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Steve Coogan confessed in a recent interview on BBC1’s The One Show that he is morphing into his alter ego Alan Partridge. ‘There’s almost a complete overlap in the Venn diagram,’ he admitted, ‘by this time next year I will have completely become Alan.’ Maybe he was joking, but I suspect he kind of meant it. At a recent drinks party, I discovered to my horror that I’d come dressed exactly like every other midlife man in the room The comedian has spent years trying to distance himself from the boss of Pear Tree Productions, firstly by creating ‘other less successful characters’, his words, not mine, and then by retreating

The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town.  You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin The little lad was having the time of

It is no longer normal to see Hollywood men looking normal anymore. From the empty cheeks of Ozempic face to the puffed-out Brotox foreheads to the eerily-uniform veneers of Turkey teeth, no one seems to be aging, but no one seems to also be quite so attractive. Even Ryan Gosling, once my favourite heart-throb, has overdone the filler, and now looks like he is smuggling a pair of snooker-balls in his cheeks. Boys and young men are being sold a lie The same is true for male bodies; masculinity means muscularity. In our superhero-saturated age, audiences are inundated with images of male physical perfection: torsos like upside down triangles, shoulders

Lambourn trainer Jonny Portman is a splendid ambassador for horse racing: he is talented, charming and witty. Television presenters and newspaper journalists love interviewing him because his dry sense of humour invariably comes to the fore. Addressing some challenging times for his stable in 2022, he told a racing journalist, ‘I’ve had four owners die this year and I know two more are planning on it. So I do worry.’ Portman invariably gets the best out of his horses – he currently has 45 in training – and, if he had a couple of big-spending owners, he would undoubtedly be competing for the sport’s top prizes more often. Two Tempting

Perhaps Gareth Southgate’s greatest achievement at the England helm has been to inculcate a sense of togetherness in his squads. This had been noticeably absent in teams under those who preceded him: at one point, for example, the first-choice central defence partnership, Rio Ferdinand and John Terry, refused to even talk to each other, while the two best midfielders, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, seemed unable to play together.  Strangely, this change was symbolised by some inflatable unicorns. The players were photographed laughing and messing about in a swimming pool during Southgate’s first tournament, the 2018 World Cup, at which he took his team further than any England outfit had