Owned by Spike Milligan, birthplace of the Daleks — this London townhouse is on sale for £6.5m

Three days before he died in the summer of 2012, the comic writer Eric Sykes told his manager, Norma Farnes, that he had one last wish. More than anything, he wanted to visit 9 Orme Court one last time. For 50 years this Victorian townhouse near Hyde Park in London had been his happy place, and the place from where Sykes and his friends had made so many other people happy.

Sykes had taken the property in Bayswater in 1962 as a new home for Associated London Scripts, the company he had founded in Shepherds Bush with Spike Milligan, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. From this comic co-operative, this factory of fun, a stable of writers churned out puns and gags by the yard for radio, TV and theatres.

Comedy meant serious money for those who wrote it best. Having grown rich on their scripts for Tony Hancock, Galton and Simpson would travel in by Rolls-Royce from their homes in Surrey. At Orme Court, where they created Steptoe & Son, Galton would throw out punchlines while lying on the floor of their office, which Simpson would bash out on the same typewriter they had used since they started. In another office, Johnny Speight created Alf Garnett for the series Till Death Us Do Part, while below stairs Tony Marriott came up with the record-breaking stage farce No Sex Please, We’re British.

Tim Macpherson of Carter Jonas says, with some reconfiguration, this could become “the most beautiful house in a much-desired area”

COURTESY OF BEAUCHAMP/ CARTER JONAS

Orme Court was also the birthplace of the Daleks. In 1963, in what is now Room 9, Terry Nation, who had previously written jokes for Hancock and Frankie Howerd, wrote the second story arc of a new BBC science-fiction programme called Doctor Who. The stairsphobic psychopaths, seemingly made out of egg boxes and a sink plunger, soon became the series’ most popular villains.

The building’s biggest names, however, were the two men who co-wrote later series of The Goon Show and are commemorated on blue plaques by the first-floor bay window: Eric Sykes, whose huge desk in Room 5 was accessorised by a photograph of his mother who died when he was a baby, and Spike Milligan, who kept a piano in his office and liked to feed the birds from his balcony. There is a subtle difference in the wording of their plaques on the red-brick façade. While Sykes “worked here”, Milligan “lived here” — he had two rooms upstairs, though he would often fall asleep on his office sofa, clutching a script.

Holding the place together was the formidable Farnes, who arrived at Orme Court in 1966 in response to an advert for a personal assistant. She was greeted in the hall by the voice of Sykes, from behind a wall of cigar smoke, who advised her not to take her coat off since Milligan had got through five PAs in 18 months. She stayed for 36 years, becoming manager to both of them and what Sykes called a “psychologist, mother figure and umbrella” to Milligan.

From her office in the basement, she dealt patiently with his bizarre behaviour, such as his tendency to walk around naked or to send taxis to Harrods for toilet paper, as well as the string of lovers whom she called “the Bayswater harem” and the fits of depression in which he would lock himself in his room for days or, in one bad bout in 1972,when he handed Farnes a gun and demanded that she shoot him.

and Milligan’s offices have high ceilings, elegant cornicing and fine views

COURTESY OF BEAUCHAMP/ CARTER JONAS

In 1967 Milligan and Sykes bought Galton and Simpson, who wanted to work with Robert Stigwood’s production company, out of their share in Orme Court and in the 1970s Milligan sold his to Sykes, though his name-labelled pigeonhole remains in the hall. Since Sykes’s death it has remained a co-operative of offices for creatives and therapists. They will all depart at the end of March 2023, since Sykes’s family have decided to sell the townhouse’s freehold. While it could remain as individual offices, there is an opportunity to turn it back into a six-bedroom home of some 5,700 sq ft via permitted development rights without the need for a full planning application.

Eric Sykes

COURTESY OF BEAUCHAMP/ CARTER JONAS

Tim Macpherson of Carter Jonas says that with an additional spend of £500,000 to reconfigure the property and add a lift, this could become “the most beautiful house in a much-desired area”. Sykes and Milligan’s offices, for instance, which have high ceilings, elegant cornicing and fine views, would make good reception rooms; Farnes’s basement would make a cinema room with space for a self-contained studio flat or gym; and the cradle of the Daleks could become, with a little extermination of existing features, a huge bedroom suite. This could again be a place of much fun — but the owners must provide their own laughs.9 Orme Court is for sale at £6.5 million (freehold) with Beauchamp Estates, beauchamp.com, and Carter Jonas, carterjonas.co.uk