Tony Parsons: My week in media

Last week I read...

I buy the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Independent every day, and skim them in a scholarly fashion. Newspapers are like jam doughnuts, and you can only consume so many of them. Richard Littlejohn wrote his entire column on Friday around David Cameron choosing "Ernie The Fastest Milkman in the West" on Desert Island Discs. It was the funniest thing I've read in a British newspaper for a long time. I know he's not to everyone's taste but I've been laughing about it all day which is such a brilliant conceit. When you go to another newspaper and you're taken out of context it can work quite well. I like seeing people writing against the grain - I think it's very good that the Independent have got a right-winger like Bruce Anderson writing for them. Dylan Jones did a very good interview with David Cameron (left) in GQ. It's the only men's magazine that's going to do that. I read my wife's Grazia every week - a great magazine and good at breaking stories, which is difficult to do, with excellent tips on hair and make-up. They had something on how the World Cup wives hate each other on the cover this week. It's got a newsy quality to it, which I like. A lot of newspapers are misogynistic. I think Heather Mills has been really bullied by newspapers but Grazia hasn't done this.

Last week I watched...

The Line of Beauty is prime BBC drama - a classic fable of the young outsider entering this gilded new world. It's Brideshead Revisited or a Thatcherite Great Gatsby to a New Order soundtrack. And great to see all those Hugh Grant types buggering each other senseless in the bushes. I am watching Life on Mars on DVD and loving it. Although you can see all the reflections of Back to the Future, it is written with such spirit that it feels completely original. And of course there's a world of difference between Fifties America and Seventies Britain.

Last week I surfed...

www.SCMP.com, the online edition of the South China Morning Post, the best place for breaking news about China, where my next book is set. The big corruption story was about the land grabs. Rural land wasn't worth anything for years, and now farmers are losing land and being given hardly any compensation. There are probably more people crawling out of poverty now in China than at any time in history. But the other way of looking at it is, there are still five million people living on less than two dollars a day.

Tony Parsons' Stories We Could Tell is published by HarperCollins