It's bedlam for Big Brother inmates

· In the 18th century people used to go to the Royal Bethlehem hospital in Moorfields, known as Bedlam, to view the lunatics and laugh at their antics. Visitors paid one penny each. In a typical year the London hospital took around £400, a huge sum in those days, making Bedlam a great tourist attraction, the equivalent of the London Eye or Madame Tussauds.

It strikes me that is exactly what has happened with the latest Big Brother on Channel 4. Though it's been excoriated by just about everyone, including much of the tabloid press, the present series is getting the highest ratings of the lot. In the past there were loveable Scouse builders and gentle lesbian nuns. Now the house is full of weird, illiterate, dysfunctional, rather frightening people, all of whom have one thing in common - if they sat next to you on the bus, you'd get off at the next stop. The glass screen of our televisions is the equivalent of the bars at Bedlam, allowing us to mock their stupidity, ignorance and demented behaviour while remaining completely safe ourselves.

This from Channel 4, which this week had to close down the film arm which made Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and My Beautiful Laundrette. Next they could go the whole way and devote the next Big Brother to people who actually are lunatics, the sort who expose themselves in parks, snarl at small children, and gibber uncontrollably. Forget making good films; that's risky and expensive. Instead we could all have a really good laugh at the nutters, and it would cost the company almost nothing.

· For a long time now politicians have banged on about how Britain is the fourth largest economy in the world. It's supposed to make us feel good, or, in some cases bad, as in "why is it that, in the fourth largest economy in the world, we cannot get the trains to run on time?" or whatever gripe the speaker has.

But this was always an artificial statistic. The GNP mea sures all economic activity, and includes millions of people who earn money without actually creating wealth, such as those people who sign you up for charities in the street, financial advisers, security personnel, and so on. And the figure was measured by the greatly overvalued pound.

I'm told it's too early to say, but as sterling falls against the euro, it looks as if we will have to accept we are, by any realistic measure, back below France. I shall listen carefully for the first instance of a politician saying, "why, as the fifth largest economy in the world, can we not ..."

· Monday saw the annual dinner at the Red Fort, in Soho, for Glenys Kinnock's charity, One World Action. Like so many modern charity operations, it's extremely smooth and glitzy, with superb Indian food (the Indian cricket team were dining in the basement as we arrived), lashings of booze and terrific company. You have the pleasingly vague buzz induced by doing good works while getting pissed.

The guest speaker was Will Self, who at the last minute had replaced John Simpson, the liberator of Kabul. Mr Self's speech was interesting; perhaps more discursive in its nature than focused. Much of it was devoted to speeches he had made at other occasions, though there was a story about a man who got himself literally crucified for his art, which I didn't entirely follow, but which did put me in mind of number 738 in my series of jokes that are irrationally funny. To me, anyway.

Mr Steiner has been making nails in New York City for years. Feeling he could do better, he goes to a Madison Avenue advertising agency, who promise to come up with a great idea in a week. So he returns to be shown a man in a crown of thorns, nailed to a cross. A voice-over intones: "When you need a job well done, use Steiner's nails!"

He goes mad. "This is crazy!" he yells. "You guys are outta your minds! Do you know how many gentiles buy my nails? You gotta do something else. I want subtle, I want understated, okay?"

Two weeks later he's back. They show him the tape. This time there's a man in a crown of thorns with holes in his hands and feet, running across the desert brush. Next we see a Roman chariot with two centurions, lashing their horses to catch up with the man who, meanwhile, has reached a crossroads. He looks right, left, right again, then races off to the left.

Moments later the chariot arrives. They too look frantically both ways. They stare, they peer, they see nothing. So one centurion turns to the other and says angrily: "Dis would never 'a happened if we'd used Steiner's nails!"

· Years ago I quoted a story about Tom Stoppard which delighted me. So I was sad to get a note from him saying it wasn't true. Which it wasn't, at least in some details. The real story appears in a new biography of the playwright (Double Act, by Ira Nadel, Methuen). He was being interviewed for a job on the London Evening Standard by the late Charles Wintour, co-incidentally the father of my colleague Patrick Wintour.

"Mr Wintour asked me if I were interested in politics. Thinking all journalists should be, I told him I was. He then asked me who the current home secretary was. Of course I had no idea, and in any event it was an unfair question. I'd only admitted to an interest in politics. I hadn't claimed I was obsessed with the subject."

· Another colleague, Hugo Young, told me in this week of Barbara Castle's memorial gathering about his encounter with her 10 years ago at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Hugo had chaired a session on political memoirs, and she had talked about her own diaries.

That night he and his wife returned to the Georgian Queen's Hotel in the centre of Cheltenham, to see Lady Castle sweep down the stairs robed in a magnificent diaphanous blue silk peignoir. She had descended from her room to ask someone at reception to unclip her necklace so she could go to bed.

It's a wonderful picture: this proud 80-year-old woman determined to look as superb as she ever had, practical enough to get help from anyone who could provide it, defiant and slightly pathetic at the same time. It was evidently a true "I'm ready for my close-up now, Mr de Mille" moment.