Death at one's elbow

So, hot on the tail of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, Colin Vearncombe and Dale Griffin goes Terry Wogan. That's quite a early-evening chat-show line up, right there.

I didn't listen to Terry Wogan on the radio until the very last years of his breakfast show, so most of my memories of him are television-based. I remember Kenny Everett bending Terry's wand mic on Blankety Blank (and no, that isn't prison talk). I remember George Best being too drunk for that early-evening chat show. I even remember Tel's moment of golfing glory, sinking what was then the longest televised putt in history. But most of all what I remember is from the very early days of Children In Need, when Joanna Lumley did a mini-striptease for Terry, all for a pledge from some punter or other. I would have been about thirteen at the time and, tame though this clip now seems, its effect on me at the time was profound, and lasts to this day as a crystal-clear memory.

Also, passing (literally) under the radar, Frank Finlay died on the same day as Terry. I mostly remember him as Porthos in Seventies films The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. Classic stuff. I was going to find a suitable clip on YouTube to show you, but when casting around for one I stumbled instead upon his TV portrayal of Casanova from 1971 (Dennis Potter's first television series, fact fans) and which seems, to my untrained eye, to be a little closer to the source material than David Tennant's more recent interpretation. See what you think.