When I consider the household names I have met and befriended as a journalist – among them Rowan Atkinson, Paula Yates and Alan Smethurst, ‘the Singing Postman’ – the thought occurs that I almost always preferred the person to the product.

Of Atkinson’s Blackadder and Yates’s The Tube, I have never witnessed a minute on screen – honestly. As for Smethurst’s classic single Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy – well, had I gotta life?

It was a bit like this with Nicholas Parsons, on whose demise two days ago, aged 96, were awarded to him plaudits richly deserved.

Yes, a great bloke – courteous, witty and never inclined to capitalise, in the needy way of so many showbiz types, on the éclat that his considerable achievements brought him. A perfect gentleman, as his handsome obituaries declared.

And yet – Just a Minute? Just a second, I think I’ve something better to do . . .

It was as long ago as 1967 that the BBC first aired the programme which I always said, without deviation, hesitation or repetition (actually, that last isn’t true), was a bit of a bore.

No doubt my appetite for what is now called ‘edgier’ radio entertainment conditioned my attitude to it.

Hard, I suppose, to think of Round the Horne in this category. Yet how much more appealing it was to find Kenneth Williams at work there – smuggling smut under the radar with his and Hugh Paddick’s cunning use of the gay lingo Polari – than mixing it petulantly with fellow panelists on Just a Minute.

These also included, it will be remembered, the stuttering Derek Nimmo, curate Noot in TV’s All Gas and Gaiters, and Clement Freud, a BBC no-no these days as a recognised paedophile, yet once a television personality, lugubrious dog food salesman (with bloodhound Henry) and Liberal MP. I was among the crowd in the Isle of Ely on the night of his victory in 1973, as were his brats Matthew and Emma (though not I think Henry).

Knowing what one does now of Freud and his painter brother Lucian, it is hard to decide which of them was ghastlier.

The year of Just a Minute’s kick-off, 1967, was one in which the world – and especially the youngsters in it (I was 15) – was revelling in a culture very different from that of the past.

As we were reminded by Paul Gambaccini on Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops last week, this was the year of Jimi Hendrix’s chart debut with Hey Joe, Cream’s brilliant I Feel Free, and the Spencer Davies Group’s I’m a Man, with singer Steve Winwood at his finest.

After that lot – and the heady delights of The Seekers’ Morningtown Ride (only joking!) – who would want a date with Parsons and his gang?

Soon wider shores of comedy were to be revealed in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, one of whose stars, Terry Jones, recently preceded Nicholas to a place among “the bleedin’ choir invisible”, in the immortal phrase of John Cleese’s Mr Praline.

As I learned for the first time (I think) from his obituaries, Jones had studied English at Teddy Hall under Reggie Alton, whose wife Jeannine once brought more of culture to the pages of The Oxford Times than anyone else.

Jones was an authority on medieval literature. I interviewed him at Blackwell’s in the summer of 1980 about his book Chaucer’s Knight and was rather surprised to encounter him three days later in a shop outside Siena. Small world.

As was the case with many of my celebrity pals I got to know Nicholas (and his delightful wife Annie) through his participation in the annual literary festivals in Oxford, Woodstock (later restyled Blenheim Palace) and Gibraltar.

Their director Sally Dunsmore told me of her sadness at the passing of “one of life’s goodies”.

She said: “It was my great privilege to know Nicholas and call him a friend. We first met when he spoke at the Blenheim Palace Literary Festival. Little did I know what a dear friend he would become to our festivals.

“Nicholas suggested we stage Just a Minute at the Oxford Literary Festival. We did it twice and it brought such joy and laughter to a packed family audience in the Sheldonian.

“He performed his one-man show at both festivals and had audiences in stitches. His double act with Gyles Brandreth brought us all to tears. Nicholas was wonderful to work with, exceptionally professional, charming and warm-spirited – and that rarity in life these days, a gentleman.”

Like many gentlemen – dare I include myself? – Nicholas was an enthusiastic wearer of cravats, and led a one-man crusade to restore their popularity (with no conspicuous success, sadly).

I once asked him how many he possessed.

“Too many,” he said. “I had more than I knew what to do with; then a friend died and left me all of his.”