Celebrity memoirs setting sights on the Christmas market

When the book of the end of the world gets written, the title writes itself: The Four Memoirs of Katie Price. It won't exactly be a mystery, but it will be an epic: a whole civilisation crumbles before your very eyes, or at least the book trade. It will sell well in Tesco because Tesco will certainly survive the end of the world.

Now Jordan's memoirs aren't so much books as stuffed book covers, the modern form of "something for the weekend, sir?" if you're spending the weekend in the shed. They're a brand name, pre-sold from OK! magazine to the darker reaches of ITV3. They're the ideal celebrity book, the kind that gives publishers a cashflow beyond their wildest dreams, although not as much as you might think after supermarket discounts, and all they have to do is choose the right celebrity.

They upend the logic of the old kind of publishing: Dickens used to complain on his American tours that people turned out even to watch him wash, but Dickens did it the old-fashioned way. He wrote the books first.

The new way, the numbers are extraordinary: publishers play Vegas high rollers. Sometimes, as with the first memoir of Paul O'Grady (sales: 684,000), a very good book goes supernova. Sometimes, as with Ant and Dec, a doubtful book shifts 309,083 copies and there may be a profit. But the trade felt let down by Peter Kay's second book, remember; it sold "only" 249,534 copies in hardback, which is still rather more than McEwan, Amis and Barnes in a good year to put together.

The trade has only one problem: any sleb might deliver, but all slebs have agents so the gamble is expensive. The logic is more Hollywood Boulevard than Bloomsbury Square: lose money almost all the time, then make it huge from a few big hits.

Our problem is more basic: it's the books. All too often, they're a lethal slurry of chat, enough to drown you in trivia and saccharine. All too often, you remember luvvies get on-stage so nobody can interrupt them.

Sometimes you really want a memoir, as with the story of how Shirley Bassey stormed out of Tiger Bay to proper stardom, how she crossed race lines so solid nobody white even thought about them. What we get is John L Williams' higher cuttings job Miss Shirley Bassey (Quercus 16.99.) He's got bits of a smashing story, all threat and passion, but he doesn't have Bassey. He can detail the sexual crimes of her first father - in her family, you had several fathers - because he has the court records; but on what it felt like to be stuck in semi-black, semi-nude touring shows, or why she made her unlikely marriage, or what was going on behind the tabloid headlines, he's much less sure. The book exposes, but it doesn't reveal.

Alexei Sayle, on the other hand, reveals - what it was to grow up Commie in Liverpool in Stalin Ate My Homework (Sceptre 20). The book's fresh, funny and artful; it tells you things you don't know in a voice you want to hear.

It was Lenin who came down the chimney with his Christmas presents, so his parents said. Holidays tended to be at miners' campsites behind the Iron Curtain, the house was full of Soviet Weeklys his mother felt it would be disrespectful to throw away, and in Paris, he didn't know what to think about the Eiffel Tower because "as far as I knew, the party didn't have a line on it".

Some of it is very sharp indeed. Sayle stares at the weird culture of the old British Left - no dreams between shiny mechanical futures and odd rural idylls - and says out out loud what everyone else is too polite to say: the one thing the Left never did appreciate was "anything that was working class".

Now Sayle has never committed a memoir before. Michael Caine is on his second The Elephant to Hollywood, (Hodder and Stoughton 20) for the best of reasons: 18 years ago, he wrote a book because he thought his acting career was over. Since then, he's won a couple of Oscars, and the work, friends, and travels give him rich material. He's engaging, and a proper storyteller: you laugh at the nightmare of making a war movie on the same desert sand as a Western, horses stampeding at the sight of the tanks, and meet a thousand names. There's a slight obbligato of righteous annoyance that Maurice Micklewhite was underestimated just because he was London working class, but even that makes gags: "I didn't have a clue who the proletariat were - and was very surprised to find out I was one of them."

Barry Humphries is back for the third time (Handling Edna, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 18.99) and it shows. Mind you, he knows his business: he invents a literary agent who says "the only way for a showbiz autobiography to become a bestseller was to include something about a deviant uncle". He pops one on to p288, for safety's sake.

But the material is getting a bit thin, so Humphries is driven to a kind of po-mo device that doesn't seem to convince him: he's writing about his epic troubles, and his career as "manager" with the bawling, gladdie-tossing, gigastar housewife from Moonee Ponds, Dame Edna Everage herself. He bluffs the monster by calling the book an "unauthorised biography". "I hoped," he writes, "Edna would never read it and discover herself to be a mere figment of my imagination."

At the very start, he wonders "how I could ever have allowed one seemingly shy and uneducated woman to ruin my life". This is interesting: how a truly fierce character can persecute a creator (think of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.) The trouble is, the idea doesn't shape the story so much as jut into it like splinters, so we don't forget the new excuse for these re-runs of old stories.

Still, there are stories. Jo Brand wrote a good, warm autobiography; we spent 250,000 buying it, and now she's been brought back much too soon: with jottings, leftovers and peelings (Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down, Headline Review 20). Many of these notes are as revealing as "weirdly, I can't remember much about my second Montreal trip". She tells us Dawn French is "lovely and totally comfortable in her skin". The publishers want 20 for this. Even Brand is embarrassed: "I won't be picking up my trusty electronic pen for a good few years to come," she says. "God willing."

This is a good idea, because commercial logic has changed her out of recognition. She isn't the agreeably sour comedian we know; she's a paid-up member of the new commissar class. Put it this way: she was proud to be seen with Gordon Brown.

She's very sure she's right, down to finding racism in Fawlty Towers (it is, I agree, rather down on the English.) She says she just doesn't like "expat types" which is quite a swathe: the Portsmouth brickie on the Costas to the aid worker in some valley in Swat; and she knows her prejudice is all right because she's all right. She must be: her Mum, she insists on telling us, was "a very senior social worker". A hereditary member of the commissar class, then.

She disapproves of the Bullingdon Club wrecking a restaurant and then paying for it; a ludicrous, ugly moment, even if it harmed nobody who couldn't afford it. But she thinks it's just a prank to party hard with her mates in the flat above the flat of "a man who I think worked on a building site", keeping the poor sod awake, and then to steal his one and only pair of working boots so he can't work. Obviously his anger at the drunk luvvies was quite unreasonable.

She also deals with "the critic" who is a "strange animal". Well, touch. "To assume that your opinion is more valuable than anyone else's surely makes you a bit of a big-headed twat," she says. Mind you, that also describes a whole generation of howling, didactic bores, the ones who didn't know much but didn't like Thatcher, who called themselves comics and made their first money being agreed with in small clubs.

Nothing personal, you understand, because Jo Brand will be back again, and funny again. But meanwhile, bad luck and industrial logic make her turn out a book even when she has no material, and something rather nasty shows through. It's enough to make you wonder if sleb books really do the slebs any favours.