Spike Milligan's gravestone returned after family feud

Spike Milligan's headstone - with the epitaph 'I told you I was ill' - is returned to an East Sussex churchyard with the name of his third wife added.

As seen on The Late Great Eric Sykes, three days before he died in the summer, aged 86, Eric Sykes told his agent Norma Farnes that what he'd like more than anything would be the chance to pop into Orme Court one last time.

This was his office in London's Bayswater, and having been fortunate enough to share an hour in his company there, I knew what the place meant to him. In the 1960s it had been a fun factory, with top gagsmiths firing jokes at each other across the hallway. Comedy was a serious business for these guys with Sykes and Spike Milligan failing to agree where to position a "the" for maximum laughs and the latter settling the matter with a lobbed paperweight.

When I visited Orme Court, I noticed that Milligan, who had been dead three years, still had a pigeon-hole and what's more he had mail. I hope Sykes' ­pigeon-hole remains active although he's pretty much the last of his generation. Almost all his associates featured in The Late Great Eric Sykes, including Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers and regular co-stars Hattie Jacques and Derek Guyler, are gone. Guyler played Corky, the bumbling bobby, and typically Corky would say "Hello, hello, what's all this then?" and Eric would say "Don't come dashing in here like Starsky and Hutch!" He was being ironic, of course. No one did any dashing in Sykes' comedy.

Farnes took us on a tour of the office, which seems to have been left untouched. Sykes fired his gags from a big Sherman tank of a desk. There was the cupboard where he kept his cigars, latterly just for sniffing. And there was the photograph of his mother. She died giving birth to him, at least this was what he was told, and he bore much guilt for that. But she was his inspiration. In a clip from an old interview he said: "When I'm in trouble or a bit down I've only got to think of her." The photo's position in direct eyeline from the Sherman was deliberate. "Eric was absolutely certain that she guarded and guided him," said Farnes.

Sykes didn't have a catchphrase and his style wasn't loud or look-at-me. His heroes were Laurel and Hardy who no one mentions anymore, which seems to be the fate of practitioners of gentle comedy (notwithstanding that with Stan and Ollie or Eric around, there was a high probability of being hit on the head with a plank). Denis Norden, one of the few old chums not yet potted heid, described him as diffident, and not surprisingly it was the gentle comedians of today who queued up to sing his praises (no sign of Frankie Boyle). ­Eddie Izzard rhapsodised about him getting a big toe stuck in a bath-tap; Michael Palin said: "He just did the things you'd see your dad do, or someone in a ­garage." And right at the end Farnes recalled Eric's reaction to the dramatic revelation that his mother had actually hung on for a week after he was born: "So she did hold me!"

Sykes, who died in July aged 89, was a master at teasing big laughs from unpromising material: a plank, a missing cat, fishing... And he was steeped in comedy greatness, writing for Hancock and Howerd, and collaborating with Spike Milligan on The Goon Show.

But it's for his TV sitcoms (Sykes and a... in the 60s, just plain Sykes in the 70s), that he's probably best remembered. He, Hattie Jacques as sister Hat and Deryck Guyler as local policeman Corky, made a formidable, beloved trio.

He overcame disability and a tough upbringing to earn massive respect among his peers. Eddie Izzard and Michael Palin are among those to doff their caps.

Despite his fame and success, it's not difficult to cast Eric Sykes - who died earlier this year at the age of 89 - as the unsung hero of post-war British comedy. Unlike his sometime cohorts Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan, he was never wholly taken to the nation's bosom. There are no stories, as there are of Hancock's Half Hour, of the pubs clearing as everyone rushed home to catch his latest show. But none of this is to disparage a brilliant, raging comic mind that contributed to the Goon Show scripts, wrote for Hancock and developed his own TV show Sykes: a twisted kaleidoscope of '70s suburbia that ran from '72-'79 and pitched him against the formidable Hattie Jacques. Forming the basis for BBC2's Eric evening, The Late Great Eric Sykes promises contributions from Eddie Izzard, Russ Abbot, Michael Palin and Bruce Forsyth, with a screening of a classic Sykes episode and a 2001 Arena profile rounding things up. So pull up the floorboards and have your rhubarb at the ready!

Where does all the best comedy come from? Death & War

Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Eric Sykes and the rest all experienced war. That made their comedy different to today's.

Archive Letter: Spike Milligan to a disgruntled fan

In February of 1977, a disgruntled fan named Stephen Gard wrote to legendary comedian Spike Milligan with a number of complaints about his recently published, autobiographical account of World War II. The comedian responded as follows.

Are the Goons still funny in 2012? I wouldn't have thought so, but it was a question John Sergeant seemed determined to answer in the affirmative in Sergeant on Spike (ITV1), even if it meant forcing a class of primary schoolchildren to sit through half an hour of them. Sergeant's verdict - that they were all laughing their heads off by the end - didn't quite chime with the puzzled looks on my TV - but heigh-ho. Sergeant, out and about in a tweed bucket hat, was amusing in his own right, walking backwards in Marylebone station (with Spike's I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas playing in his head) to the visible concern of commuters. Much of the programme was about Spike Milligan's zany genius, but also how difficult he could be. Did Spike's own children find him funny? There was no word from them.

Sergeant on Spike, ITV1, review

Christopher Howse reviews Sergeant on Spike, the latest instalment of ITV1's Perspectives arts strand in which John Sergeant explores the influence of Spike Milligan on his life.

The life and career of Spike Milligan has been incredibly well-documented over the years. We know about the scars left by war, the misanthropy, the depression and the freaky and original humour. It's hard to argue that this John Sergeant-helmed doc adds very much to the world's sum of Milligan-knowledge but it's watchable enough all the same. Sergeant, in news that won't be particularly surprising to Strictly fans, began his career as a comedian. He's always been in awe of Milligan and here, he visits a few of Spike's old haunts and chats to the likes of Michael Palin, Noel Fielding and Esther Rantzen. Finally, he plays The Goon Show to a classroom of modern kids to see if Milligan's comedy stylings still cut the mustard. And cheeringly, it seems that they do.

Spike Milligan accused Monty Python of plagiarism

Michael Palin has revealed Spike Milligan once accused Monty Python of "plagiarism".