For every prize that makes the news, there are at least eight in hot pursuit of the razzmatazz

When people moan about how much gong-giving there is in the press (and you're right, it is outrageous, and we haven't even reached the year's giddy apotheosis with the Oscars, which just about sum up the phrase "weepy climax"), they perhaps don't realise that we are all being let off lightly.

For every prize that makes the bright lights of the news, there are at least eight in hot pursuit of the razzmatazz. You can tell the wannabes: they describe themselves as the prize that they in effect want to be. So you have "the Turner Prize of the north", the "Oscars of the porn world", and so on. When I was at the BBC, we were really very sniffy about which gongs we covered. And usually something really BIG had to happen before one was taken seriously. The Brits merited attention only after Michael Jackson was mooned at by Jarvis Cocker. Similarly, in the mindset of editors, the Golden Globes did not arrive until about five years ago, when in reality the event has been read as an "Oscar barometer" (its tired old raison d'etre) for about 40 years.

Other prizes get there through sheer perseverance. The Whitbread Book of the Year is one. Maybe because having poetry up against children's writing up against biography is just so weird, or because its "Everyone's a winner, baby" zeitgeist is so chummy, it has gradually winkled in beside the Booker and become a "must-cover" event. Which makes it all the more daft that its "named sponsor" is now yearning to get rid of it.

Invited by a girlfriend who is big at the Times, I went along to the last ever Whitbread Book Awards. In between gossip sessions, I berated a Whitbread bigwig about why the company, which owns Costa and David Lloyd Leisure, was ridding itself of a rather handy "good news" event.

"Well, it's a bit like the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race," he explained. "It just doesn't fit in much any more." What? With Costa coffee? I would have thought that a race for a high-end book prize, in which the biographer of Matisse can slug it out with a poet who has spent his life rewriting Homer, for God's sake, "fits in" much better with a coffee chain than with a brewery that once owned Peter Dominic.

But what do I know about sponsorship? Far less than the noble Colin Tweedy, at least. The chief executive of Arts & Business spends his life brokering sponsorship deals, and he was striding about the tables telling everyone how Whitbread was determined to give its baby to the best possible new parents.

"Who are the contenders? No one is excluded," he told me, "from BP to BT to Barclays. Although I suspect the name that eventually buys it will be someone no one has ever heard of. Who had heard of Man, before the Man Booker? Man [a hedge fund, in case you didn't know] now thinks buying the Booker was the best thing it ever did."

Apparently, buying a prize like the Whitbread or the Booker will set you back about a million one-ers. Plus the annual running costs - about £200,000-£300,000. And that's it. Front-page mentions, every time with your name in them. Three minutes on Radio 4 at 8am. Two minutes on the evening news. No possibility of rudeness, unless Michael Jackson happens to turn up. It's a no-brainer. Frankly, who would not want an established arts prize in their portfolio?

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