My experience has found them to be addicted to unrealistic romance

Alex: A Passion for Life (Channel 4), Micro Men (BBC4), Scrubs (E4)

They're looking for 'fun and friendship' from younger men, and are found on TV, movies and in a bar near you. The 'C' word has caught on, but not everyone is happy about it, says Susan Daly.

There's a man at the top of Carnaby Street singing "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". No, it's not 1964. It's last Thursday. And the man in the floppy felt hat and sunglasses, strumming and singing for the benefit of a gathering crowd, is not Bob Dylan; he's 35-year-old Joshua Radin. Not everyone in the crowd knows who Radin is, but they stay to listen to his songs – and if they watch any US television, there's a good chance they've heard some of them before.

Outlook: Cowdery's Resolution made institutional investors a fortune and they hope he can repeat the trick.

Naturally, I get a lot of enquiries from members of the public eager, having seen the above photo, for my style advice. To save you the trouble of asking, this season's big look is: lots of hair! Corduroy suits! And glasses! Just like last season, in fact, and several seasons before that. Because style never goes out of fashion. Still, for those who can't carry off the corduroy look, there's always programmes such as Gok's Fashion Fix, in which Gok Wan offers fashion advice to the nation. He is assisted in this by Alexa Chung, who, I am assured by my friendly neighbourhood teenagers, is cool to a world-historic degree – so cool, in fact, that in dating the lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys, she is actually slumming it a bit. But it's undoubtedly Gok who is the main attraction here, partly because of his encouraging manner – where Trinny and Susannah would offer a sharp intake of breath, he's more likely to give a joyous shriek of "Girlfriend!" – but more because he is one of those few blessed or cursed beings who swim through television as naturally as an otter through a stream, never seeming as if he is consciously performing. In this, he is the natural heir to, say, Davina McCall and Robert Robinson (whose ability to stand utterly unfazed in front of a camera is the subject of some grousing in his memoirs). To be fair, I can't imagine Mr Robinson ever congratulating Geri Halliwell on purchasing a pair of gold shorts from River Island for a mere nine quid with the words "Girlfriend, that's a Gok high-five", and not only because his name isn't Gok.

It's prom night for blonde teen queen Donna (Brittany Snow), but she's a bit jumpy from flashbacks to three years ago when her family were brutally slaughtered by a maniac obsessed with her.,/p>

"You're gonna have so much fun," her aunt tells her, but we know different: said maniac has just escaped from his maximum-security jail and is now inside the hotel where Donna and her friends are whooping it up. It's basically the sort of old-fashioned stalk-and-slasher one might have supposed the Scream movies had made obsolete. Some hope. I kept thinking of Woody Allen's line to the "crazy killer" in his play, Death: "You could be using your time constructively... Take up golf – be a crazy golfer!"

Linda Smith would be surprised and possibly even horrified at how busy Warren Lakin has been in celebrating her since the nation's favourite funny person died in 2006. He was, she stipulated, her "boyfriend" of 23 years (she reserved the word "partner" for business), giving him ample opportunity in their life together – as he did her typing and booked her gigs as well as driving her to them – to observe and appreciate her individuality.

IT IS unquestionably unfair to dub any writer a one-book man, especially when he's published well over 20. Nevertheless in the case of George V. Higgins the fact has to be faced. He wrote superbly dialogued, complexly plotted, richly characterised novels - yet all just a slight variation on the same basic riff. And, as the years went by and the books stacked up, the similarities began to stand out, hardly helped by their author's reliance, more and more, on pure dialogue, to the point where narrative - scene descriptions, back-story, the intricate social hinterland against which the novels' events were played out - virtually disappeared. Until, in essence, all that remained was "two guys gabbing at each other" - or even one guy soliloquising for paragraph after paragraph, page after interminable page.

THE PRISON Service has drawn up a 118-point action plan to save the notorious Wormwood Scrubs jail by turning it into one of the most progressive prisons in the country.

Councils may cast a greedy eye on London scrublands, but they are havens for animals and humans alike.

SPARE A thought for the poor, misunderstood prison officers. It just isn't true they are a bunch of unfeeling tough guys and even harder women. New research shows they are as nice a bunch of people as you are likely to come across.

PRISON OFFICERS mounted an angry protest at Wormwood Scrubs jail yesterday after 25 colleagues were told they would be charged over alleged assaults on inmates. Prisoners were forced to remain in their cells as 100 officers staged an all day sit-in in the chapel.

TWENTY-FIVE prison officers from Wormwood Scrubs are to be charged with offences linked to assaults on inmates after the biggest criminal investigation at a jail.