“The few of us who are left,” he said recently, “keep telling each other that we never had it so good.”He moved easily into television in the Fifties, and in 1967 received an Emmy nomination as best supporting actor for his role in the “CBS Playhouse” production Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. He started directing for television in 1960, and his work in this field included the pilot show and first six episodes of The Munsters (1964).Dobkin made his film d?t as an extra in Kiss of Death (1947), but had his first acting role as an Assistant District Attorney in Ida Lupino’s production Not Wanted (1949). Often cast as figures of authority, his other films included 12 O’Clock High (1949, as padre of a wartime bomber unit), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Five Fingers (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956).In Alexander Mackendrick’s stunning portrait of a powerful columnist and a venal press agent, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Dobkin portrayed a columnist with ethics whom, in a gripping scene, the press agent (Tony Curtis) attempts to bribe over his secret dalliance with a cigarette girl. While his wife studies racing form in a newspaper at her night-club table, Dobkin is given a “smear” item by Curtis to be planted in his column, but Dobkin instead refuses and confesses his “moment of weakness” to his wife. The scene is a masterclass in writing, direction and acting.In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1957), Dobkin is an intelligence official who discusses the plight of the hero, who has been mistaken for an agent who doesn’t exist and has now become a murder suspect. “It’s so horribly sad,” he says drily, “why is it I feel like laughing?”Dobkin wrote one film script, the children’s film The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1976).Tom Vallance. Buttling, we discover, perhaps a little tardily, is not exactly what we thought it was, particularly in royal circles.

Our idea, based mostly on a hazily remembered Mr Hudson from Upstairs Downstairs, featured a pleasant lifestyle with the chance to cultivate an air of discreet omniscience while occasionally staring in a bark-worse-than-bite way over the half-moons at a flighty skivvy. What does one wear when purchasing top-shelf material for one’s employer’s son? Should Big Ones Monthly be presented on a silver salver? How, precisely, does one usher a consultant surgeon into the boot? Matches or a lighter for unwanted gifts? And this discretion thing, how does that work? Still, we do know now that one stands to attention while watching EastEnders with one’s employer, and that, fortunately, it’s the valet’s job to hold the sample bottle for the Prince of Wales.. Don’t panic Do worry. House prices are still rising, as would be expected in a free market in which demand is rising faster than supply. So long as unemployment and interest rates stay low and earnings rise, prices will keep going up. The £146,000 question – that being the average price at which houses now change hands – is the extent to which the present boom is an unsustainable bubble

Don’t panic Do worry.

If it were obvious that prices were unsustainable, no one would pay them. Certainly, the rate of house-price rises seems to be accelerating, which might suggest a market driven by psychology rather than fundamentals. The Halifax survey puts the rate at 31 per cent a year, although the fuller Land Registry data published earlier this week put the rate at a more plausible but still overheated 18 per cent.However, it is possible that the market is simply adjusting to changes in the fundamentals. One factor recently has been the flight of capital from the stock market, as people buy houses to let as an investment. This has, incidentally, brought rents down sharply, which is part of the counter to excessive doom-mongering about the lack of “affordable” housing.Another factor is the delayed reaction to historically low interest rates, unchanged at 4 per cent for 12 months – a period of stability unseen since the 1950s This has transformed the issue of affordability. This is usually measured by expressing the size of a mortgage as a multiple of the borrower’s annual salary, with alarm expressed over multiples, which used to be limited to two-and-a-half or three, as high as eight. But because interest rates are so low, the payments on a typical new mortgage represent 15 per cent of earnings, some way below the long-run average of 22 per cent.Looked at in that light, houses are still cheap.

Buyers need to beware that house prices are a lagging indicator, the last to turn if the economy slows down. But there is no reason why they should not carry on rising for a time first.. It is a measure of the damage that Iain Duncan Smith has inflicted on himself that Kenneth Clarke would now be a better leader of the Conservative party. That is not a ringing endorsement of Mr Clarke: for all his personal qualities, his support for the euro would still render his leadership a hobbled pantomime horse. This week, that calculation has changed, and the Conservative party is now in limbo.In retrospect, the false dawn of the party’s annual conference in Brighton last month only underlined Mr Duncan Smith’s problems. What was promising about the conference was that it saw the launch of a number of policies which started to set out a plausible alternative to the statist, high-spending instincts of the Labour government. Mr Duncan Smith’s sense of the strategic opportunity that presented itself to the Tories was sound.