What a strange assortment of luvvies, lords and lags – well one at least – was assembled last week at the service of thanksgiving for the life of Lord ‘Dickie’ Attenborough.

Acquainted though we were (see picture), I was unable to be present.

Thus was I spared from being part of a gathering disgraced by the attendance of Jeffrey Archer, jailbird shame to the House of Lords.

His name took a bit of finding in the vast list of attendees spread over a page and a half of The Times, all now alphabetically assembled, titles disregarded.

In the Telegraph, though, where the order of precedence is still strictly observed, he was up with the nobs, immediately after the Attenborough family members.

The list of these titled folk was headed by the Marquess of Bute – always ‘Boot’ to me on account of the pronunciation of my Peterborian history master, who also spoke of the ‘Dook of Noocastle’ (the 3rd Earl of Bute was an 18th-century prime minister, successor to ‘the Dook’).

Lord Attenborough had a home on the Scottish island of Bute.

The paucity of old-style aristocrats at the service was glaringly apparent in the Telegraph’s presentation – nary a duke, just one earl and only a brace of viscounts.

Lots of Labour life peers, though, and plenty of knights, among them Gandhi star Ben Kingsley, who has raised eyebrows in the past for his insistence on having his ‘sir’ on billboards.

This reminds me of my surprise at a Telegraph report concerning a new television production of The Dresser.

This was to star, it said, “Sir Anthony Hopkins and Sir Ian McKellen”.

Both the writer, Ronald Harwood, and director, Richard Eyre, were mentioned without allusion to the titles they also carry.

Another surprise is that this will be the first time Hopkins and McKellen have appeared together on film.