Yesterday’s opening night of the Southend-on-Sea Film Festival was due to offer a triple comic treat — three shorts from Peter Sellers thought to have had been lost for 50 years.

Sellers, who died in 1980, was famed as bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series but it is for such films as Dr Strangelove that he is best remembered.

One of the rediscovered films carries the punning title (on Arthur Miller’s play) Dearth of a Salesman.