Peter Ustinov with Michael Parkinson in 1971

One of the big cultural fibs going around today is that this, uniquely, is the Age of the Celebrity; a time that is defined by our fascination with people who are famous, but we’re not entirely sure what for.

There’s actually a long tradition of this, but the difference with the old-style celebs is that we could never define why Peter Ustinov (for example) was famous, because he did so many things, not so few. Apart from the proper jobs (writer, director, actor, artist and so on) he was also good at non-specific stuff that people really don’t do any more. He was always “Peter Ustinov the raconteur”, which meant you could drop him in front of Michael Parkinson with 10 minutes’ notice, no script, nothing to plug and Parky would say “What’s it like working with Kirk Douglas?” and Ustinov would. . . well, he’d racont, I suppose, with perfect timing, all the funny voices and weird digressions that never went too far off-piste, and then when the next guest came on, he’d sit there politely, and only interject occasionally, but when he did it was brilliant.

I’m not sure Paris Hilton could do that.

Ustinov comes to mind because he represents a tradition that, sadly, seems to have been propping up the obituary columns in recent years. Its representatives were usually born between 1920 and 1940, so they remembered World War Two, either as combatants or as grubby-kneed schoolboys cowering in shelters. They were usually a bit posh, and usually a bit left-wing, although the ones that weren’t proper posh (like Alan Coren and Ned Sherrin) were also the least leftie. They were all fearsomely intelligent and well read and articulate, although not all had excelled academically.

But above all, it was usually very difficult to point at them and say: “That is Humphrey Lyttelton, the _______.” The what? Trumpeter? Cartoonist? Bloke who made eye-wateringly foul jokes about cunnilingus on Radio 4 and gets away with it? It’s the same with John Mortimer, the most recent to peg it. Bit of barristering, bit of writing, bit of showing up on panel shows and being gently subversive. Any more of that Chateau Lafite, luvvy? These people were brilliant amateurs, in the best sense of the word, the sense that Andrew Keen doesn’t understand because he’s a witless cock who wouldn’t know genius if it asked him to write another book but do it properly this time because his first one was embarrassing shit.

Even when they had a particular, definable, defining skill (I’m thinking of Oliver Postgate and Tony Hart), you knew they had plenty of other interests, other strings to their bows, a sort of cultural and emotional hinterland that meant that if Parky or Wogan or Mavis Nicholson had a gap in the schedule, they could just be parachuted in, given a G&T and allowed to do their stuff for 10 minutes, very nice, here’s your cheque, shall I get you a cab?

Back to Paris Hilton. Or, I dunno, Calum Best. Nah, don’t see it myself, do you? Although, to be fair, with Parky retired to the golf course, there are fewer opportunities these days for someone like Calum Best to demonstrate that he is, contrary to received opinions, a wit, a raconteur, a calligrapher, a bassoonist, a balloonist, a. . . something?

Of course, we do have Stephen Fry. But the very fact that 95% of you will also have thought “of course, we do have Stephen Fry” demonstrates the immense pressure upon the great man, and how thinly he has to spread himself. To the extent – and I don’t say this lightly, because I know it may end it ordure through my letterbox as a punishment for my temerity – that every now and then I get a bit tired of Stephen Fry, because I know what he’s going to say next, and the archly self-deprecating way he’s going to say it. He does give good Twitter, though.

(I’ve just flipped through this and realised that all the people I’ve identified are men, which is surely rather remiss of me. So I’ll add Germaine Greer, another one I’m glad is still around. I know she’s a bit mental and picks fights on subjects she knows nothing about, just to be annoying, but she’s always good value, and funny, and she’s got a filthy laugh. And she’s the only one who’s started a porn mag.)

I don’t believe in heaven, but for the purposes of this article, I’d like to imagine a version of Big Brother up on a cloud somewhere, with Ustinov and Sherrin and Coren and Lyttelton and Mortimer and Postgate and Hart all sitting in comfy armchairs drinking agreeable, nicely-chilled Sancerre, and Big Brother asking them to do something, and Lyttelton telling Big Brother to fuck off, but in a terribly clever way that is at once monstrously rude and deeply charming, and then they all go back to raconting.

Tim Footman blogs at: Cultural Snow