Sabrina's Beginnings

1955

From the book, The Double Act - A History of British Comedy Duos

by Andrew Roberts, 2018

After the Second World War, one of Arthur Askey’s most famous partners was Sabrina, a.k.a. Nonna Sykes, a model who was cast to add publicity to the comic’s 1955 BBC TV series Before Your Very Eyes. In the comic’s own, rather dispiriting words:

I felt I wanted to give the show a gimmick of some sort. So I hit on the idea of having a dumb blonde around the set ... We held auditions for a suitable dumb-cluck and found one in Norma Sykes. She had a lovely face and figure, but could not act, sing, dance, or even walk properly, although she had come to London to try her luck as a model. (Askey, 1975: 164)

The name ‘Sabrina’ was selected as a reference to the stage show Sabrina Fair, and within weeks she was attracting headlines that made the worst Talbot Rothwell script appear Proustian by comparison. The lady herself once wryly reflected of her publicity, ‘even clergymen ask me to open their garden parties and bazaars. They don’t do that because I sing in the choir or because they think I’m Dame Edith Evans’ (Sykes, Lancashire Evening Post, 28 October 1957: 4).

But Sabrina was never an equal part of the act, Askey writing in his memoirs that ‘she eventually became bigger than me (in every sense) in the show ... The tail had begun to wag the dog, so she had to go’ (1975: 165).