Professor John Carey, Howard Jacobson and Richard Ingrams have also done stints in the TV trenches.
But there are signs that television critics are now in the firing line. Last week the Evening Standard was obliged to pay out £75,000 in libel damages to Gordon Ramsay over claims by its television critic, Victor Lewis-Smith, that scenes in the Channel 4 series Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares were faked. For most adults, lounging in a darkened room with a bag of crisps and a remote control appears an enviable way to earn a crust. Being a professional couch potato has also, for several decades, been an occupation with high intellectual status. Clive James’s tenure at The Observer was followed by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes – a circle of witty, brilliant minds determined to apply high style to low culture. The product’s called Web and Walk, T-Mobile’s German and Robbie’s back in the Rolls to W11 by now.Peter sru.co.uk.

Second to owning a sweetshop, being a television reviewer is widely accepted as the easiest, best and jammiest job in the world. The quizzical acknowledgment, the momentary eye-contact, the moving on. There’s probably an American word for it, and it’s own dissertation (“fiction and reality in the post-war celebrity cameo”). The poor girl’s looking distinctly flakey when she steps back and bumps into the real, completely evolved jacket and T-shirt, wry charm and laddish swagger Robbie thing.I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen this bit of choreography, but I know it’s completely formula-compliant. There’s a Robbie fan, a wonderfully ordinary woman with an Anglia TV local reporter 1992 kind of look, getting an alert on her mobile, “Robbie seen in hotel”, and plunging into Hotel Babylon to find him.Inside, everyone’s a bit Robbie – the man on reception, a child on a sofa, a floor-cleaner with a machine, a groom in an awful suit – have all been computer-tricked to look Robbie-ish. T-Mobile’s the first network to lead in their advertising on delivering the internet – all of it, not just snippets, they say insistently – to your mobile.

And all the other stuff that goes with full medium status, like alerts to Robbie’s new output, discounts for his concerts and messages from Pizza Hut.There’s a long tradition of “star cameos” – US TV of the 1970s and 1980s especially – where the star pitches up as his wonderful self and puts all the fictional people around into a deeply embarrassing, skin-crawlingly kind of tizz The T-Mobile commercial conforms in every particular. It’s an ad that looks as if it’s made to run wherever he’s got a High Recognition factor – most of Europe probably.It’s an ineffably old-fashioned way of selling a very new platform, the mobile medium. Somehow he’d Hoovered up London in the late 1990s becoming a metropolitan, getting to scale, learning what you had to do. Which meant being anthemic, an international stadium act, but being able to flex it with moments of 1940s pastiche, with videos that looked more like Frankie Goes To Hollywood than, say, Radiohead. Even the dull middle-class audience that loves dull middle-class acts like Coldplay could never completely dismiss him, could never deny the CD in the rack or singing along to “Angels”.Now – and it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like for Robbie 2006, though I suspect it feels like coasting – he’s in a T-Mobile commercial.