THE PLANK

Having recorded it just before Christmas, we sat ourselves down and watched Eric Sykes' 1967 short film "The Plank" the other evening and, whilst it's obviously "of its time" and was less about "two blokes carrying a plank down the street" than I remember it (there are a lot more "car" gags than I expected, for a start), it was still an entertaining way to spend an hour of your life, even though the moment where Graham Stark and his lorry driver's mate try to "hit on" the girl hitch-hiker seems as if it might have been slightly suspect even then, and seems completely sinister to the modern viewer, especially given the way attitudes have shifted even over the past year.

Starring "The Plank" in "The Plank" is a simple tale of two workmen, played by Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper, who find themselves one plank short of a complete floor and head off to the timber yard to fetch another one, after which, because this seems to be a particularly willful plank, as they say "much hilarity ensues..."

Whilst I had remembered it as being a mostly "silent" piece, built mostly around sight gags as a kind of tribute to the silent film comics of the writer/director/performer's youth, I was actually surprised to find so much sound on the soundtrack, featuring in much the same way as it would in the "Mr Bean" shorts a generation or two later.

Nobody has a conversation as such, although the police sergeant's (played, in an excellent and most satisfying piece of casting by Stratford Johns, no less) repetition of "Name...?" as all of the victims lives come together at the police station is very much a "featured" moment, but mostly it's background chatter and sound effects which are used to enhance this tale as the plank makes its eventful way back to the floor it is intended for, sometimes strapped to the roof of the particularly rickety car owned by the joiners, but more often than not removed from it into some situation which turns out to be unfortunate for anyone whose life is touched by the wretched thing.

Amidst the jokes about cars falling apart and kittens perhaps accidentally being sealed in under the floorboards, there are bit parts for many of Eric Sykes' "Celebrity Showbiz Mates"and part of the fun is spotting some of them in their "blink and you'll miss it" cameos.

Was that a "Tarby" I spotted shining Jimmy Edwards' shoes...?

For me, at least, here is also much satisfaction to be found in basking in the warm glow of nostalgia of seeing so many "lost worlds" on film, three "stand out" moments made this particular hour a rather joyous one for me...

My first "sit up and take notice" moment was spotting a genuine Police Box in situ on a London street, which, as an old-school "Doctor Who" fan is a rare treat. Even though they can regularly be seen in the background of some of the contemporary British films of the 1950s and 1960s, spotting a new one of them doesn't happen all that often, so that, at least, made me smile.

Then I noticed a blatant early example of "product placement" as (perhaps inadvertently, although I doubt it...) a bus pulls into the background emblazoned with an advert for the TV Times...

Finally, as Jimmy Edwards has his alarming high speed cycle ride through the streets of London courtesy of the plank and a van driven by a one-eyed John Junkin, a brand new shining example my all-time favourite type of Jaguar, the twin headlamped beast that was the Mk 10, turned up parked at the side of the road. Actually, if you like that sort of thing, part of the fun is watching out for the same cars, obviously ones owned by the production crew, turning up again and again in the various shots throughout the film.

In my opinion, there are two stand out classic comedy moments in the hour long running time. The first is when an astonishingly hairy - and soon to be very smelly due to an incident with Kenny Lynch's dustcart - Roy Castle sits down in the back of his van just before it drives off, which I think is the best sight gag in the thing, and the second is when the red paint deposited on the plank courtesy of Jim Dale gets mistaken for an injury to Tommy Cooper and the Great British Public come to his assistance, only to be disappointed when they discover the truth and just vanish into thin air.