Maxwell Smart is dead. Agent 86 has spoken into his shoephone one last time. Don Adams, 82, died yesterday. Was there a funnier show in the sixties, a better written (Mel Brooks) spoof of spies and their technology? Remember the cone of silence? Agent 99? No show today will ever have the impact of that one half hour of 60's comedy. 3 networks then. 500 channels today. Tomorrow unlimited. That era, represented by news anchormen telling us news once a day, is over. With it, the commonality of culture also gone. (And yet this Observer story indicates that perhaps Smart's influence and thinking is alive and well in Spy HQ's everywhere)