A NIGELLA LAWSON cookery book, an Ian Rankin thriller and a debut novel by a Cambridge undergraduate are among 24 books to be featured in a new television book club, which the BBC insists will not be a "copy cat" version of the successful Richard & Judy reading group.

This week's book under scrutiny was The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury pounds 7.99). A rich and many-layered novel, it garnered an appropriately complex mix of responses. It was thumbs up from studio guests Thelma Barlow, who read the dialogue "like a script", and Richard E Grant. However, he clashed with Judy over the central character, the curmudgeonly paterfamilias Charles Judd: "depressing!" claimed Judy, while Grant, appropriately for such a skilled comic actor, was the only person to point out that the book is also bitterly, blackly funny. The featured book club found the book very rewarding: "human and honest", "well-crafted" but also "disturbing and sad".

I'm recovering from a minor operation. Stacey insisted that I go and see my doctor about a mole that she was worried about. I was fairly adamant that if it was regarding a mole then a vet might be more appropriate.

"WE'RE NOT Morecambe and Wise" - as a statement of the blinding obvious, Gordon Brown's opening line on the Richard and Judy show yesterday was impeccable.

FORTUNATELY, ONE doesn't come across that many sex-pest bosses these days, even as a temp, but when you do, it doesn't help that you belong to the itinerant workforce. Dirty Boss, you see, is more interested in the power kick than a sexual thrill. So putting him in charge of someone who has no track record with the company and no employment rights is like putting a bull in a pen with a toddler dressed in a red romper suit. I've heard tales from other temps about the gropes behind the filing cabinet, the wandering eyes, the petty threats, but this is, amazingly, the first time I've encountered it in the flesh.

Censorship can be a good thing, argues David Aaronovitch, but not when led by public opinion

Sunday

In his engraving The Idle Apprentice, William Hogarth recorded the details of a public execution at Tyburn in the middle of the 18th century. There is the condemned man arriving on a wagon, sat upon his own coffin, an assortment of hawkers selling drinks and souvenirs, a preacher or two, and a 1,000-strong mass of self-righteous ghouls and gawpers.

FOR THIS observer, the most disturbing aspect of a turbulent, giddy week has been finding myself in complete agreement with Boris Johnson, the Telegraph's raving Tory Boy who famously complained about being "stitched up" on Have I Got News For You last year.

(Such as: Richard and Judy, do you ever get sick of the sight of each other?)

(Such as: John Peel, if you're such a nice guy why do you call your wife the Pig?)

It seems only fair to begin with a minor clarification. Certain passages in last week's column - the ones which could conceivably have been headlined "Time for this Spineless Schmoozer to Shuffle Off Back to Radio" - might have led some readers to believe that John Inverdale had turned into the sporting equivalent of Richard Madeley. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, as his interview with Will Carling on last Monday's edition of On Side (BBC1) fully demonstrated. Sport on TV welcomes this opportunity to set the record straight, and naturally regrets any confusion that may have been caused.

PERHAPS IT was the pressures of time or of having to perform in front of two and a half million viewers, but in the end the live television trial of Viagra was, literally, a bit of a flop.

Edinburgh Television Festival: Woodward says TV distorted her trial, while fly-on-the-wall shows take centre stage