Dearly departed part three

There are some prominent people that have passed on who are in my cultural orbit but in relation to Neptune from the sun.  Stephen Lewis was most famous for the generally execrable On The Buses, portraying 'fascistic' middle-management in the form of Blakey.  I remember from my schooldays that there was an experiment in having televisions onboard buses and some bright spark thought it would be appropriate to have re-runs of On The Buses to increase the existing discomfiture of the passengers.  The televisions outlasted Blakey and co but they too, like Lewis's era of humour, joined the discards of history.  Maybe not surprisingly, Lewis became a recurring face on Last of the Summer Wine until ill-health forced him to step down.
George Cole of Minder notoriety in frankly in the Kuiper Belt for me.  I know of Minder, I know Dennis Waterman was also in it and I know people who hold the series in great affection, but that's as far as it goes.  Sorry George.
Of more consequence was the death of Patrick Macnee.  The Avengers is one of the all-time classic British serials, though only after his character Steed came to the fore in series two and a series of glamorous assistants from Honor Blackman to Diana Rigg did more than help out.  Although I haven't seen The Avengers, its cultural impact has been immense.  I did catch repeats of The New Avengers from the 1970s with Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt - that only last two series is held by many to be inferior to the original.  As an act of charity (for certainly it was no tribute to Macnee) he made a guest appearance in The Avengers movie with Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery - a film held to one of the worst ever released in cinemas.  As a star of the British acting establishment, Macnee found his way into appearing in a Bond movie, like Blackman (Goldfinger), Rigg and Lumley (both On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and, of course, the Edinburgh milkman and mortician Connery.  This was in the largely lamentable A View to a Kill (though as a James Bond film it still has a special place in my heart), Roger Moore's swansong where Moore realised he had become too old for the role of 007.  Christopher Walken waltzes away with the reel as the supervillain Max Zorin and there are some good action sequences (partially spoilt through plot flaws or gauche musical interludes) but unfortunately Macnee doesn't appear in them, much as he slots urbanely into his character.  Him and Moore fighting two heavies in an underground packing facility is simply ridiculous and ultimately is another murdered Bond ally whose misbegotten fortune provides 007 with the righteous kill of the main nemesis.
Christopher Lee was another British actor accepting service for Queen and Country, except as the villain Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (a film I feel to be unfairly underrated, though I can see why people might draw that conclusion).  His extensive work with Hammer I can't claim to have seen bar Frankenstein and The House That Dripped Blood.so his turn as Scaramanga stayed long in my memory.  Lee had a late renaissance, appearing as Count Dooku in Star Wars: Episode II and Star Wars: Episode III (noted film critic Alexander Walker said that when Lee entered the scene in Episode II the IQ of the flick was raised) and also in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  After the director of the latter, Peter Jackson, had put a foreword in Lee's last memoir, the two of them fell out after Jackson cut Lee's contribution from The Return of the King, salt rubbed in the wound as this was the Rings film that won all the glory at the Oscars.  They reconciled for Lee to appear again as the wizard Saruman (before his corruption) in The Hobbit trilogy.  Lee's last major role therefore was in The Battle of the Five Armies, a film where the most interesting character (Smaug the dragon) was killed off before the title card.  The Battle of the Five Armies isn't a terrible movie but it is a bit repetitive with multiple onslaughts of CGI hordes, the best bit the episodes of humour that is synonymous with Guillermo del Toro, a consultant on the film.  So it could been a better place to bow out, but Lee did provide the continuity in this film prequel and that is to his credit.