A word from the Editor Martin TOWNSEND

‘I was sad about Eric Sykes because all the comics I loved when growing up looked old before their time’

SO, FAREWELL then Eric Sykes. I remember seeing him in The Plank, the silent comedy that sealed his fame, at the Granada Cinema in Harrow. It was at the time when there were “B” features accompanying the main film and, in between them, adverts which promised Chinese restaurants and garden centres “just five minutes from this theatre”.

It seemed odd to me that someone would come out, blinking into the mid-afternoon sunlight, from a matinee performance of, say, Dr No and think: “Oh, I must buy a clematis.” Then again, I suppose some people did.

The Plank was gentle comedy. It made you smile rather than laugh out loud, except, perhaps, when someone fell over.

It’s difficult to remember anything else Eric did after The Plank until he arrived on our TV sets opposite Hattie Jacques. Then, another long gap until, decades later, he had a cameo in a ghost film, The Others, opposite Nicole Kidman: the obligatory “straight” role all comedians seize late in their careers as if to say: “Look, you should have taken me seriously all along.” Diana Dors did a similar thing in The Amazing Mr Blunden. One day, sadly, Jimmy Carr will be Hamlet: “To pay or not to pay?”

Perhaps Eric Sykes didn’t disappear for long periods of his career, maybe I just imagined he did because I wasn’t looking out for him. Nevertheless, when his death was announced last week I felt very sad for reasons I could not quite fathom until one of my colleagues remarked that he was the sort of comedian “who always looked old”.

Then the penny dropped. I was upset about Eric because almost all of the comedians and comic actors I loved when I was growing up looked old before their time and virtually all of them are now dead.

The earliest of these I remember was helium-voiced Jimmy Clitheroe, a man who suffered from a condition which meant he never grew above 4ft-and-a-bit and would always sound like a schoolboy. Then there was Charlie Drake, half mischievous, baby-faced urchin, half seedy old man; Jimmy Jewel, long-faced and mournful but never young; Arthur Askey, owl-like and elderly from start to finish. Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes’s old comedy partner, never looked young, nor did Jimmy Edwards. It is hard to imagine Irene Handl as a bright young thing. As for the curiously asexual Charles Hawtrey, he was always the elderly spinster, bespectacled, desperate and twitchy. I am sure that many of these comedians, coming to television relatively late in their careers, having flogged themselves around the music hall and variety clubs for years, looked old because they were old.

That said, it is strange that they simply stayed that way, almost as if laughter, being the best medicine, had pickled them in their suits and bow ties, too-short trousers and comedy hats.

I also think I must have favoured these young/old comedians when I was a hopelessly TV-addicted child because the funniest people I knew were all elderly members of my family: my grandad, who always wore his hat at the Sunday lunch table, my nan, teaching her budgerigar to swear, my dear old Auntie Joy and Uncle Bill who were always laughing at something ridiculous.

Eric Sykes, sadly deaf in reality, deftly daft for the camera, vaguely reminded me of my next-door neighbour Reg, one of the funniest people I have ever encountered though, hilariously, he was only half-aware of how funny he was. I can still hear his machine-gun laugh as he stalked up the path to his shed ready to fill the neighbourhood with cassette-taped fairground music.

I didn’t think anyone young could really be laugh-out-loud hilarious and I am not sure I have changed my mind. It is interesting that the TV characters I have laughed most at in recent years, David Brent in The Office and Father Ted Crilly, were both played by men who looked old before their time. Neither John Cleese in Fawlty Towers nor David Jason in Only Fools And Horses ever really looked young. The most watchable character in Gavin & Stacey was not the much-vaunted James Corden but Rob Brydon, he of the pock-marked and lived-in face.

The new stand-up comics leave me cold, with the possible exception of Peter Kay, who, from Phoenix Nights onwards, had the demeanour of a very middle-aged Northerner.

The best humour comes out of age and experience and a certain threadbare vulnerability. It’s the way we all are in the end, which is probably why we find it so funny.