might have been' for an underrated actor who ambled through a stop-start career with the same unknowable civility as he did his life. He's the man for whom 'keep calm and carry on' might have been invented.

Julian Rhind-Tutt narrates this in-depth profile of the beloved actor, best remembered for his role as the genteel Sergeant Arthur Wilson in Dad's Army. Friend Michael Palin and Dad's Army co-star Clive Dunn offer fulsome praise, and help dissect Le Mesurier's three marriages and legendary fondness for a tipple (or 10). "It's all been rather lovely" were his final words before slipping into a cirrhosis-induced coma - an appropriate epitaph by all accounts.

The life and career of Spike Milligan has been incredibly well-documented over the years. We know about the scars left by war, the misanthropy, the depression and the freaky and original humour. It's hard to argue that this John Sergeant-helmed doc adds very much to the world's sum of Milligan-knowledge but it's watchable enough all the same. Sergeant, in news that won't be particularly surprising to Strictly fans, began his career as a comedian. He's always been in awe of Milligan and here, he visits a few of Spike's old haunts and chats to the likes of Michael Palin, Noel Fielding and Esther Rantzen. Finally, he plays The Goon Show to a classroom of modern kids to see if Milligan's comedy stylings still cut the mustard. And cheeringly, it seems that they do.