Tommy Cooper

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!"

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On the 15th April 1984 Tommy Cooper died on stage during the Live From Her Majesty's TV show. A friend of mine who worked for LWT at the time told me: "I was there in the theatre that night, standing at the back of the Circle."

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I first noticed Tim Key on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe TV series on BBC Four, where he did readings of his "topical poetry" to camera. These were short, pointedly unpoetic monologues about the issues of the day, delivered with a comic poise that brought to mind the late Tommy Cooper. He now has his own radio show, Tim Key's Late Night Poetry Programme (Radio 4, Wednesday), in which he reads more of his poems and argues with his long-suffering assistant, Lord. By rights, it shouldn't be very funny; but it is.

Wednesday's programme was themed around chance, which had prompted Key to write six numbered poems. His plan was to roll a die and perform the poems in the order thus dictated, but the number four kept appearing. "Have you touched the dice with a magnet?" he asked Lord, who protested that Key had totally failed to understand the nature of probability. Key decided to read poem number three instead, provocatively titled The Wrong Number That Led to a Marriage ("He had woken her up/ but she had been charmed by his blustering apologies and his flattery/ after an hour or so, the pauses became longer, and more comfortable"). By this time I was spluttering into my tea and resolving to tune into this Wednesday's instalment, which tackles the theme of superstition.

National treasure, adored by the public, comic genius - it's become almost a cliche now for those qualities to go hand-in-hand with a troubled private life.

This one-off documentary explores the side of Tommy Cooper that audiences never got to see and suggests that in order to achieve all the success, fame and ­popularity that his career gave him, he made a deal with the devil to get it.

Not literally, although you won't find many people here with a good word to say about his life-long manager Miff Ferrie, who died in 1994. "He was the most unpleasant agent I've ever known. Nobody liked him," offers one interviewee in tonight's programme.

As well as having absolutely no sense of humour - a serious drawback when your clients include Tommy Cooper and Sir Bruce Forsyth, who also appears here - one of Ferrie's other eccentricities was to keep obsessively detailed records of every one of his phone ­conversations.

Perhaps he knew what a gift these would one day be to biographers and documentary makers because these never-before-seen documents form the backbone of this film, revealing new details about Cooper's drinking, his ­volatile marriage, and his equally rocky relationship with Ferrie himself.

But if you'd prefer to remember Cooper as the funny man with the fez on his head, there are plenty of classic clips of his stage act here, too.

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The nostalgic can wallow in plenty of retro-fare this Christmas, from old Morecambe and Wise specials, by way of Tommy Cooper repeats and this splendid profile of the poker-faced comedian who was still selling vacuum cleaners at the age of 38 when, in 1967, he had one last throw of the dice and entered Opportunity Knocks. Dawson's deadpan humour is appreciated here by John Cleese, Robert Webb ("it's quite easy to play the piano badly and not be funny") and Russell Kane ("some of us younger people did muddle him up with John Prescott"). Touchingly, Dawson stopped cracking mother-in-law jokes when his wife's mother died.

Comedian Tommy Cooper was regularly credited with the ability to be funny without actually having to do anything. At 6'4!, with messy hair and a red fez on his head, he certainly looked the part. Using previously unseen footage, plus details from the diaries of Cooper's manager Miff Ferrie, this documentary provides a portrait of the troubled comedy giant, who died in 1984. Contributions come from Johnny Vegas and Damien Hirst.

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