Career: Briers' film career began in the 1960s with British features including Bottoms Up, Murder She Said, and The Girl on the Boat. He turned his attention to TV, gaining fame initially in the sitcom Marriage Lines, but it's probably for The Good Life that he will be best remembered. He teamed up again with its creators, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, on the 1980s sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles. Briers went on to join Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company, taking on more classical and Shakespearean roles including King Lear and Uncle Vanya. He's also appeared in Monarch of the Glen, Peter Pan, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Torchwood. He voiced the cartoon Roobarb twice - in 1974 and 2005.

Career: After the war, Milligan returned to jazz and made ends meet performing in the Bill Hall Trio and other musical comedy acts. His big break came in the 1950s as a writer-performer on The Goon Show, a hugely popular BBC radio show that ran for nearly 10 years and also made stars of Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe. Milligan went on to make a number of TV shows as a writer-performer, including The Telegoons, The World of Beachcomber, Curry & Chips, The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, and the Q comedy sketch show (Q5, Q6, Q7, Q8, Q9 and There's a Lot of It About). Away from radio and TV, he wrote poetry, novels and a series of war memoirs, including Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. He died from kidney failure on February 27, 2002 at the age of 83.