Hello once again, my fellow travellers through time and I hope you are all still clinging onto the wreckage as best you can. My legs really prefer not to walk much any more and I really envy runners who pass me in the street as I hobble along, especially as another birthday has just come and gone. Nobody told me 40 would be like this and as Bette Davis once said: "Being young is easy, getting old is for the real strong."

I must start with an apology as last week I was encouraging you all to buy tickets for an event at Elstree Studio in September but between my writing my article and it being published, that new fangled thing called the internet overtook me, resulting in a sell out within a couple of days.

However, let us turn a negative into a positive. Anyone joining the waiting list I assume will go onto the Studio's mailing list for future events and we have more planned this year and next. If you are on a computer it is worth going to Facebook and joining the pages for Elstree Studios and Elstree Screen Heritage, but if not don't worry, I will still mention them in my column.

Well, I doubt any of us have missed all the publicity about how much BBC stars get paid if they earn over £150,000 a year. Personally, I thought it a rather pointless exercise as many BBC programmes are produced by outside companies and they were not included. In addition it does not include the spin-off income stars can earn from their exposure on the BBC. I don't actually think there will be a rush of poaching stars by ITV and Sky as the business is ruled by agents so I doubt that behind the scenes these figures were new.

My actual concern is whether some of these people are worth it or is it just lazy executives staying with who they know rather than being creative?

For instance, Gary Lineker gets paid up to £1,800,000 apparently, and he is a nice chap. However, would Match of the Day really face a mass turn off if he was replaced? The same applies to Claudia Winkleman, who earns up to £500,000, but would she be missed from Strictly Come Dancing? Some said it would go downhill after Brucie left but actually it has survived rather well.

The same applies to soap stars, as we used to call them. That term comes from the 1950s American television when their series were often sponsored by companies like Proctor and Gamble, famous soap manufacturers. I think they now like to be called continuing drama series but let us not argue over a title. I was amazed that Derek Thompson is apparently paid up to £400,000 to play a character called Charlie in Casualty. Surely the whole thing about soaps is the ever changing cast; nobody is indispensable.

I was most interested to read that the late actor Gorden Kaye, BBC star of 'Allo, 'Allo left £3.3 million in his will, although he had not worked for some time due to his fight with dementia. So I wonder if the BBC figures include such things as repeat fees to the stars they employ?

In the film and stage business, huge salaries are nothing new but if you are a hot star making the studios vast sums then that seems fair. I like to collect contracts signed by stars of yesteryear. I recently bought the original contract signed by Danny Kaye to appear at the London Palladium in 1948. It was so successful it made him a big star over here, although he was already a name in Hollywood. They paid him £4,375 a week in an era when the average man in the street was lucky to be earning £10 a week. However, his performances and ticket sales justified this. The lovely Ken Dodd once said to me: "I don't ask for a fee but a percentage of the box office and if I flop we both lose and if it sells well we are both happy."

I just find this era of so-called stars and celebrities are very lucky due to clever agents and television executives who should have more guts, but I am just a retired old man so what do I know?