John Le Mesurier was not measuring up for his wives

Joan Le Mesurier had been married for only six months to her actor husband, John, when she fell for his friend, Tony Hancock. The Telegraph reminds us that Hancock and Joan told John straight away and he, more or less, gave them his blessing. The affair lasted for two years, off and on, with Joan returning to John every time it was off. Then, when Hancock killed himself, aged 44, in 1968, Joan went back to John permanently and stayed married to him until his death, aged 71, in 1983. The BBC made a TV-show about her tempestuous affair with the comedian. And it's not the first time. Joan was his third wife, but his second wife, Hattie, had left him for a younger man. This part of his life was also dramatized. Hattie - played in an exceptional performance by Ruth Jones - took in her used-car salesman lover as a lodger, and maintained a secret affair by the cunning means of slipping upstairs during the middle of the night. The scene in which she was finally discovered by Le Mesurier (a perfectly cast Robert Bathurst) in bed with her lover was a vision of tragicomic poignancy. He apologised for intruding and explained with consummate resignation that he was looking for his book - a James Bond novel. Seldom has the distance between reality and fantasy been so economically or movingly captured. John earns an 8 on the cuckold scale for this double cuckolding.