As with my experience of so many modern cultural touchstones, I first came to 24 via a Simpsons parody. Being only seven years old in 2001, when the 24-episode “real time” thriller first aired, my knowledge of Kiefer Sutherland’s exhausting counter-terror mission to stop the assassination of a presidential hopeful came from a 2007 Simpsons episode starring Lisa and Bart in a split-screen chase to hold off the detonation of a powerful stink bomb at Springfield Elementary.

•Peter Bradshaw on Robert Forster: a coolly charismatic character actor with an intensely sympathetic air

Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died on Friday. He was 78.

Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.

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Peggy Lipton, a star of the groundbreaking late 1960s TV show The Mod Squad and the 1990s show Twin Peaks, has died of cancer aged 72.

Lipton died surrounded by her family, her daughters, Rashida and Kidada Jones, said in a statement.