WITH GUY DAVIS

WHEN it’s not spreading disinformation or setting us at each other’s throats, the internet can sometimes offer up a fun fact or two.

Here’s one that’s been doing the social media rounds lately: Tom Cruise, aged 56 when making the new film Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is five years older than actor Wilford Brimley was when Brimley appeared in the muchloved 1985 sci-fi hit Cocoon.

Now this is an observation that’s playing with something of a stacked deck, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

Firstly, Brimley is one of those crusty character actors who came out of the womb looking middleaged and moustachioed, enabling him a long and healthy career playing both curmudgeons and curmudgeons with a heart of gold, so comparisons between him and Cruise are perhaps unfair.

Secondly, and more importantly, Tom Cruise is clearly not a human being.

I mean, at this stage it’s blindingly obvious he’s a product of the top-secret science labs busily operating somewhere in Hollywood.

That, or an alien who decided the quickest path to fame, fortune and world domination was movie stardom.

This is, of course, not true. Cruise is not an extraterrestrial, his ongoing involvement with the religious order Scientology and its litany of sci-fi folklore notwithstanding.

And if he has been enhanced by the entertainment industry’s armies of behind-the-scenes technicians — people who tweak