Quite. I don't know how the hell he managed to get on the telly. I'd rather watch a pile of recently severed puppies' heads decompose than sit through an hour of his unbearable smugness.

Coogan is a considerable way from a favourite of mine too – as is Hugh Grant. Or Max Mosely, for that matter.

But as you say, there is a great deal of difference between seeking the attention of the media at all times and having a career that puts you in the spotlight.

Aside from this particular topic - or alongside it - who defines "in the public interest" and how do you define it in such a way that it both protects privacy but allows for those items which are in the public interest to be reported?

An example: back when John Major was still PM, one of his junior ministers at the time, Tim Yeo, got up at the Conservative Party conference in October and gave a speech slamming single mothers as a major problem in society etc.

About a month later, it was revealed by a paper (can't recall which) that the married Yeo had been having an affair with a single woman who was pregnant with his child.

That's in the public interest – not because he had sex, but because he was in government at the time and it was clearly a case of 'not do as I do but do as I say'.

Max Mosley's kinky proclivities is not – unless he has, at some stage, stood up and, for instance, used his public position to claim that kinky people were pervs who should be shot (or something to that effect). The Screws had to try to set him up in such a way that he would make a Nazi salute and therefore give them some justification for publication – on the basis of who his father was.

Similarly, the revelations about Angus Deayton – and nobody was remotely interested in what he'd done that was illegal (snort coke) but only his having sex with prostitutes. Deayton, through HIGNFY had ridiculed the double standards of minister and others, but since he had not himself ever made a statement about what he considered morally acceptable etc, he was not himself guilty of those double standards – which would have given a public interest justification.

To be frank, I suspect that most of us in the trade know and completely understand this. It's not rocket science.

It may not be rocket science to those "in the trade", but I suspect when it comes time to put some sort of proper privacy laws onto the statute books the trade won't be writing them. Indeed, it will be the one pulling at the edges of any legislation trying to find loopholes under which it can publish salacious material dressed up as public interest to increase circulation.

For every clear cut case, there will be one which sits somewhere on the margins, and those margins will be set by judges dictating precedent. Given the ways things went with super-injunctions and the judiciary - grant first, ask questions later - it's likely to lead to public interest having a very narrow legal definition and many worthwhile stories prevented from being published.

So the status quo, then? What we have is not acceptable. We have commoditised private life – with enormous cost. The story of the Watson's is just utterly tragic and depressing. So too of Mosley's son. The grotesque treatment meted out to the like of Christopher Jeffries – it is absolutely unacceptable.

Mind, I keep asking (and people keep avoiding – and this is not aimed at you specifically, Andy), what about the responsibility of those who buy the tripe? They're at least as culpable and at least as pathetic as those who write and publish it. Without them, there's no market ...

Status quo in the short term, but the more this story runs and grows the louder the clamour is going to become for a "proper" privacy law. The press may want to start thinking very carefully about how it is seen to behave, lest it reaps the consequences by having to operate with one hand behind its back in future.

You haven't been listening to the Colombian president again have you? That's like blaming the users for the drug trade - just because someone buys Heat magazine once a week doesn't make them responsible for Milly Dowler's phone being hacked.

I wouldn't be so keen to describe someone as "pathetic" on the basis of their reading choices either - different strokes for different folks, as Max Mosley might have said...

I've no love for that slapper at all, but when it comes to access to her son, I think she's actually in the right. She's the one who's shagged her way to fame, not him..

There was a good article in the Guardian by alex bailin There must be a balance and the treatment of the Dowlers was inexcuseable. However, if it comes down to a choice between upsetting a film actor, or curtailing good investigative journalists and their abilities to root out corruption, then I'd be firmly in the journalists' camp. For me, the star of the Leveson Inquirey is Robert Jay QC. I certainly enjoyed his gentle admonishments to Hugh Grant, that opinion, supposition, or what his friends believed were not actually evidence...... So that'll be 95% of his case filed in the waste paper bin then!

There was a good article in the Guardian by alex bailin There must be a balance and the treatment of the Dowlers was inexcuseable. However, if it comes down to a choice between upsetting a film actor, or curtailing good investigative journalists and their abilities to root out corruption, then I'd be firmly in the journalists' camp. For me, the star of the Leveson Inquirey is Robert Jay QC. I certainly enjoyed his gentle admonishments to Hugh Grant, that opinion, supposition, or what his friends believed were not actually evidence...... So that'll be 95% of his case filed in the waste paper bin then!

She's also the one who's been quite happy to play on the fact he's severely disabled in newspaper and magazine stories when she's wanted some public sympathy...