Spectator, The: Give me a break

Oh dear, I do wish I hadn't written that happy-sounding column a few weeks ago about my brilliant book plan because it will have given you the wrong idea. In fact, I'm feeling quite unspeakably miserable at the moment. It seems that no matter how hard I work or how much money I earn it's never quite enough to cover my massive outgoings. And they're not fun outgoings we're talking about like, maybe, whores and crack cocaine. I just mean boring but essential family stuff like insurance, mortgage payments and school fees. And hanging over me is the awful knowledge that it can only get worse, what with our Enron chancellor following the world economy towards the brink of collapse, not to mention the latest round of tax hikes and the whopping extra fees for when Ivo starts at JAPs in September. And I just so do not deserve this. I'm nice and clever and talented and funny and it's about time I had a break.

But, at the moment, the only breaks I'm getting are imaginary ones, thanks to this terrible new addiction I've acquired - the Celebdaq. This is the stock exchange on the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) where you can buy and sell shares in celebrities. All you have to do is register and you're automatically given 10,000 credits to spend. The good thing is that, even though it doesn't cost you a penny, it feels as exciting as gambling with your own money. But this is also the bad thing because it means you spend far more time than is healthy micromanaging your portfolio and deluding yourself that your massive pretend gains somehow compensate for your real world losses.

It reminds me a bit of my brief period playing the markets during the Internet boom. Now, as then, you base your investment decisions on the flimsiest information, ever prey to rampers and rumour-- mongers, never really having a clue about the names you're buying into. Will Mellor? Kwame Kwei-Armah? Well, quite. But these are the sort of people you need to know about (they're both in the Comic Relief celebrity version of Fame Academy) if you want to do well.

The one that has been really puzzling me is Ms Dynamite. My random portfolio generator bought me some of her shares at the beginning and they've been going up ever since, but it's not as if she has done anything newsworthy or interesting in days. I was glad to see it puzzled the team on Celebdaq (BBC3, Friday) too. `Maybe people are buying her simply because they like her,' said its presenter Patrick O'Connell, slightly disgustedly.

What's brilliant about O'Connell - and indeed the programme itself - is that it takes `the Daq' every bit as seriously as the real stock exchange.

O'Connell used to be a TV business reporter (on 9/11 he overslept and narrowly avoided being in a meeting in the World Trade Center when the first plane struck) and he has something of the sneering ruthlessness of the Chris Morris character from The Day Today. His market analyst Libby Potter is similarly catty. If Patocon and Libpot were tradable options, I'd buy heavily into both.

Would I have been happy if my mate Andrew Roberts had come a huge cropper in Secrets Of Leadership (BBC2, Friday)? Well, possibly. Let's not pretend that schadenfreude isn't one of life's great pick-- me-ups. But I have to say I thought the first two episodes on Hitler and Churchill did an absolutely brilliant job. Indeed, I very nearly sent him an email to congratulate him.

Then I thought, the bastard's quite pleased enough with himself already and besides, if I'm not a duke, a billionaire or a former prime minister he's not going to be interested anyway.

The title sounds like something out of the self-help section, asking what various great men have to teach us about leadership. But I suppose if you're a would-be TV historian that's what you've got to do these days. You can't just go - as I'm sure most of them would like - `Hey, I know shitloads about Winston Churchill, so how about you pay me to do a programme with lots of shots of me looking great in all the places in the world he ever went?' You have to pretend you're bringing something new to the party.

And, actually, I think Roberts did. His Hitler programme made the neat point that, contrary to popular myth, the Wehrmacht at the beginning of war was not some robotic machine but a surprisingly flexible unit which thanks to the Auftragstaktik (`Mission Command') system gave ordinary soldiers a lot of freedom to take the initiative during battle. It was only when Hitler abandoned his hands-off approach and began taking all his generals' decisions for them that he became seriously unstuck.

The Churchill one, too, cunningly alighted on that little-known phase in the war when, in charge of the admiralty, he was absolutely useless. He meddled in other departments' affairs, he spun more outrageously than Alastair Campbell, he changed his plans for the defence of Norway so often that it ended in disaster. Yet when he became prime minister, his hands-on approach suddenly turned into a great strength. So the very thing that made Churchill was what undid Hitler. Which means, presumably, that management theory is bollocks.

But who cares? We like the programmes, we like Roberts's style and we particularly appreciate the series's apparently encyclopedic knowledge of jaunty Nazi marching tunes.