Once famous TV sitcom actor dies.  Genuinely sad news for his family and friends, of course.

When a once-famous actor who dies was famous because he appeared on a BBC programme, the BBC can be relied upon to put on its very saddest face.

In a frantic scrabble to find a former co-star coherent early in the morning, Rula Lenska (who co-starred with Inman in that well-known, popular, long-running and successful sitcom Take A Letter, Mr Jones) is forced into the Five Live studio and then onto the Breakfast sofa, where Dermot Murnaghan begins proceedings with, “Rula Lenska, you were close friends, what are your feelings?”

If only she’d replied, “As a close friend and if that’s the best question you can ask, Dermot, my feelings are that the standards of BBC journalism are falling quicker than a whore’s knickers.”

Wendy Richard, meanwhile, was wheeled out to be interviewed on the BBC lunchtime news. “He did do straight drama, as well,” she said. Yes, love; straight as an arrow…

Meanwhile, I am now in the Jobcentreplus (sic, sic, sic) system and get to sign on every other Thursday at 3.10pm – and not a minute before.  £57.45 weekly.  It’s very exciting.  Today I particularly enjoyed the conversation with my “job seeking adviser” in which he could not grasp why, as a commercial contracts and intellectual property solicitor of almost ten years’ standing, there was precious little point in applying for the one vacancy for a solicitor on his computer – an opening for a land law specialist.