We critics are a fallible lot. Take the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, for instance. In his role as Olden but golden music columnist in the Spectator last week he told readers (after one of his now predictable anti-alcohol rants) that he “always wondered what happened to Roy Wood (above). [He] wrote some of the greatest British pop songs ever to grace the charts and then seemed to disappear without trace”.

Can disappearing without trace be said to encompass playing in a support band for Status Quo, which Wood has been doing this month and last? Possibly. But I hardly think its definition could be stretched to include his appearance on Sunday as Johnnie Walker’s star guest on Radio 2’s Sounds of the 70s, one of the most popular programmes on Britain’s most popular station. Mr Spencer, who occasionally reveals himself to be a Radio 2 listener, is likely to be regretting his words. I felt the same some years ago when I wrote that it was high time for John Mortimer to be knighted — two weeks after he had been.

Of all national newspaper reviewers, Mr Spencer holds opinions that tally most closely with my own — certainly where the function of the critic is concerned. He was spot-on some months ago when he said he considered it his duty to save his readers from wasted hours in the stalls (or words to that effect).

In this connection, he (and others) could in my view be doing potential theatregoers a disservice by being quite so enthusiastic about the National Theatre’s production of One Man, Two Guvnors. Though I thought it funny, the Norman Wisdomesque antics of its star, James Corden, eventually become rather trying. Does anyone agree?

In my review of the show in Aylesbury in September (headlined “Gleeful vulgarity palls”), I owned to never having heard of Corden (of course I have now, he having a book to plug and the BBC being ever kind to those in this position).

This admission led Steven and Steph Bliss of Woodstock — who think as one it seems — to write to the Editor saying they presumed this must mean I had not seen the National Theatre’s production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in which he appeared.

In fact, I saw it twice but cannot call to mind the names of all those in it. Would the Blisses, individually or together, be willing to submit to my questioning over the cast lists of plays they saw years before?

The reason most people know of Corden, of course, is for the TV series Gavin & Stacey, which I have never seen (and always think of as Kevin & Spacey).

I would rather be in a theatre or reading a book than gawping at the television. This, I admit, can leave a reviewer a little in the dark come pantomime time, with the reflection of popular culture that these shows supply.

As the season began, I saw four pantos in five days. All but one of them contained tasteless jokes — actually, cruel jokes — about Fatima Whitbread. (The show that didn’t, I am pleased to say, was the Oxford Playhouse whose Mother Goose maintains this theatre’s reputation for tasteful festive entertainment.) The former world champion javelin thrower had, it seemed, put herself in line for these by talking part in I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

A Google check on the precise wording and punctuation of the title of this programme has just taken me to its website where I immediately found a picture (see left) of its presenters Ant and Dec — old muckers of mine, you might recall — flanking the winner of the latest series, Dougie Poynter of ‘boy’ band McFly and the runner-up, Mark Wright from another witless TV show, The Only Way is Essex.

Staring out at us with rictus grins, the quartet look not dissimilar from models rejoicing over their ‘ring of confidence’ in a Colgate toothpaste advertisement of the sixties.

We are, it seems, well on the way down the path long trodden by Americans in expecting all our stars to have gleaming white tombstone teeth, the result of much cosmetic dentistry.

Such a perfect set of choppers was the first thing I noticed about Gareth Gates when he strode on to the stage as Milton Keynes’s Aladdin last week. “He ought to be called Gareth ‘Pearly’ Gates,” I joked with my companion (and a Google check shows I’m first with that pun).

The new stage production whose uniform five-star reviews come as no surprise is the revival of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off. This is at the Old Vic and another feather in the cap of its artistic director, the already-alluded-to Kevin Spacey.

I dare say there will be many who share my happy memories of the production of it which the National Theatre toured to the Oxford Playhouse in 2003. In the last sentence of my review I wrote: “I do not know how canned laughter is made. If it is created by recording a live audience, then I suggest the makers of it should take their equipment down to the Playhouse, pronto.”

Of the Old Vic production my colleague Nick Utechin writes (in a review coming in full next week): “This show will make you physically exhausted from laughing.”

This is one form of exhaustion I would be happy to experience. Another is that supplied by Christmas. Have a good one!