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 and Ronnie Brody. In 1968, he had a supporting role in an Anglo-American film co-production, the Edward Dmytryk western "Shalako", starring Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot. In 1969, Sykes co-starred with Spike Milligan in the ill-fated television sit-com "Curry and Chips", a satire on racial prejudice created and written by Johnny Speight and made for London Weekend Television. Milligan, who had grown up in British India, played Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani half-Irish man who comes to work in a British factory and ends up boarding with his ineffectual foreman Arthur Blenkinsop (Sykes), who has to regularly defend Kevin against his