This was the first radio series to star Eric Sykes. (1961)

By this time, he was already very well known and had starred in his own TV series (“Sykes and a…” had already started the previous year with Hattie Jacques playing Sykes’ sister), and had written numerous other comedy shows for radio since the end of the Second World War, including material for Frankie Howerd, who performed the first sketch of Sykes’s accepted by the BBC in 1947 (the ‘Two Elephants’ sketch). However, Sykes didn’t write this series himself, John Junkin and Terry Nation (later to create the Daleks) wrote the scripts.

Set in Blossom Hill Police Station, Sykes plays a constable answerable to his superior, Sgt Deryck Guyler, who in turn is answerable to Superintendent Leonard Williams (who would become better known as another cop the following year, on television, playing Sergeant Twentyman in the first series of Z Cars, before his early death).
This series has many similarities to the long running TV series that began a year earlier, as not only does Guyler play a policeman, but Hattie Jacques plays Sykes’s sister. Making up the full compliment is resident prisoner Dick Emery, a jobbing criminal who learnt to make himself comfortable in his many stays in Cell Number 1.

The same cast would also play multiple other characters as required: Leonard Williams was the postman Tom; Hattie played the Italian actress in one episode, a young lost schoolgirl in another, and a landlady in another.

As well as playing the crook Pringle, who has been staying with the police for years, Dick Emery also played a guest spot in each episode as a drunk who stumbles into Sykes in each episode for a bit of patter.