But Jimmy Beck, who played the spiv Private Walker, died at 43 - the age I am now - in 1973. Teddy Sinclair, the verger, died early too, and Lowe himself was only 66.The opposite seems to apply to Star Trek. There must have been something in the water on the Enterprise, for Doohan lived to the grand age of 85, having sired his ninth child at 80, and most of the main cast members are still working energetically despite being well into their seventies. As for Lavender, Captain Mainwaring's "stupid boy" is now pushing 60.

Hell, he's older than Arthur Lowe was when he started playing Mainwaring.Much has been made of the so-called curse of Dad's Army, incidentally, for Lavender is one of only a handful of survivors. That's not least because most of the cast were getting on a bit even when the series began, in 1968. After all, our own lives are inexorably linked with the lives, and deaths, of those who formed part of our childhoods. It was a huge shock to me in the mid-1990s to find that Ian Lavender, who so memorably played Private Frank Pike, the juvenile weed in Dad's Army, was about to turn 50. It was the same year that my mother's generation was rocked by the realisation that Marilyn Monroe, had she lived, would have turned 70, and could have made a sequel to Bus Stop called "Bus Pass". For forty-somethings, the passing of James Doohan - for that was indeed the real name of Lieutenant Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott - offered pause for thought. But clearly the attention it generated owed a great deal to the age of those editing newspapers, or producing radio and television news. The death of the actor who played Scotty, chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise, received a remarkable amount of media attention yesterday considering that very few of us, outside a few pub quiz enthusiasts and those unhealthily devoted to Star Trek, even knew his name.

If anybody can be George Lucas then George Lucas might have to reinvent himself - and that's long overdue More from Thomas Sutcliffe. Sadly it doesn't take very long to discover that 99 per cent of the vanity projects and weekend publishing online are weak. There are some prodigies of derivative effort but a lot of what you see is lame, and almost immediately flamed by internet critics who are more savage than old-technology reviewers. Mediocrity has found a lot of new ways to express itself - but, since almost all of us are mediocre, this is likely to be a popular development.It raises another tantalising possibility. If anyone can do the flashy stuff - the multilayered studio mix and CGI sequences - then the profitable demarcation between professional and amateur will have to be marked by something software can't emulate; unprecedented thought and inimitable flair.