But behind the irresistibly courteous front, the infallible memory for faces, there is a real and lovable man, perhaps the biggest British football has produced.
She takes Cilla Black, ungainly with her long legs coltishly splayed and drinking from a paper cup, all wrapped up in her limbs, and it's not in the slightest degree humiliating, but lovable.
Both bumbling, ineffectual, trapped, lovable, basically well meaning, and with some surprising strengths – like the great scene when Bubbles reveals an unexpected knowledge of things nautical, and Ziggy introducing Nick to digital cameras and internet search engines.
At least that seems to be the idea, with the introduction this week of a brand new figure in the corporation's timelessly lovable good-time gang of fast-food friends.
It tells the story of lovable rogue Fletch (Ronnie Barker) – "an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard" – and his attempts to serve his five-year sentence, keep his nose clean ish) and outwit the system at HMP Slade.
It all works out, despite the rain and the strange accents; the Ch'tis turn out be lovable, warm-hearted scamps who just talk funny.
People will be set weekly challenges, which will be brought to life as "blob man", a lovable and distinctly flabby online pal.
The appearance of two new films about Alfred Hitchcock, widely considered to be the greatest of Britain's filmmakers, is a reminder that there was a time when he was also considered lovable.
But behind the marketing spiel about Aibo's autonomous behaviour patterns, simulated emotions and instincts, "lovable shape" and "four highly expressive legs", lurks a serious point.
The not-always-lovable Mr Jobs is still stuck in a greedy-looking share-option "backdating" scandal.
SUDDENLY Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia's authoritarian president and once the Balkans' chief troublemaker, looks almost lovable because an even nastier man has come within a whisker of becoming president of Serbia, the bigger of the two republics that make up what is left of Yugoslavia.
