The sad truth about Phillip Schofield

You hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over professions in the near future – and I think television presenters should be particularly worried. Think about it. Robots wouldn’t expect salaries of hundreds of thousands of pounds. They wouldn’t jump queues. They wouldn’t have lurid headlines about paedophile brothers casting a pall over their shiny facade. And they wouldn’t show a cheery Doctor Jekyll-bot to the public and a nasty Mr Snide-bot to those they considered their inferiors.

I’m thinking, of course, about Phillip Schofield. Amusingly, when you go to his Wikipedia page you find a line at the top saying: ‘This article is about the television presenter. For the medieval historian, see Phillipp Schofield’.

What must life be like for this other P.S. – the professor at Aberystwyth university, whose thesis was entitled ‘Land, family and inheritance in a later medieval community: Birdbrook, 1292–1412’ – whenever he wants to book a restaurant table? The same might have been said of the novelist Kate Mosse (‘A taxi driver said, ‘You’re not as tall as I’d expected’’) and the late novelist Elizabeth Taylor (‘Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini.