Tales of the City: Not the steamiest of affairs

I have in my top drawer a marvellous collection of kitsch postcards from the late Edwardian era. They are works of indescribable naïveté, full of hearts the size of sofa cushions, moonlit kisses on painted lakes, feelings too deep to be spoken, babies and cherubs, awkward-looking couples seated on horseshoes or sickle moons, hearty wink-and-nudge salutations from patronising swains to their blushing valentines. There are even little sketches of vegetables with the hots for each other. An importunate swede propositions a blushing tomato with the words, "I have eyes only for you dear." And they keep popping into my head as I read the Ulrika Jonsson confessions.

When did you ever read such a joyless record of a sexual liaison? I've ploughed through zoological reports of the mating habits of the slow loris that communicated more passion. The fact that Sven first made a pass at Ulrika while she was opening the door of her fridge speaks volumes. He clearly likes things somewhere down around freezing point. How was the sex, Ulrika? "Sven was generous with his affection." Good heavens. What crazed, urgent, molten confidences did he pour down the telephone lines when you were kept apart before the World Cup? "We exchanged terms of endearment, and said how much we missed each other." Golly Moses. When Sven got rid of Nancy Dell'Olio and invited you over for a ferocious seeing-to, how did you feel? "I felt uncomfortable but curious at the same time. I wondered where in the street I should leave my car, in case it was spotted." How did she cope with the twin impulses of guilt and jealousy on finding herself in Sven and Nancy's shared home? "As he entered their bedroom, I told him that I hoped he didn't think I was going in there. He paused and conceded that perhaps it wasn't the best idea. We took up residence in the guest room."

Stop! Stop!! Enough with the towering passion. Perhaps this is all the fault of Ms Jonsson's stilted English. Perhaps she is a mistress of Scandanavian understatement, who is leaving us to imagine the volcanic lust that seethes between the lines of her starched and tightly-buttoned prose. But I can't help thinking that this love story, the one that's supposed to be rocking the nation, seems to be the fatal attraction between two Woodentops. The only trace of emotion appears when Ulrika sees a news photograph showing her new beloved taking his long-term girlfriend out to dinner, after all his protestations about wanting to dump her. Ulrika cannot fathom how this could possibly happen, nor how he could fail to tell the world about his "generous affection" for her, how he could fail to split up with Nancy, sell their house, disrupt his life and nip round to Ulrika's with a ring from Asprey. Mystifying, isn't it? It's not as if he had much else on at the time, give or take the odd World Cup.

One of the Edwardian love-cards shows a wooden clothes-peg telling an angular blonde Miss Knife that she's cut him to the heart. It seems a perfect illustration of this cold, forensic revenge for a distinctly bloodless affair.

Is it New York? Is it Prague? No ? it?s downtown Croydon

I've never really thought of Croydon as the Prague of south London – I try not to think of Croydon at all if I can help it – but the huge and horrible Greater London suburb is about to be reborn as a glamorous movie location. A man called Hugh West, the head of a star-struck little outfit called the Croydon Film Commission, is organising special coach trips next week for 100 film directors, producers and location hunters, showing them the district's streets, shopping malls, gardens and pedestrianised walkways – including, presumably, the Fairfield Halls and the Whitgift Centre, those twin monuments of lose-the-will-to-live Sixties architecture, the unspeakable council building and the nu-metal kids hanging around outside HMV looking for someone to mug.

The lucky movie executives will also be shown 3,000 photographs of Croydon's loveliest views to persuade them to set their next movie in this bustling metropolitan heartland. And yes, if you were looking to remake Mean Streets, or produce a more menacing Boyz N the Hood, or fill the screen with threatening youths like in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, I could see how a certain suburb of south London might fill the bill. The name, though, will always be a drawback. Would you go and see Escape from West Croydon? Would Martin Scorsese jump at the chance of making Gangs of Croydon High Street Near McDonald's? I don't think so.

But the film-commission people have a cunning secondary plan. They want to persuade film-makers to use Croydon as a cheap stand-in (like a body double) for New York or Prague. You might think this makes as much sense as casting Gareth Gates as the lead in Terminator 3, but Mr West is an ambitious man. "We have 50 buildings more than 16 storeys high," he explains, "and bits of Croydon could easily pass for New York, especially shot from street level."

He has a point, I suppose. If you filmed a cashpoint queue outside a bank, it would look much the same in Birmingham or Brest-Litovsk, once you'd changed the bank logo and the people's clothing. If you've got grass, sunshine, dogs and buggies, you could as easily be on Beckenham Common as in Central Park, provided you never looked up beyond the tree-line. But by this logic, anywhere could pass for a bit of anywhere else. So I'm going to start a similar venture in my backyard in Dulwich. I'll drive a few location finders up Calton Avenue and Court Lane, pointing out the place's astonishing resemblance to a leafy side-street in San Francisco. Why, they could remake Bullitt in modern London SE21. The car chase would be a problem, though – we've got some nasty sleeping policemen in Turney Road...

That would be kiss'n'telling

Svennis the Menace apart, has biography ever been such a hot subject? Not a day goes by without another hardbacked time bomb heading the news agenda: the Currie diaries, the Clark diaries, the Benn diaries, Joe Haines's revelations about Harold Wilson, Princess Diana's minder's memoir, Ulrika, John Birt... The public thirst for tale-telling has surely never been stronger.

I wondered what Richard Holmes, the bestselling biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the nation's foremost connoisseur of life-writing, made of it all. "We've been here before," said Holmes. "The phrase 'publish and be damned' goes back to the Duke of Wellington, after his mistress, Harriette Wilson, threatened to publish her memoirs in 1825. Many of Byron's friends published shocking memoirs, especially Lady Caroline Lamb – kiss'n'tell books before the phrase was invented. Coleridge wrote in his magazine The Friend: 'This is emphatically the Age of Personality'. We think these things are unique to our period, and we're wrong."

What is new, said Holmes, is a shift in sensibility. "There's a tradition in English autobiography for quite rigorous, Puritan self-examination. Now we get books that are exercises in self-justification." He might have been talking about Geri Halliwell's second autobiography, but it's hard to imagine a man of his discrimination even knowing such a thing existed. The culture of celebrity memoirs is, he thinks, part of a modern phenomenon – the frenzy for personal renown. "Modern fame is an oxymoron, of course," he mused, "because its obsolescence is guaranteed. But it's interesting philosophically, because it shows the individual striking out against anonymity, against globalisation. It's a form of secular salvation in a post-Christian world."

Good Lord. And you thought Ulrika was just a minx with a grudge and a £700,000 advance?