There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.

My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.

I can't actually read interviews with thesps now because they're almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.

There's no Peter York Foundation, and you're no one without one.

Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: 'I'm a good person. Isn't it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?'

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn't aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.

Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bongo' of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic.