The Club Awards were a glamour-free zone, reports Monique Roffey

Live and Uncut

Is the musky new fragrance from Harley-Davidson a passport to biker heaven? Would-be real man Richard McClure finds out

I knew it was only a matter of time before I succumbed. As a recovering peroxide junkie, I had successfully kept off the stuff for the last five years and accepted, philosophically, my natural attributes: a head of mediocre, mousey brown.

Mark Wareham spent last week at the London Comedy Festival. Something f unny was going on.But not the jokes

BOOK launches are not events normally associated with girls in fishnet tights and leotards with no bottoms. But most book launches are not in aid of Nesta Wyn Ellis, John Major's biographer (principal revelation: John Major is sexy), who has now compiled Britain's Top 100 Eligible Bachelors. She celebrated publication of this latest work at Stringfellow's on Wednesday night (Peter Stringfellow is bachelor number 30), where the first sight to greet arriving guests was not the usual scruffy author or intense literary type, but girls with no cellulite and the willingness to walk around with only fishnet tights covering their buttocks.

LOOKING to fill their afternoon schedules this autumn, ITV have recruited Vanessa Feltz, a substantial blonde from Anglia Television with a wardrobe of ill- advised twin-sets. Her role is to do what they do in America all afternoon - talk to the people. Vanessa (ITV) goes like this: a couple of Aunt Sallys are set up on a platform to open a discussion about some lukewarm topic of the day, which Vanessa then takes into the audience via a vast phallic microphone.

Am I alone in being sick to the teeth of nightclub bouncers masquerading as beauty police? It is the ultimate comedown, a frustrating end to what is intended as an evening of enjoyment, which leaves you feeling cold, bored and faced with the prospect of trudging sheepishly back past the hopefuls queuing behind you. And all on the whim of a bouncer with an ego the size of a sound system who has decided that you will not be one of the chosen few.

Peter Stringfellow is about to trademark Angels: the word and the concept. By Angels he means beautiful, shapely, very young women wearing only a garter and a G-string, who will dance for (but not with) any man who slips pounds 10 into the garter. They are trained to hold eye-contact with their benefactor, so it often takes two or even three dances before the man can tear his eyes away and allow them to travel lower. When all's said and done, you don't pay pounds 10 to gaze into an Angel's eyes.

HOW much you value money depends on your background and since mine was working- class Sheffield, I respect it. Being poor means not having enough coal to put on the fire in winter or only having meat once a week. If you believe everything you read in the papers, I was worth pounds 12m at my peak, which I always thought was a conservative estimate. The wonderful thing about being wealthy is not having to worry, knowing that the cheque won't bounce.

PETER STRINGFELLOW, nightclub owner: Would I employ a fat person as a waitress, a receptionist, at the bar? NO] High profile, presentable staff require a certain look and style that reflects the glamorous surroundings in which they work. However, my first chef is very overweight, as is my second chef, and it doesn't bother me because they are tremendously talented and not in the public gaze.

OF COURSE, the really big thing about Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader of North Korea, is that he is fat. Everybody who writes or talks about him mentions the fact - even BBC Television News felt obliged to describe him as 'chubby'. The best photograph shows him grinning inanely next to his late dad, his obese form militarily clad and largely concealing a distant mountain range.

'I love London. It's very special to me. I've been coming here for ever. I even lived here for a while. London is my second home. Fans here are so loyal and have been since I came over at 18 with the Benny Goodman band.

THE NIGHTCLUB owner Peter Stringfellow is about to import from America something that he intends to make a vital element of British business culture. So exciting is it that Mr Stringfellow likens himself to the man who brought the first potato; but, unlike the potato, Mr Stringfellow's thing is staggeringly beautiful, but must not on any account be tasted, or similar. His thing is girls, performing in dance clubs. ('Dance clubs' being a euphemism for places where women take their clothes off for a fiver and dance on shiny black tables.)