Graham Stark, Pink Panther actor, dies aged 91

British comic actor Graham Stark, best known for his recurring roles opposite Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films, has died aged 91.

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter Sellers were on hand to make us feel better about the end of the world as we knew it, and about the psychopathic childishness of our military betters. There had been nothing in comedy like Dr Strangelove ever before. All the gods before whom the America of the stolid, paranoid 50s had genuflected - the Bomb, the Pentagon, the National Security State, the president himself, Texan masculinity and the alleged Commie menace of water-fluoridation - went into the wood-chipper and never got the same respect ever again.

Southern, in particular, was wise to the nonsensical macho posturing of the US military-industrial complex, and had no time whatsoever for the uniformed ignoramuses pontificating about mutually assured destruction, fail-safe trajectories and world targets in megadeaths (as one top-secret file is named). Thus he makes General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) a barmy, paranoid repository for every last idiocy the military was spitting out at each new press conference on Vietnam or nuclear-attack policies.

And if you think General Ripper is an over-the-top slur on the good name of America's military might, then you've never come across the real-life head of strategic air command, US Air Force General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay - as floridly insane as any character in Strangelove.

No wonder the audiences' initial reaction was one of horror that these verities should be questioned, or such figures ridiculed. Once they got over that, they never stopped laughing, and one small, important cornerstone of the nation's respect for the military was smartly tugged out, leaving the destruction of the edifice itself to the war planners. They would tear it down without the aid of satire before the decade was out. A comic masterpiece that's also deeply serious and perceptive about the mad military mindset of those times, Dr Strangelove's genius endures even as we bury the weapons we once feared so much.

In this week's episode of The Reunion - the first in a new series - monstrous egos were nowhere to be found and tone was, for much of the time, joyful. Presenter Sue MacGregor, best known for calmly making mincemeat of politicians on The Today Programme for nearly 20 years, reunited the brains behind the BBC comedy Goodness Gracious Me, which first aired on Radio 4 in 1996 and later transferred to television. There were no histrionics here, just pride in a series that helped break the largely white, xenophobic mould of mainstream comedy.

Goodness Gracious Me - named in "tribute" to the Peter Sellers-Sophia Lore song inspired by their 1960 film The Millionairess - was the first series in the history of the BBC that was conceived, written and performed entirely by British-Asians. In examining the tensions between traditional Asian ways and modern British life, it yielded a host of celebrated sketches including "Going for an English", in which the cast get tanked up on lassis and order 12 bread rolls and a pint of ketchup, and "The Six Million Rupee Man", a daft re-working of The Six Million Dollar Man.

Here the show's major players, including Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal and producer Anil Gupta, discussed their early days as the toast of British comedy like people who couldn't believe their luck. "There was a general feeling amongst British Asians that they were finding their identity, and we were part of that," noted Bhaskar, who had, until the show's early success, been working in marketing.

But there was a discernible sadness too, in the fact that the door they had opened for the next generation of Asian performers seemed to slam shut after them. After three series, Good Gracious Me was cancelled and, soon after, the BBC and its rivals seem to forget the non-white audience. "We used to play the spot the-Asian-on-the-telly game when I was a kid and I find that I'm doing that again," sighed Syal.

If the irony of making this point on Radio 4 - the station that first championed them and yet remains dominated by white, middle-class presenters - had occurred to Syal, she was too polite to mention it.

Ricky Gervais is declining to play safe with his latest bittersweet comedy, if comedy is the right term. Comedy drama? I don't know. Perhaps there is a new genre here. Either way Derek (Wednesday, Channel 4) is about a man with learning difficulties who works in an old people's home. And you don't laugh at Derek, you laugh with him.

He may have a slack jaw and bad haircut but he is sympathetic and kind. In some ways he reminds me of the Peter Sellers character in Being There: the idiot savant who stumbles on profound truths, or at least says things which make you wonder a little (such as "Why aren't pigs called hamsters?").

As with The Office and Extras there are poignant moments. And there is pathos, too. The documentary style used in those earlier shows is also deployed here, with characters giving little one-to-one interviews away from the others. Hannah (Kerry Godliman) as the care worker running the home provides a necessary naturalistic balance to the grotesques around her.

Karl Pilkington plays a stroppy version of himself as the caretaker Dougie (in real life Pilkington has a deep suspicion of old people). And a new character has been introduced since the pilot last year: the sex-obsessed, trainwreck Kev (David Earl). Kev is Derek's friend, and as Hannah said: "If it weren't for Derek, Kev would have ended up dead in a skip."

When an accountant from the council came to inspect the home with a view to cutting its budget there were bound to be awkward moments - this was, after all, a comic device that echoed all the way back to the health inspector episode of Fawlty Towers - but I didn't see the Kev appearance coming. Bustled out of the way when the accountant arrived, he had taken his clothes off and gone for a "quick nap" in one of the beds while the elderly resident was still in the room.

In his stand up shows Gervais sometimes teases his audience about their nervousness at his politically incorrect jokes. It's OK, he implies, it is safe to laugh because I'm being postmodern and ironic. This territory is slightly less safe - laughing at the people laughing at Derek - but it is, nevertheless, still safe to laugh.

Lost comedy work among rare radio scripts published

A script for the fourth episode of the 1955 Hancock's Half Hour show catalogued along with those for and by the likes of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The scripts are being released by comic actor and rare bookseller Neil Pearson (Drop the Dead Donkey, Brian Gulliver's Travels).

As seen on The Late Great Eric Sykes, three days before he died in the summer, aged 86, Eric Sykes told his agent Norma Farnes that what he'd like more than anything would be the chance to pop into Orme Court one last time.

This was his office in London's Bayswater, and having been fortunate enough to share an hour in his company there, I knew what the place meant to him. In the 1960s it had been a fun factory, with top gagsmiths firing jokes at each other across the hallway. Comedy was a serious business for these guys with Sykes and Spike Milligan failing to agree where to position a "the" for maximum laughs and the latter settling the matter with a lobbed paperweight.

When I visited Orme Court, I noticed that Milligan, who had been dead three years, still had a pigeon-hole and what's more he had mail. I hope Sykes' ­pigeon-hole remains active although he's pretty much the last of his generation. Almost all his associates featured in The Late Great Eric Sykes, including Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers and regular co-stars Hattie Jacques and Derek Guyler, are gone. Guyler played Corky, the bumbling bobby, and typically Corky would say "Hello, hello, what's all this then?" and Eric would say "Don't come dashing in here like Starsky and Hutch!" He was being ironic, of course. No one did any dashing in Sykes' comedy.

Farnes took us on a tour of the office, which seems to have been left untouched. Sykes fired his gags from a big Sherman tank of a desk. There was the cupboard where he kept his cigars, latterly just for sniffing. And there was the photograph of his mother. She died giving birth to him, at least this was what he was told, and he bore much guilt for that. But she was his inspiration. In a clip from an old interview he said: "When I'm in trouble or a bit down I've only got to think of her." The photo's position in direct eyeline from the Sherman was deliberate. "Eric was absolutely certain that she guarded and guided him," said Farnes.

Sykes didn't have a catchphrase and his style wasn't loud or look-at-me. His heroes were Laurel and Hardy who no one mentions anymore, which seems to be the fate of practitioners of gentle comedy (notwithstanding that with Stan and Ollie or Eric around, there was a high probability of being hit on the head with a plank). Denis Norden, one of the few old chums not yet potted heid, described him as diffident, and not surprisingly it was the gentle comedians of today who queued up to sing his praises (no sign of Frankie Boyle). ­Eddie Izzard rhapsodised about him getting a big toe stuck in a bath-tap; Michael Palin said: "He just did the things you'd see your dad do, or someone in a ­garage." And right at the end Farnes recalled Eric's reaction to the dramatic revelation that his mother had actually hung on for a week after he was born: "So she did hold me!"

Peter Sellers on the making of Casino Royale

Take one deluded producer, two huge egos, four directors, five 007s and half-a-dozen writers. Sprinkle with cash, add jokes to taste, shake, stir - and voila! Casino Royale: a cocktail recipe for disaster - with a Goon thrown in.

William Troughton on Graham Linehan's The Ladykillers

Despite its popularity, actor William Troughton - who plays cockney spiv Harry Robinson (originally played by Peter Sellers) in the show - has never actually seen the original film.

'Spike Milligan was not an easy man to work for'

Norma Farnes, Spike Milligan's assistant and manager for 36 years, recalls an evening out with her boss and their friends Peter Sellers, Bill Kerr and Alan Clare in 1979.