Chris Tarrant’s big mistake was in not throwing that cutlery at a fellow diner a lot harder, and aiming for a spot just between the eyes. Tarrant had been dining in the MemSaab restaurant in Nottingham with a friend when John Trussler, another diner, spotted him and apparently began shouting out hilarious things.

You can imagine the level of wit. It was stuff like “Fastest finger first, eh, Chris?” and “Do you want to phone a friend, ha ha ha!” as the quiz show presenter studied the menu. Tarrant reportedly first tried to jolly this pest into quietness and then pleaded with him as the “jokes” kept coming, but failed dismally.

Tarrant ended the whole business by – as he put it – gently lobbing some cutlery, wrapped in a napkin, towards the oaf’s table. It allegedly hit Trussler on the arm, who later went to a police station to complain. The old bill were round to Tarrant’s hotel quicker than a rat up a drainpipe and took him down the nick. He was bailed to appear before the nation’s press the next morning.

Let’s look on the bright side: it was good to see the police acting so promptly for once. But then, even more quickly, a Metropolitan police team turned up at Jose Mourinho’s place to investigate the inoculation status of Leya, his pet Yorkshire terrier. It was believed that the dog might not have had the correct antirabies paperwork.

“How is it possible that I had eight police officers at my house because of a dog? It’s a disgrace,” the manager of Chelsea complained.

While police may dispute the number, there’s an easy answer, Jose. One copper to bang you up and one (specially trained, under health and safety guidelines) to pacify Leya; two to have a quick snoop around the house for background purposes. The other four were to deal with interest from the national press, who will have been contacted before the ink was dry on the arrest sheet.

Arresting celebrities has become an important way of generating good PR for our otherwise lassitudinous rozzers. Janet Street-Porter accused of a racist hate crime? That’s got to be worth a page in The Sun. Jose Mourinho harbouring a rabid, wild animal – oh, we’re talking huge column inches here, sarge.

If you’ve dialled 999 recently to report a burglary, or because the sat nav was stolen from your car, or your son’s been stabbed in the throat and relieved of his mobile phone – you may have concluded that there is a certain institutionalised sluggishness infecting our boys in blue, a reluctance to do much in the way of, you know, investigating.

So wise up and kill two birds with one stone – next time you report a crime, tell them Graham Norton did it. They’ll be round before you’ve put the phone down, he’ll be arrested and you might make a few quid from the follow-up story.

* * * * *

Can there be a fate worse than death? Evelyn Waugh certainly thought so; at the close of A Handful of Dust, the hero, Tony Last, is held captive in the Amazon jungle and forced to read aloud every one of Charles Dickens’s books, over and over again. That does it for me – just as it would have done for George Bernard Shaw, who could not abide the ghastly Victorian sentimentalist. Dickens has cast a long shadow over English literature for far too long; literature for people who, I suspect, don’t really like literature very much. Bleak House? You’re not kidding. The government has just spent some money making a whole bunch of books available to school libraries and – what larks, Mrs Fizzlepeg! – there’s no Dickens on the list. There is, however, a book by our own Jeremy Clarkson and this has prompted, among others, the Daily Mail to howl “dumbing down” in inevitable anguish.

Well, I haven’t read Jeremy’s book about marvellous machines but it cannot possibly be any worse than the interminable misery of reading Great Expectations.

Here’s another fate worse than death: waking one morning and suddenly finding that the narrow, bitter, world imagined every day by the Daily Mail really does exist.

Please, Jerry, no more naughty bits

Jerry Hall, the famous Texan very tall person, has complained that Mick Jagger, her exhusband, is a bit tight with the money. Perhaps she is angling for two mansions on Richmond Hill, rather than just the one she has, courtesy of Mick, at present.

Jerry is about to bring her timber-clad acting talents to yet another production of The Vagina Monologues and one is tempted to remark that this is indeed about the only part of her which might have an interesting story to tell, were it able to speak for itself.

Incidentally, I thought now that feminists had famously “reclaimed” the vagina they might stop beating us men over the head with them – but no, that morale-sapping Monologue goes on and on with its usual cast of lesbian comedians, backbench former Blair babes and other assorted women who can’t act.

I saw Jerry jabbering about her private parts in a woeful production a few years ago and have been feeling distinctly under the weather ever since. If Mick had a social conscience he’d bung her a few more billion quid so she can stop pretending to have a job, buy a couple of African children to keep at home and say nothing more about vaginas, hers or anyone else’s. And leave the rest of us in peace.

Unspoken doubt behind the ribbons for Maddy

There was something strange and unsettling seeing MPs crammed into the Commons all wearing little yellow ribbons in support of lost Maddy. And the television news programmes camped out in Portugal day after day, their anchors and specialist correspondents all sharing with us the news that nothing whatsoever had happened. All of us want Madeleine back safely, of course, though we may resist wearing a ribbon to proclaim our desire and occasionally may wish to hear or read of something else that’s happening in the world. It is my guess the public perceives the story a little differently to how it has been presented: it is slightly less sympathetic to Maddy’s parents, for example. And there is a suspicion that this story would have been treated rather differently had Maddy’s parents not been nice middle-class doctors but common or garden chavs. Then the media’s Doc Marten boot would have been on the other foot and the feckless parents excoriated daily. But yellow ribbons or not, let the little girl be found safely.

* * * * *

Men no longer offer compliments to women because they fear being accused of sexism, said a survey last week. Yet women crave compliments just as much as they have ever done. According to female “relationship experts”, men should tell women how lovely they look but make direct reference only to their hair or eyes. But what if their eyes are bloodshot and narrow like an albino gerbil’s? Or they have alopecia? Don’t these women deserve compliments too? It’s still a minefield, despite the experts. I rely on a trusted standby with a plain woman who is conspicuously, if silently, demanding positive affirmation. “Hey, you don’t sweat much for a fat girl,” cheers them up and avoids the charge of sexism.

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