Bill Sikes won several awards in the early 1960s. Oliver Reed played Sikes in the musical's 1968 film adaptation which also won several awards, with Reed's performance often cited as the best portrayal of Sikes - being labelled as "the sinister core of the film". His songs are removed from the film, making his performance of the character closer to that of the novel rather than the stage version. The famous climax of the 1948 film adaptation is retained and Bill Sikes dies in the same manner of being shot then accidentally hanging himself. In Disney's animated version, "Oliver & Company" (1988),
Eric Sykes of "Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers", and the second, in 1958, was called "The Peter Sellers Show". In 1959, Sykes wrote and directed the one-off BBC special "Gala Opening", with a cast that included 'Professor' Stanley Unwin and Hattie Jacques, and played a small supporting role in the Tommy Steele film "Tommy the Toreador". At the turn of the decade Eric Sykes and his old friend and colleague Hattie Jacques co-starred in a new 30-minute BBC TV sitcom, "Sykes and a...", which Sykes created in collaboration with writer Johnny Speight, who had worked with him earlier in the 1950s on