Legend relates that George Melly, the exuberant jazz singer and bon viveur, once bumped into Mick Jagger at a party and, with a certain absence of tact, expressed surprise at how wrinkled his friend had become.

“These aren’t wrinkles”, Jagger replied tartly, “they’re laughter lines.” Melly considered the rocker’s puckered road-map of a face. “Surely nothing could be that funny,” he drawled.

It’s a classic showbusiness anecdote — cherished because despite — or perhaps because of — the radioactive eyewash we read these days about make-up and tights for men and the booming economic stature of grooming products for blokes, nothing is quite so funny as male vanity. Particularly when it’s as precious and bruised as Jagger’s was.

Happily, the same hard cackle of derision was abroad this week with the news that Gordon Ramsay, the faltering shallot-chopper of televisual fame, had sought to improve upon what God had placed on his plate. As we know, Ramsay’s face and lower jaw sport the evidence of dermatological trauma in his teenage years — to the extent that the chef can resemble the ventriloquist’s dummy of a 1940s music hall act.

Clearly, this troubles him, hence Ramsay — in town this weekend for the BBC’s Good Food Show — is seeking refuge in a corrective scalpel work. He revealed this week that he’d had his facial canyons filled in — doubly handy when your career is booming in America, a land where the facially disfigured can be chased by crowds wielding pitchforks.

“My mother said they were smile lines,” Ramsay said. “I could deal with that at 21, but not at 42.” Filler was inserted into the tramlines of Ramsay’s face — a process, he revealed exclusively, that “hurt”.

As awful and vain as the business is, it does at least have several upsides. For the next few years Ramsay will be unable to go anywhere without busybody women inspecting his chops and clucking: “Oh, they did a lovely job, didn’t they?” And now he’s vulnerable, he has an Achilles chin.

The next time he lambasts a failing restaurateur or hopeless celebrity trainee, they have an instant, crippling comeback concerning what might have happened to Ramsay’s odd, lunar fizzog. The prospect is delicious.

Tuesday was Unesco’s World Audiovisual Heritage Day, an opportunity to view obscure bits of footage lying abandoned in film libraries and the remnants of local film societies.

This year the Scottish Screen Archive revealed at the Glasgow Film Theatre the bits of arcana it has been restoring. These consisted largely of creepy old black-and-white snippets in which people wearing too many clothes walked too quickly. But the star was Cumbernauld Hit, perhaps the greatest cult film in waiting ever seen.

In 1977 the development corporation in the Lanarkshire new town decided to make a tub-thumping promotional film. Seized by some wacky, Age of Aquarius goblin of the perverse, it allowed Murray Grigor — the film maverick and lately the biographer of Sean Connery — to make it.

Rather than deliver a conventional film of the area’s benefits and amenities, Grigor concealed the propaganda in a bizarre psychedelic hijack drama, filmed in Cumbernauld shopping centre and starring Fenella Fielding, an actress commended to posterity by her appearance as a sexy vampire in Carry On Screaming.

By means of some of the worst acting imaginable, the cast languished in tank tops and high-waisted trousers in a world where everything was made from crimpelene. “Cumbernauld,” Fenella breathed lustily, “a veritable jewel in the navel of Scotland.” The campaign for the film’s re-release starts here.

Such is the parlous state of the music industry that performers are now partaking in humiliating drives to flog their wares in ways they never had to do in the past.

Attend a concert in any venue with seats and on the way out you’ll trip over the star feverishly autographing CDs — this being one of the few ways to guarantee that fans purchase them.

In keeping with her weirdly accelerated career, Susan Boyle — the haunted tree of big-lunged balladry — has taken the process further. She announced this week that she will promote her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, on QVC.

Normally, the home-shopping channel is a forum through which blank-eyed ringtone addicts kill time by considering the purchase of Elvis-shaped table lamps. Selling your music on QVC is akin to admitting it is aural wallpaper for those whose social interaction is limited to speaking to the employees of call centres.

Or at least it was until Barbra Streisand hawked her latest album via QVC and hit number one in the Billboard 200. If it’s good enough for Barbra it’s good enough for Susan, it seems.

However, when it comes to Boyle’s home patch of Blackburn, West Lothian, one suspects it might not work the other way round.

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