Massler is MC at a sleazy Phoenix strip club when recruited by a group of army buddies, including Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, to rob five Las Vegas casinos one New Year’s Eve.Lester’s films for his friend Jerry Lewis include The Nutty Professor (1963, as a bartender), The Patsy (1964, as a night-club MC), Three on a Couch (1966, as a drunk), The Big Mouth (1967, as a gangster), and Hardly Working (1980, along with his brother Jerry). He was also in The Party (1968), starring Peter Sellers.Lester was part of the regular cast of the television sitcom The New Phil Silvers Show (1963). “After a few weeks it was clear that I owned 100 per cent of a sinking ship,” wrote Phil Silvers in his memoirs, lamenting the ratings of his revived TV series made by his own production company. Instead of Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko, scourge of Fort Baxter, Silvers played foreman Harry Grafton, scourge of a small factory.

Grafton’s band of co-workers was headed by Herbie Faye (Private Fender in the Bilko show) and Lester. Sadly, The New Phil Silvers Show lasted a single season.Lester was also seen in the less anticlimactic The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971-74), as well as in episodes of Petticoat Junction, Love, American Style, The Odd Couple and the police shows Barney Miller, Dragnet, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch and Adam-12.In the TV movie Poor Devil (1973) Lester played “Scarface” Al Capone. He was ideal for the role because of an intriguing scar near his mouth. Over the years he enjoyed inventing colourful explanations for it, such as “I got it trying to break a contract with a club run by the Mob” and “I was blown off a landing barge in the South Pacific”.

During a newspaper interview in 1961, Lester was surprised to hear himself actually telling the truth: “I fell off a chair on to a broken water glass when I was three.”Dick Vosburgh. IT DOES less than justice to an outstanding rugby league career that Mick Shoebottom will be remembered primarily for the shocking suddenness with which it ended. It was in a Championship semi-final for Leeds against Salford at Headingley in 1971 that Shoebottom, still only 26, dived to score a try and was caught on the head by a boot from the late Colin Dixon. He was carried unconscious from the field and never played again, but, although he was paralysed for a time, made a laborious recovery that enabled him to live something close to a normal life. Michael Shoebottom, rugby league player: born Leeds, Yorkshire 24 December 1944; married (two children); died Leeds 12 October 2002.