AS someone whose only previous claim to being a VIP-spotter was to have seen Bamber Gascoigne on the platform of Finsbury Park tube station, I praise retirement for bringing me a flurry of the famous.

In London again a few months ago, Carol Vorderman passed me with an inscrutable look as though she had just ten seconds to work out how many words she could make out of a jumble of letters plucked from the alphabet at random.

Closer to home, I once saw broadcaster Robert Robinson walking away from Tintern Abbey with that dazed expression assumed by all who have just immersed themselves in an architectural marvel.

As a journalist, of course, even in the provinces, one dismisses from the record book all encounters with the famous in the course of one's work, though I do recall Judith Hart, then some government minister or other on the election trail, asking me what I was going to write about her speech at Woodland Road Social Centre, Croesyceiliog. Some hope!

The important thing about passing the illustrious in the street is that one does not confront them excitedly, even for an autograph, or when they live nearby and are seen every week.

For about ten years at my last address in Newport, I lived a few hundred yards from the playwright Julian Mitchell, he of the Inspector Morse TV adaptations. We spoke now and then in the lane of an evening but never about plays or newspapers - thank God.

It's strange that Gascoigne, Vorderman and Robinson should spring to mind or materialise before me, because they have been much in my thoughts of late, as television continues to make me squirm with hatred and aversion.

Each of the three has qualities or backgrounds which are superior to any sort of televisual fame, for which these days no qualifications appear to be anecessary, apart from an ability to speak with an unintelligible Cockney accent or behave in a threatening manner close to camera.

Gascoigne, as far as I recall, had an academic life away from his only venture on to the small screen as slick-talking, pre-Paxman host of University Challenge, in which he never stooped so low as to chide a contestant for believing that Ramsay MacDonald was a Tory or the founder of a fast-food chain. Quiet disdain sufficed. When I saw him waiting for his train, he was surrounded by an entourage equipped with huge amounts of stationery, clearly not researchers for a minority-interest quiz programme, and he looked like a sage who knew all the answers to questions he posed on television, especially - for some reason I cannot now fathom - those concerning sites of antiquity.

Vorderman, apart from her late flowering as a femme fatale and sudoku master ('The challenge is to decipher the simple logic of the pattern' - yea) is admired for being the only Cambridge mathematician who opted to be a stooge for the late and much-dishevelled Richard Whiteley. A woman with her priorities correctly stacked.

Robinson, even as quizmaster of Ask the Family, was an impeccable sentence-constructor and exuded the wisdom and intelligence of a sporting Oxbridge don. He's in slightly subdued form on radio's Brain of Britain but still sounds like a media person it would be rewarding to meet, unlike Kim or Scott (or Kim and Scott) of Home and Away.

As a penniless student in the 1960s, I was walking through Woolworth's in Cardiff when the lights went out. Actually, it was Tommy Cooper, blocking all entrances and approaching in shoes that I swear were two feet long.

But this didn't go down in my VIP book. Everybody recognised him. Only hermits and the blind wouldn't have.