We don’t know exactly what that hyphen was all about (real name: Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens), though the man himself joked it was the gap between those famous teeth made text. We were going to try and spot where his ‘cad’ persona descended into self-parody, but now we come to look at it we’re not sure it did. Even in the likes of The Naked Truth, the T-T persona was already fitting like a snug trilby. He’s also the best thing in a fair few duds – together at last with Jerry Lewis and Jacqueline ‘Servalan’ Pearce in landmark-flogging comedy Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, and in full song with Arthur Lowe as a duo of periwigged academics in The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones.
FINEST HOUR: Going out on a limb here maybe, but who else could have played dastardly big game hunter Sten Martin in undercranked take-off of Edwardian silent serials The Perils of Pauline?
