I used to love Diane Keen. I can't be too sure when it started but I know I watched You Must Be The Husband, in which she starred alongside Tim Brooke-Taylor, with religious intensity. When she was scheduled as a guest on Pebble Mill at One, I would make my mum promise to tape it (on our state-of-the-art Betamax video). She was, to my mind, the Sarah Lancashire of her day.

Even when she popped up in the Ruth Rendell Mysteries in the early 1990s I watched her with fondness. And when she played Molly Marchbank in Brookside three years ago, it was like finding an old photograph of a girl you loved at nursery school. I also think this is when my loathing of Ron Dixon took root.

It was, you can imagine, nice to see her on Star Lives (ITV). Unfortunately, she wasn't the subject of the show, a This Is Your Life for thickos. That accolade fell upon the shiny pate of Russ Abbot or, as the voiceover man enthused, "the curly-haired cutie who's always been a barrel of laughs". He really meant it, too.

Spreading more cheese than you'd find in a Pizza Hut kitchen, he continued to whip the audience into a frenzy, excitedly introducing "the Chester jester". Abbot looked like a bank manager about to foreclose on a loan. And so, we got the Russ Abbot story painted in big broad strokes right up until he stopped being famous some 11 years ago. "We work in decades," Russ said, solemnly. "We had the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. The 80s were very good to me." How profound.

There were contributions from Russ's "lovely wife, Trisha" - Carol "I'll do owt" Vorderman used that very phrase - various has-beens he used to hang about with and his friend and neighbour Bruce Forsyth. (You don't want to imagine what the residents' meetings-cum-swingers' parties are like down their way.)

And there, right at the back, was Bella Emberg. I always felt sorry for Bella, given that she used to get the mickey ripped out of her for being fat and nae bonny. Today, she still has a hunted look in her eyes. That's showbiz, I guess: a cruel business, even if you've got the bone structure of Diane Keen.