John Hutton has today been promoting the government’s new pensions package, a follow-up to Lord Turner’s report earlier this year, which will increase the state pension age from 65 to 68.

The retirment age was set at a time when life expectancies were much lower than they are now. The idea that once you hit 65 you’ve “done your bit”, “paid your stamp” and are entitled to thirty years of leisure at the state’s expense is a nonsense. The system simply wasn’t designed to cope with today’s longevity, and just as we expect young people to work if they can, it’s reasonable to expect 65-year-olds to stay at work for a few more years if they’re still spritely. The alternative is for a generation whch has spent decades keeping taxes relatively low to then force high taxes on their children in order to give themselves a comfortable retirement – although in practice, because of the long lead time for this change, the baby boomers will benefit from the current state pension age anyway.

So John Hutton is entitled to a quote:

“As unpopular as it may be to talk about working longer – the simple fact is that if we aren’t prepared to increase the state pension age, we will simply pass an ever greater and frankly unsustainable burden on to our children and grandchildren.”

Sometimes you can misjudge a headline. The BBC today demonstrated how by providing one headline that could have fitted elsewhere:

I’ve been suffering from a painful bad back for the last few days and have run out of ibuprofen, so all I’ve got for you today is a photo from the archives (three years ago last month, according to my quiz list) which I recently found metaphoricaly gathering dust on my hard drive and popped onto Flickr. In my defence, I no longer wear that shirt, although admittedly only because it no longer fits.

Last week, I asked you to identify Doctor Who actors in this clip:


There are at least four. Joe identified Brian Blessed, who was King Yrcanos in The Trial of a Time Lord, and Alan spotted a different king – Jason King – who I’d missed: Peter Wyngarde, who played Timanov in Planet of Fire.

The other two were Deep Roy, who played Mr Sin in The Talons of Weng-Chiang and was also in the same segment of Trial as Blessed (and was in several Blake’s 7 episodes), and John Hallam (right), who I’m sad to report died last Monday. As well as playing Light in Ghost Light (the last made story from “classic” Who), Hallam was also a mainland policeman in the original cut of The Wicker Man. He was in the BBC adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, EastEnders, Bergerac, Knights of God, The Black Adder, the Joan Hickson 4.50 from Paddington, and with Wyngarde in episodes of Department S and Jason King. He was, as demonstrated in the clip above, Brian Blessed’s hawkman sidekick in Flash Gordon.