You have to worry when you start rooting for Peter Andre. But such is the strange power of All About Us: My Story (John Blake, £17.99/offer £16.19). What? You don’t know who Peter is? Fearsome pecs, looks like a squashed Action Man, married to Jordan, aka Katie Price.
The key is in that horrible title. He’s known more for being married to her rather than for anything himself. But anyway . . . Sex in the stables! Katie’s post-natal depression! Her dramatic change of personality when she drinks! He loves her, he really does.
Similar blunt desperation in Chantelle’s Living The Dream (Century, £16.99/£15.29), the tone of which matches her permanently awestruck Essex burr: “Oh my God!” It’s the classic tale of nowheresville to Chinawhite: “Who do you ring when you’ve called every model agency there is and they don’t want to take you on?” Terry Wogan’s Mustn’t Grumble (Orion £18.99/£16.99) contains broadsides against reality stars, and those who are popular on television being offered radio shows. He is affable but also spiky: he rounds off by saying he’ll choose when to desert the airwaves, no one else.
Other key revelations this year: Gordon Ramsay (Humble Pie, HarperCollins, £18.99/£15.99) was chef to the Australian soap opera king Reg Grundy; Jack Osbourne (21 Years Gone, Macmillan, £16.99/£15.29) had 30 nannies; Billie Piper (Growing Pains, Hodder, £18.99/£16.99) imagined her future husband would be called Dave; Leslie Phillips (The Autobiography, Orion, £18.99/£16.99) dreams about an epitaph on his grave which reads “Hello and Goodbye”. Michael Barrymore (Awight Now, Simon & Schuster, £18.99/£16.99) met his boyfriend at the Fridge nightclub in Brixton, South London; Kerry Katona (Too Much, Too Young, Ebury £16.99/£15.29) has been through SO MUCH CRAP that it almost makes those Iceland ads forgivable.
In Making Waves (Hodder, £18.99/£16.99), David Hasselhoff takes crowing pleasure in how his fame has flowered despite his being a laughing stock. Key fact? Some of the breast implants done for Baywatch’s female stars were so heavy that they “couldn’t stand up straight”. But they sure knew howto float.