During his heyday in the 1950s and ’60s Ken Sykora was one of the best-known names in music. The Humphrey Lyttleton of jazz guitar, Ken was both a leading musician and a prolific broadcaster.

Sadly, by the time of his death at the age of 82 on March 7, 2006, the former Holbrook resident was a forgotten man. Happily, thanks to some tenacious film-makers, Ken’s story can at last be told, and, thanks to an extensive archive, his music re-discovered.

Film-makers Linda Chirrey and Marc Mason have spent four years piecing together Ken’s life by talking to his family and friends, as well as exploring his extensive archive of recordings, notes and photographs.

The result is The Man With The Jazz Guitar – a documentary about a talented but modest musician which makes up for a lack of performance footage with some engagingly quirky retro animation.

The venture has been a labour of love for producer and animator Linda. “Marc and I discovered Ken through his music. Marc was looking for some music to use in his short film The Bedfordshire Clanger and was listening to jazz music on Radio Three when they played Ken’s Little Black Dog.

“This was back in 2006 and they said they were playing it in tribute to Ken, who had just died at that point. He immediately latched onto it at that time because it was just what he was looking for in terms of the soundtrack of his short. It wasn’t until later that we really found out about the man.”

Having made contact with the family, they invited Ken’s son and daughter, Dougal and Alison, to the premi�re of The Bedfordshire Clanger and were amazed by the fact Ken could have done so much and yet be virtually unknown.

For many years Ken commuted from his Suffolk home in Holbrook to London for gigs and to record his radio shows for the BBC.

“Ken was a very modest man. He was never interested in shouting about himself and the fact that in the early ’70s he took himself away from London and moved to Scotland meant that the wider world forgot all about him.”

She and Marc accepted an invitation to visit Ken’s home in Scotland and discovered a jazz archive which rivalled John Peel’s pop equivalent. “It was huge. He had something like 7,000 records; he had recorded 3,000 programmes – he had kept recordings of some of his own shows: things like Guitar Club, which the BBC no longer had in its own archive – as well as photographs and all the notes and research materials for his shows. It was like coming across buried treasure.”

They knew immediately that they wanted to do something to bring this material to life and to tell Ken’s story, but the problem was that footage of Ken himself was non-existent.

“We were fortunate to have audio recordings, discovered in Ken’s archive, of him talking about his life. We also found that he had recorded his appearance on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley, which again gave us a lot of material to work with.

“The discovery of that recording was a real bonus because the BBC no longer had it in their own archive, so we and the family are in the process of returning it to them.”

The initial plan was to make a 30-minute documentary for either BBC 2 or BBC 4, but the more they explored Ken’s life, the more people they interviewed, the more convinced they became that Ken’s story would be best told on the big screen.

The real turning point came when Linda struck upon the idea of illustrating Ken’s own narration with some stylised animation.

Her animation not only turns Ken into a cartoon character but does the same with the interviewees and places them all in a retro landscape. Combining the stylised images with Ken’s voice and music, it gives the audience a feel for the man and the times in which he worked.

A huge fan of pioneering jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, Ken was a major fixture on the London jazz scene immediately after the war.

During those immediate post-war years he led a double life – teacher by day, pipe-smoking jazz musician by night – but it wasn’t long before he took the plunge and became a full-time jazz guitarist.

Music remained an all-consuming passion for Sykora. He led his own band in the 1950s, performing with Ted Heath at the London Palladium and with Geraldo at the old Stoll Theatre, and was voted Britain’s Top Guitarist five years running in Melody Maker’s readers’ polls.

His wedding to Helen Grant, a popular singer at Murray’s Cabaret Club, even made the front page of Melody Maker.

The year of his marriage, 1957, turned out to be a momentous one. If marriage wasn’t a big enough step, he also managed to land a regular 30-minute show on the BBC – Guitar Club – which gave him the confidence to quit his day job as an economics teacher and become a full-time broadcaster and musician. In Guitar Club, Ken wanted to feature all types of guitar playing, “from Spanish to Skiffle, Classical and Swing”. As well as compering, Ken also performed every week, as did the resident Guitar Club Band.

The show proved extremely popular and was moved to a prime Saturday evening slot. It ran for three years until 1960 and welcomed many famous guitarists, including Ivor Mairants, Bert Weedon and John Williams. Three complete Guitar Clubs were found in the Ken Sykora archive.

Other programmes with the Sykora stamp included Those Record Years, Album Time, LP Parade, Big Band Sound and Radio Three’s Jazz Digest. He also wrote and presented Radio One’s Plain Musician’s Guide to the History of Pop. One of his favourite programmes, which he also devised and presented for BBC Radio 2, was the autobiographical series Be My Guest, on which he talked to celebrity guests – examples included Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Isaac Stern, Johnny Dankworth, Count Basie and Gloria Swanson – about their lives.

He and Helen also took the opportunity to move out of London and bought a large house in Holbrook, to where he could escape between trips to the capital.

The film paints a contented picture of life in Suffolk, with interviews with Ken’s friends – former Ipswich dentist Ronnie Caiels, folk musician David Penrose and his lodger, singer Julie Gleave. They conjure up an image of a man very much at peace with himself, who loved to play guitar, and who after a hard day broadcasting in London or researching a broadcast at home would disappear to The Compasses pub and just play as part of an ensemble.

Linda said their large home was like an open house, relaxed and friendly. Woodbridge singer Julie Gleave, who lived in the coach house attached to the property, remembers many happy hours in the Sykora kitchen, listening to Ken’s music and sometimes singing and playing alongside him.

Linda said: “By all accounts they were very happy living in Suffolk. Certainly the way of life seemed to suit both Ken and Helen. It was a lovely place to bring up their family, it was close enough to London for Ken to commute for his radio work, and yet it was far enough away for him to escape the rat race at the end of the day.”

For nearly 20 years the situation seemed perfect; but then, almost on a whim, or so it seemed at the time, Ken quit the BBC, severed his London broadcasting links, sold his Suffolk home, bought a hotel and moved the family to Scotland.

However, his retirement from radio was short-lived. He was soon back on air with BBC Radio Scotland and then Radio Clyde. At one time Ken was to be heard broadcasting on both Radio Clyde and BBC Radio Scotland – at the same time, in the same week.

Linda said the reason for Ken’s sudden departure from Suffolk has always been surrounded by mystery. Certainly as the 1970s dawned his style of music had fallen increasingly out of favour as the pop music of the Swinging Sixties had given way to the Glam Rock era of the 1970s. “Ken certainly never explained or left any clue why he would want to escape from what had been up until then a very successful and comfortable life.” At the time of his departure he was hosting both You and Yours and Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 – two high-profile shows. It seems he had just had enough and had harboured a long-standing ambition to run a hotel, so he bought the Colintraive Hotel on the Kyles of Bute and followed his heart.

One of the challenges of making the film was that there was virtually no reference material on Ken. “Basically we had the archive and that was it. There was very little of Ken on the internet. Fortunately, Ken supplied everything we needed, but it was all in boxes. After his children sold the house we took the archive away and just spent years going through all the papers, newspaper and magazine cuttings, listening to the recordings, talking to people and just getting a feel for the man.

“As a result, I like to think that the film has a wonderful scrapbook feel. There are elements from his life, memories from his family and friends, photographs, snatches of music, his old radio shows, photographs and even the voice of Ken himself all tied together by the animation. Hopefully it makes for an entertaining and informative experience in the cinema. The way that modern media works means audiences are very used to different story-telling styles.

“We made the decision very early on that we didn’t want to use stock footage of jazz clubs from the era. We didn’t have film of Ken but we thought it would be wrong to use stock footage. We knew we wanted to use the posters, the newspaper cuttings and the photographs from the archive, but we then hit upon the idea of using animation to bring the character of Ken to life.

“For me, I loved that I could reconnect with animation. I used to dabble with traditional 2-D animation but I found it rather dull and time-consuming. I never took it up seriously, as I found it too repetitive – back in those days you actually had to draw every second frame of the 24 frames per second!

“It was Marc who encouraged me to try again with this project and we found Toon Boom, a brilliant software that uses traditional 2D theory and is geared for small-scale projects like this.

“The cartoons were produced as we went along: as Marc required them for his story-telling. To be honest, if I’d known at the start how many we’d end up with, I’d probably never have agreed to do it. He said 10–12 drawings, with minimal movement; we ended up creating more than 100! Style-wise, he wanted something evoking ’50s animation, but modern looking.”

She said that in addition to bringing Ken to life, they wanted a strong element of humour in the storytelling which reflected Ken’s own sense of the absurd, as well as his love of his guitars.

“It’s been a huge journey which has taken the best part of four years. We’ve got the film made; now we have to put it in front of an audience.”

The Man With The Jazz Guitar is playing at the Ipswich Film Theatre on May 30 and 31.