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 the two Tony Hancock series for ITV. The original concept for the new series had Eric living in suburbia with his wife, with simple plots centring on everyday problems, but Sykes soon realised that by changing the house-mate from wife to sister it offered more scope for storylines and allowed either or both to become romantically entangled with other people. In the revised concept, Sykes played a version of his established stage persona, a bumbling, work-shy, accident-prone bachelor called Eric Sykes, who lives at 24 Sebastopol Terrace, East Acton, with his unmarried twin sister Harriet, played by Jacques. The other