“In its essence, Wormwood is a story about a very, very smart young boy, now a man in his 70s, who has been involved in an epistemological journey into the nature of his father’s death. And I like to think that the movie, in its attempt to examine these questions, matches his own sophistication about these questions. How do we know what we know? How do we know that my father was murdered? What does that murder mean? He asks this question again and again and again, particularly near the end of the film. It’s one of my favorite sections of Wormwood, when he asks, ‘What does it mean?’

“It’s the same question that I’m always asking: What does it mean? And this irony, which I learned from Eric, is not something I imposed on the material-the irony of, How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to know something? Knowledge comes with a cost. And to what extent is knowing something worth the price that we have to pay to know it? The other option is to live in a fantasy, but if you ask me if there’s anything that makes us great, it’s the pursuit of truth. It’s the fact that we attempt to reach outside of ourselves and to know something about the world around us, and ourselves.

If you wanted to be unstoppably hectored by someone in tie and blazer about how the Edward Heath government had committed treason by taking us into the Common Market in 1972 and then find out the the name of the acrobat who performed a quadruple back-somersault on to a chair at the New York Hippodrome in 1915, and the artiste who caught him, Norris McWhirter was your man.

And you can add to that the fact that Norris, along with his twin brother Ross, created the Guinness Book of Records, which had sold more than 75m copies in 37 languages by the time his involvement ended in 1996.

We will never see his like again, not because the world doesn’t teem with libertarian ideologues, nor with grown men who know too much about the minutiae of stuff; but because combining these two disciplines successfully in public seems beyond our wit in 2017.

Higgins was set up to be Magnum’s stooge-the short, supercilious prig who Magnum repeatedly outsmarted, and in whose reflection our hero could shine still brighter. But as played by John Hillerman with a genuine sense of dignity and steely righteousness, Higgins was no joke; you loved him because he truly believed in a classical world of order and rules-following, and he wasn’t about to cede all of that tradition to a handsome young firecracker in a Hawaiian shirt. And every so often, Higgins would a deliver a barb that succeeded in cutting Magnum down to size. The smirk from Hillerman that would invariably follow was a thing of beauty and triumph-and a gentle exhortation to those of us suffering through grade school that the golden boys weren’t always going to be the ones who glowed.

Until he died last Thursday at the age of 84 in Houston, I confess that I had no idea that Hillerman-who was born in Denison, majored in journalism at UT Austin, and then retired back to Texas in 1999-wasn’t actually British. That’s one definition of a great performance, when an actor so wholly inhabits a part that viewers assume he must just be playing a variation of himself. (In real life, Hillerman reportedly spoke with a faint Texas drawl-akin to his character Howard Johnson in Blazing Saddles.)

LD: Here’s what I’ll have: split-pea soup and white-bean hummus. Is that okay?

PUBLICIST: Whatever you want.

LD: And I don’t need the cheesy croutons. And if there’s cream in the soup, don’t get it.

PUBLICIST: I’ll check.

LD: Yeah. No cream or butter in the soup or the hummus.

SR: Is that a lactose thing or a general-health thing?

LD: General health.

SR: So you tolerate lactose.

LD: I tolerate lactose like I tolerate people.

JESSICA: Oh, it was quite simple, really. The moss. When I saw you at the funeral earlier, the camera focused weirdly on a piece of moss on your shoe. I happened to remember that this moss only grows in one place in the world, the crime scene, and it only sticks to murderers.

But I had to wait for someone to mention the word ‘moss’ in a different context before I made this trivial extra step as if it was a moment of serendipitous inspiration, which for some reason is how we want crimes to be solved.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE: I regret stepping in the murder moss.