The dull chavvy one, who won “The Apprentice” earlier this year, and whose name I still can’t remember, has left her position as Sir Alan Sugardaddy’s sidekick after less than 6 months. From which I can only conclude a) either she wasn’t interested in being his trophy wife, or b) she was no better than Big Al’s previous 5 MDs at selling his crappy e-mail phone thingies.

Folk may remember that she preposterously beat Ruth “The Badger” Badger in the final of the BBC programme - she has now gone on to form her own company, imaginitively named, and with a lovely flower as a logo. Her biography is quite amusing; “A desire to broaden her horizons sent her to Stoke-on-Trent”…..

Why is it that no-one can publish an autobiography these days without trash-talking someone else? Gavin Henson intelligently slagged off his team-mates, Wayne Rooney slagged off his former manager, Stephen Gerrard had a go at Cristiano Ronaldo and Sven, and Cashley Cole (below, with Beryl Greedy, looking like a pair of bell-ends) whined like a pussy about everything to do with Arsenal.

Of course, I’m not for a second suggesting that any of the gents concerned wrote the comments themselves; frankly, I’d be surprised if they could write their own names. And, let’s be honest, sportsmen are boring as hell; faced with the prospect of 300-plus pages of “at the end of the day, the lads done great, it’s a game of 90 minutes, know what I mean ‘Arry”, any ghost-writer’s going to try their damndest to sell a few more copies by spicing up the dullness as much as humanly possible.

But when current world leaders get in on the act - as Pervy Musharraf has done with some “shocking” anti-US revelations which are remarkably well-timed for the release of his memoirs - I think we need to start worrying. The book’s called “In the Line of Fire”; perhaps he could rename it “Will Destabilise for Cash”.

“Daddy, Daddy! I want to be a DJ! And I want to have a TV / pop career! And I want it NOW!”

What is it about undertalented daughters of third-rate 1980s celebrities with flora / fruit / vegetable first names? They reach 17, get daddy-poos to call in a few favours from the record company / TV execs, then say something bitchy about a more attractive / established female star, and -kerching! - they’re all over us like a dose of hives.

First there was Lily Allen, daughter of Fat Les’s Keith Allen, with her lovely little songs which she writes all by herself (apart from the professional songwriting / production team who help her). According to her media spin, she was brave and talented enough to become successful through Myspace, without any help from Keith. (Mentioned less frequently is the fact that she has had a record contract, procured by her father, since 2002). Oh, and she’s a lousy DJ.

And now we have Peaches Geldof, daughter of Bob, lead singer of shouty sub-U2 Irish new wave doggerel-mongers the O’Boomtown Rats. Thanks to nothing more than her surname (and possibly her stupid first name), she was recently invited by ITV to make 3 TV programmes; on them, she treated audiences to a crock of boring, self-evident painfully teen-y shite about fashion, eating disorders and Islam. To reward herself for setting the world to rights, she then spent £4000 on a single bottle of champagne in Ibiza - money which was originally destined for the starving in Africa (probably). Oh, and she’s one half of lousy DJ combo the Trash Pussies. Cool name, eh kids?

What next? Timmy Mallett’s daughter Cucumber entering the political arena? Can you all please go away?

My weekly “Daily Mail”-style rant…

Another week, another tragedy involving an attack dog and a child. I was surprised to read that dog licences no longer exist; so any macho chav with £250 can buy a rottweiler puppy and train it to be as nasty as he likes. Rottweilers, pit-bulls and bull terriers were bred historically specifically to attack and kill larger animals; aggression is in their genetic make-up. Why do they even need to exist today?

Assuming the government can’t be arsed to introduce a decent licencing scheme, with owner suitability / proper training factored in, I think we should go with the German idea; introduce a dog tax, with the most punitive sums (£1000 p/a?) charged for dangerous dogs. That’ll keep thick men with masculinity issues and angry dogs apart, and should do wonders for the dog-shit problem on Claremont Road.

I LOVE the Ryder Cup. It succeeds in uniting Europe where countless economic and political enterprises over the last 50 years have failed, and it does so for one reason - because we love to stick it up the Yanks.

Americans, as we all know, are the worst losers (and winners) in the sporting world (apart from the French, obviously) - so it’s wonderful to be able to rub their noses in the dung of failure once every two years.

Why are they so loathsome? Two examples - Tiger Woods famously hates the Ryder Cup; he whines about not being paid for his participation, and then pretends he doesn’t care when he loses (which he does pretty much every time). And then there’s the Americans’ identikit rent-a-barbie pearl drops girlfriends, squeaking “USA! USA!” at an annoying pitch every 10 minutes or so…

AND we haven’t paid them back for Brookline yet; I’m all for organising a trip over to Ireland for tomorrow’s finale and coreographing crowd moonies at the various Yank team members when they’re about to play important shots. Who’s with me?

Words, eh? They’re, like, basically totally important and stuff when you want to speak about the things which you have in your head, y’know, and would like to kind of share them with other people or something or nothing.

But sometimes words are evil and get on our nerves. Well, they get on my nerves anyway - but then my nerves seem always to be very open to new visitors.

What I want to know from you lot is which word or phrase gets on your collective tits the most; through over-use, misuse or any other reason. I’ve put a few up, but I’m sure you can think of some better ones. The one that really makes me grind my teeth is “babe”, as used as a term of address by every “Celebrity” Love Island contestant, but “sexy” / “sexiness” isn’t far away - ad men seem to use it to describe anything from yoghurt to wallpaper, for fuck’s sake. The only film billboard poster which hasn’t had a review tagline containing the word “sexy” in the last 10 years is “March of the Penguins” - fact.

I’ve also stuck in “basically” / “y’know” / “I mean” when used as space-fillers in sentences, although I readily admit that I’m guilty as sin on that one. And “ironic”, because people only ever use it when they actually mean “coincidental”, thanks to Alanis Morrisette.

All polls from henceforthward are open to suggestions from you, gentle reader - I’m sure you can do better than my rather tame efforts.

Well, it was a tight contest, but in the end a very strong late burst from Lowestoft’s finest, Justin Hawkins (from joke band The Darkness) has surely clinched the title of the biggest dick in rock. He was a late entry too, which makes his triumph all the more admirable. Honourable mention also to that twat out of Good Charlotte, who secured 11% despite me never having heard of him.

Rumour has it that, during a recent stint in The Priory, Hawkins teamed up with other rock dicks Pete Doherty and some guy out of Keane to write some songs. I can only pray to the Lord above that some burly male nurses with taste in music were on hand to make them stop quickly by means of a full cavity body search for hidden drugs (mind you, whenever Hawkins sings, he sounds as if he’s undergoing that exact process…)

New poll soon, as soon as my leaky brain comes up with anything funny / thought-provoking. Don’t hold your breath.

New government research has proved conclusively that smokers are a bigger blight on society than immigrants, paedophiles, terrorists and global warming put together. Well, it hasn’t really, but anti-smoking-hysteria spin doctors might as well just say so and be done with it.

The gist of the research (publicly funded, in case you were wondering) is that smoking costs £2500 a year before you even take a puff of your cigarette. It cites expenses such as dry cleaning bills, chewing gum to freshen breath, higher insurance premiums, cost of removing burns from furniture and other utterly spurious crap to support its “scientific findings”.

As is now common knowledge, I own several guitars; over the years, I’ve had to buy loads of cleaning products to service them, plus many, many strings (to replace ones broken in over-zealous ham-fisted attempts to play “The Ace of Spades” by Motorhead). The best one - a 1989 cream Fender Stratocaster - undoubtedly bumped up my contents insurance when I made the mistake of declaring it on my policy. And I always need to chew gum to relax after a heavy jamming session - it all mounts up. Why didn’t the government warn me about all these extra costs? Do you think they’d fund me to publish a research paper?

Talking CCTV has been introduced in Middlesbrough, according to this story from Yahoo. People are told off by the talking cameras; eg shamed into picking up litter they’ve just dropped.

The only problem is that I don’t think this idea goes far enough; they should police more aspects of our lives. A camera should, for example, be able to say “Drop the hamburger, fatso - you’re doing yourself no favours and you’re a burden on the NHS”. Or “take that sign down immediately, you cretinous shopkeeper - plurals don’t take an apostrophe. You’re lowering the tone of the high street.”

In fact, I’d replace local councillors with elected “camera tsars” who can vent public spleen onto any miscreant on behalf of we God-fearing normal folk. Not quite the benevolent dictatorship which we all crave, but a step in the right direction.

By a quirk of book availability, I’ve just finished reading 2 autobiographies, more or less one after the other. I tend to steer clear of autobiographies on a “never meet your heroes” basis, but neither of the two men featured - Bill Drummond and Chris Donald - can really be classed as heroes of mine, and there were no other books in the house.

Drummond, for those who don’t know, is former rock manager (responsible for Echo and the Bunnymen), pop star (KLF, The Timelords) and art anarchist (most famously when his K Foundation burnt £1,000,000 of their own money). His 1998 book takes the form of various essays about his early career, K Foundation capers, and increasingly (toward the end) Drummond’s own introspective musings. Once he’s got some of his pent-up bombast and wackier ideas out of the way - ley lines, for instance - he writes with wit, intelligence and great insight. You even end up feeling that this “art terrorist” who mutilated animals, mocked the pop charts and splurged huge amounts of money in the cause of nothing in particular, might actually be a very nice bloke. The rock world doesn’t throw up creative people like Drummond any more.

On the other hand, Chris Donald - ex-editor of Viz - writes a dull, sour little book which spends most of its time blaming other people (especially publisher John Brown) for things that went wrong with the publication. Donald comes across as a class A nerd who just struck lucky.

Conclusion - if I had my time again, I’d listen to KLF records rather than reading Viz..