Eric Sykes Kinnear, Beryl Reid, and Norman Rossington. It was his last screen appearance with Hattie Jacques. The film employed an idea drawn from the British showbiz tradition in which extras used the word "rhubarb" to simulate low-level background dialogue, which had also been a running joke in "The Goon Show". In 1981, Sykes wrote, directed, and starred in the offbeat comedy "If You Go Down in the Woods Today" for Thames, with a cast including Roy Kinnear, Fulton Mackay, and George Sewell. During 1982, Sykes played the Chief Constable in the slapstick police comedy film "The Boys in Blue", which starred
Eric Sykes mostly written by Sykes, although he co-wrote one episode each with John Antrobus and Spike Milligan. All subsequent episodes were written solely by Sykes. Nine short seasons of "Sykes and A..." were made between 1960 and 1965, ranging between six and nine episodes each, plus a short 1962 special in the BBC's annual "Christmas Night with the Stars" programme, now lost. Twenty-five of the original fifty-nine episodes have survived in the BBC archives. It was during this series that Sykes introduced one of his best known creations, the wordless slapstick routine "The Plank", which originally appeared in Episode 2, Series