Tales Of The City: There's nowt as strange as celebrities

How weird must it be, to hear the most famous woman in the world plug your product on prime-time TV? Picture, if you will, the people who run the Timothy Taylor brewers when they settled down in front of Jonathan Ross's chat-show last weekend, and heard Madonna describe what she loves about British life. "I figured out how to drive on the wrong side of the road," she told Ross, "and I've learnt to love ale. Timothy Taylor's is the best real ale." Bloody hell. Did their jaws drop? Did their hearts start to pound? Minutes later, she was at it again, offering a heady insight into the private life of the Ritchies as they sit, of an evening, incognito in the Dog and Duck in Soho, where the attitudinous Queen of Pop apparently gets her round in like one of the lads. "I wear flat caps," she said, "and I speak low and order a pint and a half of Timothy Taylor." She did not dilate further on her bar technique. She failed to reveal whether she favours a straight glass, a box of logs (ie matches) and a pack of pork scratchings to accompany her order. But with this off-the-cuff bit of product placement, she sent a whole industry into a loop.

I'm not a marketing consultant, but I'd estimate the publicity value of that casual double endorsement as in the region of £92,000,000,000,000, though that may err on the side of caution. The big brewers such as Courage, Youngs and Fullers must be gnashing their teeth with envy – or sending a dray horse round to Madonna's family pad in Marylebone for her to try a pint of Directors or Winter Warmer or London Pride. For Taylors is a small, independent, family-run brewer in Keithley, West Yorkshire. It's been going since 1858, employs 50 people, owns 22 local pubs and sends 900 barrels of Landlord pale ale (Madonna's favourite) to all points of the British Isles, including the softie drinkers of central London. It's not a large operation. It's not the kind of business that picks up celebrity name-checks every day, like Bulgari or Lalique.

"We were seriously thrilled," says Charles Dent, managing director of Taylor's. "She's obviously got great taste. The brewing industry has been dying for someone to say something nice about beer for ages. We're the last independent brewer left in the West Riding, and we spend twice as much on our malt and hops as some brewers I could name. I hope," he adds, his voice trembling with anticipation, "that Madonna will be able to put Keithley on her tour itinerary – though we might be a little overwhelmed by a visit from her."

"The whole thing is totally bizarre," says the brewer's marketing man, Robert Clayton. "This opens up a totally new market. Timothy Taylor has always had the slogan 'Beer for men o' the north'. Having a female global megastar promoting it, well..." His voice trails away as he contemplates a hitherto-untapped audience of a million rock chicks, from Wapping to Woodstock, blowing the froth off pints of Landlord, belching and wiping their mouths with the back of their hands.

Timothy Taylor, sadly, has no advertising budget. It sells all the beer it brews, and isn't concerned, most of the time, to expand its supply. But should it require an ad campaign, it needs look no further than the Heineken campaign, in which a posh girl learns to say "The water in Majorca don't taste like what it oughter" in cockney. Cue Madonna, perched on a stool at a Yorkshire bar, trying, through sips of Landlord ale, to enunciate the words: "By 'eck, we supped some las' night..."

A house and £100k? It's the cat's whiskers

I've cudgelled my brains, but simply cannot work out how the trustees of the late Mrs Margaret Layne's estate plan to spend £100,000 a year on "maintaining and caring for" her black cat, Tinker, who also inherits her £350,000 house in Harrow. Where do they start? Whiskas, Go-Cat and other bog-standard feline comestibles will be replaced by daily dishes of spatchcock poussin with asparagus and foie gras from Sketch. Instead of saucers of milk, he'll have to get used to organic double buttermilk from the sacred cows of Udaipur. Instead of spending the afternoons snoozing on a wall and watching passers-by, he'll be given a PlayStation 3 and a plasma-screen television on which to watch re-runs of Bacardi Breezer commercials (uncut version). Should he experience a primal urge to chase and kill something, a dozen professional grouse-shoot beaters will trail through the garden, driving hundreds of pathetic robins and field-mice into his clutches.

All that will account for – what? About 20 grand. So how will they spend the rest? Cats don't like travelling, swimming pools, yachts or lapdance clubs, the traditional routes of the idle spendthrift. What they tend to want is a large human tummy on which to knead their paws. So there is now a lucrative employment opportunity out there, for someone of portly and sedentary demeanour, who doesn't mind sitting in an armchair all day, waiting for the pampered Tinker to sit on his or her abdomen. It may seem boring but, at £80,000pa, it beats working.

And thou shalt not worship false idols...

I've been doing some publicity for my new book – about the effects that visiting the cinema has on the emergent consciousness – and hearing of other people's experiences in the temples of the Silver Screen. My favourite so far concerns a small Catholic boy who went, aged six, to see Herbie Goes Bananas, walked down the aisle with his mother as the lights were going down and, on reaching the appropriate row, instinctively genuflected to the screen before finding his seat. I know The Love Bug and its sequels mean a lot to some people, but surely that's taking Disney-worship a little far.