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Actor best known as the haughty department store supervisor Captain Peacock in the TV comedy Are You Being Served?

The actor Frank Thornton, who has died aged 92, had a flair for comedy derived from the subtle craftsmanship of classical stage work. However, he will be best remembered for his longstanding characters in two popular BBC television comedy series – the sniffily priggish Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and the pompous retired policeman Herbert "Truly" Truelove, in Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine.

Robertson Hare, the great Whitehall farceur, told him: "You'll never do any good until you're 40." And, said Thornton, "he was quite right." In the event, he was 51 when David Croft, producer of another long-running British staple, Dad's Army, remembered the tall, long-faced actor from another engagement and decided to cast him as the dapper floor-walker in charge of shop assistants played by Mollie Sugden, Wendy Richard,...

Due to its endless delays, you’d be forgiven going into The Wolfman expecting to see a mutt of a movie. And you’ll be more than pleasantly surprised that it’s nothing of the sort. Joe Johnston has fashioned as classical horror movie as you could get – without it being a true classic. There are obvious imperfections, mostly to do with pace and set up at the beginning. But once it finds and unleashes its inner beast: stand back!

The opening is basically a montage that rifles through to Lawrence Talbot’s (Benicio Del Toro) arrival at Blackmoor after his brother has been killed by a werewolf. And why has he got an American accent you will ask when he opens his mouth, uttering, actually mumbling, the first piece of dialogue. Well…

Lawrence Talbot was born a Yorkshireman but grew up an American due to him witnessing his mother...