And the winner is . . .

My favourite titbit about the Oscars is that if at any point during the Wagner- ian length of the ceremony you get up to go to the loo, a young person who has been loitering in the aisles will instantly nip in and occupy your seat, giving it up gracefully on your return. The point is that the vast television audience must not, at any point, be shown the shocking sight of an empty seat in the auditorium. I worry about those young people: is that really what they hoped to do with their lives?

If you win an Oscar, the smart north London thing to do, or so I understand, is to keep it in the downstairs loo. At a stroke, you grandly signal that you’re really rather indifferent to these tawdry baubles, recognise the high degree of vulgarity invested in the numbered statuettes, and brilliantly ensure that your dinner guests will have minutes of awed, solitary communion with your worldly success, embodied in a sub-art-deco figurine 13 inches high. I bet that, despite vaunted indifference, those north London actresses make their Filipinas polish the thing within an inch of its life.

You are entirely free to regard me as extremely sad for being so enthusiastic about this book, but the fact is that I could not put it down — the cliché being, in this case, true, as I found myself trying to cook dinner and conduct vital telephone calls with one eye on the enchanting succession of statistics, arranged in increasingly ingenious ways. It is frightfully badly written (‘Male biographical roles have been more diverse, both historically and occupationally’); it offers no aesthetic insights worth repeating; it has an anti-talent for quoting awed celebrities saying nothing interesting at all — ‘The public relations people,’ Rex Harrison opines, ‘had a difficult time, but they are well equipped for this.’