Russ Abbot

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.

When Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton satirised media values in their Nineties sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey they produced a perceptive but gentle chiding of failing newsroom standards and most journalists loved it. They won't have found Hacks so funny.

The phone-hacking scandal is no media industry in-joke but an already much-publicised story of shameful events that the audience will have instantly recognised.

It was snappily written but it seems almost futile to try to exaggerate for comic effect the extreme methods that we know were actually employed at the News of the World. So when we saw Tabby, the pearl-wearing royal correspondent for the Sunday Comet, tasked with hacking the phone calls of the "Ginger Prince" we well knew the dapper Clive Goodman - her real life equivalent at the News of the World - was up to so much more.

Channel 4 ran the inevitable disclaimer: "The characters and events in this film are entirely fictitious." That may not have satisfied ex-staffers at the News of the World. Former showbiz editor Rav Singh and former investigations editor Mazher "The Fake Sheikh" Mahmood (neither of whom have been accused of criminal activity) can't have been impressed at the portrayal of the Sunday Comet's most scurrilous reporter Rav Musharraf (Kayvan Novak), who is shown trying to blag documents in the voices of Desmond Tutu, Sean Connery and Prince Philip ("just fax me the bleeding bank statement you imbecile").

Novak's was one of many slick performances. Claire Foy was scary as a ruthless editor with some of the ambitious traits of Rebekah Brooks. Michael Kitchen deftly played Stanhope Feast, a media baron with an Australian accent, a fruity vocabulary and a feisty young Oriental wife with a talent for close combat, Ho Chi Mao Feast (Eleanor Matsuura).

Hackgate has been such a gripping and multi-dimensional story that the hour-long drama rattled along at the pace of a good Sunday tabloid. And with the Leveson inquiry still unfolding, much of the material felt hot off the press. Scotland Yard should have squirmed at Russ Abbot's portrayal of a top cop and politicians were expertly lampooned for their obsequiousness towards the media.

But the Channel 4 audience, amused as it might have been by this all-too-real tale of tabloid excess, will have been left with little sense of the value of journalism. The role of other newspapers in exposing hacking was skipped over, leaving Ray (Phil Davis), a veteran reporter with an aversion to the dark arts, to represent Fleet Street's conscience.

Rupert Murdoch's influence on British media culture was mercilessly satirised. Hacks ended with an abandoned Stanhope Feast, hopping mad on his skyscraper helipad as the pages of his dead newspaper blew away in the wind. But the real life mogul is still worth more than $7bn and his News Corp empire generates $33bn a year in revenues, so that part at least was indeed entirely fictitious.

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