But it appears there are readers out there who need the full apparatus of life-writing &ndash Chapter

But it appears there are readers out there who need the full apparatus of life-writing – Chapter One: I Am Born, Chapter Two: First Signs of Genius, Chapter Three: My Playground Hell – in order to appreciate their hero. My sympathies are with the author, who has to find some way of padding-out and dramatising Mr Gates’s young life before he went near the Pop Idol auditions. But how? How many paragraphs can you make out of Gareth’s 1991 nosebleed, his illicit passion for Coco Pops, and the lost weekend in 1994 when he mislaid his pencil-case?Brave new censor I fear for the equilibrium of Sir Quentin Thomas in his new job as President of the British Board of Film Classification. He has, he proudly pointed out in an interview, never seen “a genuine blue movie”, though he did clap eyes on some outsized breasts in porn magazines during his time at the Home Office.

He is alarmingly keen on the word “decency”, a term that was kicked around courtrooms like an ethical football in the obscenity trials of the Sixties. But what really worries me is his offhand remark: “It is not for us to say that there are too many Westerns or not enough musicals.”Quentin, look. You can’t talk about there being “too many” or “not enough” of those two genres There aren’t any of either. Musicals stopped being made in the late Seventies, after Grease. Since then, I can’t recall a musical of any consequence, with the exception of Evita in 1996. (And I don’t count Moulin Rouge – a pastiche of old love songs.) Westerns ceased to exist 10 years ago, after Clint’s Unforgiven turned the genre upside-down and won the Oscar. How can a chap preside over the modern movie world without having a clue about its history? Oh, and Quentin, there’s a bit of a dearth of Hitchcock movies these days.

And definitely “not enough” of the Keystone Kops…The art of whiningThis is too Harry Enfield to be true, but I hear that police in Devon and Cornwall are trying to educate foreign visitors in the art of queuing. They’re afraid that, left to their own garlicky Euro devices, the foreigners may try to barge to the front in the line-up for the bus, or shoulder people out of the way in the sub-post office, and thus cause “An Incident”. So the cops are having a discreet word in Johnny Foreigner’s ear. There’s a poster campaign (showing a backpacker nipping aboard a bus ahead of an OAP and an encumbered mother). They’ve even given their initiative a sexy name – Operation Columbus – as if it was about discovering a new world rather than learning to wait your turn. But if they’re going to do this properly, and show the tourists real English queuing skills, they must go the whole hog and teach them the art of grumbling.