Celebrities get maligned a great deal in the media, but we often get to see the other side of the story. Duncan Bannatyne invited my wife and I to his London birthday dinner on Saturday night, at the delightful Murano’s restaurant just off Park Lane in Mayfair.

I later discovered the dinner for 40 was actually donated to a charity by Gordon Ramsey, who owns the restaurant. Mr Bannatyne then paid £25,000 to the charity to stage the dinner. Two musical friends of Duncan’s entertained the assembled and such was the hospitality we didn’t have the legs to then go on to the Ivy Club with Duncan’s delightful wife Jo and other members of their family.

Next Saturday he stages a celebration closer to home in Darlington, where 250 friends and relatives will dance the night away. The man certainly is the host with the most.

I have been inundated with calls today suggesting that my friend and former client Avram Grant is returning to management in this country and Portsmouth. Part of me hopes not because Tony Adams is a honest, decent man who deserves to be a success at the South Coast club. But should he move on, Avram will make a great successor.

I remember taking him to dinner with five of Fleet Street’s finest last year and we spent five hours talking football, dissecting the tactics of some of football’s top teams and everyone left feeling he had a real chance of lifting the Champions League, even though he had not reached the quarter final at that stage.

But even he could not legislate for John Terry slipping at the historic moment when his penalty kick would have lifted club football’s finest trophy…