Well, thankfully Celebrity Big Brother is over for another year at Elstree Studios and I must admit to not having watched any of it as the term 'celebrity' is lost on me.

The only reason I mention the show at all is that it brings regular business to Elstree, and that is good news, but I remain staggered by how much money they throw at 'celebrities' to take part.

Mind you, I was surprised to read the other day that the BBC shoots a show called Pointless at Elstree Studios and have celebrity editions in which famous names play for their nominated charity, usually getting £500. What I did not realise these people can be paid up to £10,000 each to appear for a couple of hours of their time. The money that floats around the business today just astounds me, but I guess it makes sense to someone.

I seem to prefer the past, when stars and character actors earned their stripes rather than the instant celebrity fame of today. I guess the real test, that of time, will provide the answer. Who will remember the participants in Big Brother in, say, 10 or 20 years time, yet today I share my memories of two stars who were in their heyday 70 years ago but I bet many of you will remember them.

In the 1970s I used to seek out stars of Hollywood's golden era and would correspond with or try to meet them if they came to London. Today I recall two glamour stars of the 1940s and 1950s who I had the pleasure to meet.

My memory is beginning to fail a bit but I think it was the early 1970s and they were both over from Hollywood, ironically to appear in cheap British films but therein lay the story. One made it to the screen and the other did not.

Rita Hayworth in her heyday had been described as a 'screen love goddess' and starred in many movies including one shot at MGM in Borehamwood in the 1950s.

Rita enjoyed the good life on and off screen but by the 1970s was considered past her sell by date by Hollywood. She was known to enjoy a drink and her sometimes odd behaviour was put down to being, as we say in showbiz, 'tired and emotional' . I found her to be delightful and after our meeting she sent me a letter saying thank you for the compliments. Sadly she was replaced on the film and it was then discovered Rita was suffering from a form of dementia that eventually reduced her to a childlike state in which she was looked after by her daughter. I went to pay my respects many years later at her Hollywood grave. She is surrounded by the likes of Bing Crosby, Sharon Tate, Charles Boyer and Bela Lugosi.

Lana Turner was nicknamed the sweater girl in her heyday and made a string of successful movies in the 1940s and 1950s. I hope Lana will forgive me when I say she often enjoyed off screen friendships with her male co-stars. In the 1950s she came to MGM Borehamwood to make a film with a young Sean Connery. Alas, her then gangster boyfriend feared they might strike up a friendship so he turned up at the studio. With pressure from MGM he was deported as an undesirable alien and not long after that, Lana's daughter apparently stabbed him to death at the family home provoking a sensational trial.

Lana managed to survive the incident but her career had already come to a halt. Nonetheless when I met her she still had that Hollywood charisma. Alas, she contracted cancer, not helped by lifelong smoking in an era when that was cool, and ended her days being fed through a tube into her stomach. Everybody smokes in those old black and white films and other than Dot Cotton, today you never seem to see anybody smoke on screen.