My prime objective at the Guardian summer party was to try and remember who people were.

But that is made difficult because:

a) I can't see because I never wear my glasses outdoors;

b) my goldfish memory makes it hard to recollect my address, never mind the name of some TV producer who claims to have met me at "the Statesman do"; and

c) my nervousness at such events makes me look distant and haughty.

So these events are something of a social minefield.

At last year's Observer Christmas party, I met a very nice man who seemed strangely to know everything about me. He talked at length about my columns, suggesting - rather cheekily, I thought - various ways in which they might be improved. When he left me to go and get a drink, I asked my dear friend Decca Aitkenhead - my eyes and ears on these occasions - to tell me what she knew about the gentleman. Turned out he was my editor - the legendary Ian Katz - a man I speak to every week. When I'd met him for lunch the previous month in Clerkenwell, he'd been perfectly agreeable company, so why had my mind elected to erase him from the records?

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Pondering this question at the launch of Peter Bradshaw's splendid novel Lucky Baby Jesus, I asked Professor Lisa Jardine if she'd ever had the same experience. Yes, she said, but only with men. She always remembered women but, when it came to men, she'd think "suit, face, hair" - and that was it.

We decided this is particularly true of media men, who are all not quite good-looking to the same degree and who all share the same ideas about how to make themselves look distinctive. Hence at any given soiree the room will be full of people wearing turquoise ties and black-rimmed glasses.

As Jardine went off to mingle, I reflected that mildly famous men must get wrongly identified even more. If someone is "off the telly", then they could be Patrick Moore or him off Emmerdale, for all their dozy public is aware. Later, as if to prove the point, I asked Bradshaw how he knew Hugh Laurie.

"I don't," he said, looking in the direction I was pointing. "That's Griff Rhys Jones."

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One comedian I always recognise is David Baddiel. I came across him at the Guardian party and it wasn't long before we were discussing our sitcom projects. His, it must be said, is slightly more advanced than mine. While my co-writer, Julie Burchill, and I have been lounging by her pool, fantasising about million-pound NBC deals, Baddiel and Bradshaw have completed their script, made a pilot episode and entered into discussions with important TV executives.

Given our working methods - one page of typing to two or three bottles of wine, with frequent breaks to watch our favourite Beavis and Butthead video - I am amazed that Julie and I have managed to produce anything at all. The fact that what we have written is far too short to fill half an hour of screen time ("Have you double-spaced it?" was Julie's reply when I told her) pales into insignificance beside the miracle of its existence. I can't say too much about it, as the only person who's read it is Geoffrey Perkins, the BBC's head of comedy, who was rash enough to commission it and brave enough to risk the wrath of Burchill by referring to the script as a "work in progress". Julie doesn't recognise this concept. There are things you have to do and things you have done - the idea that something done could turn into something un-done when the person who has commissioned it starts talking about the dread idea of rewrites - well, JB would rather throw it on the fire than attend to a single sentence.

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When we met Perkins recently, Julie greeted him with that slightly unnerving courtesy that throws people more than if she'd sneered at them or spat in their face.

"Hello, Mr Geoffrey Perkins," she said, holding out a hand too close to his face for him to shake. He sat down, looking slightly mystified. "Now, Mr Geoffrey Perkins," she said, before the poor man had a chance to collect himself, "if we decided that we don't want to do any more work on this, what would happen? Would you give us all the money?"

Regaining his composure in the face of this outrageous suggestion, Perkins explained very kindly that it was not the BBC's policy to pay writers not to finish things. JB - who knew she'd been trying it on - promised that we (meaning me) would do our best to meet his requirements.

"Have you thought about the cast at all?" asked Perkins, later in the conversation. We honestly hadn't given it a moment's thought. There was some suggestion, at an early stage, that we should ask Derek Draper to play the character loosely based on him. I say "loosely" because the spin-doctor in the script is a charming, roguish, straight-talking fellow, who shines like a beacon of hope among the Prospect-reading dullards who surround him. I've called Draper many things in my time, but "beacon of hope" was not one of them.

Nevertheless, the idea of his acting debut struck one paper as sufficiently amusing to ask him for a comment. Would he take the role if he was offered it?

His reply?

"I'm not good looking enough to play myself."

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