I started the year laughing at - or rather with - Russell Brand, and now I am ending it in the same way. In early February, I was part of a full-house delighted by his stand-up routine at the New Theatre. We even forgave him the fact that the show was delayed for nearly two hours with no explanation save that "I was doing my hair". Three days later at the same venue, I saw another big comedy star in Ricky Gervais. His show went on to be one of the hot tickets of the year in London, but I was unimpressed. Despite the excellence of The Office, Gervais is not the giant talent he considers himself to be.

No one could deny that Brand is pleased with himself too - but with rather more justification. My Booky Wook, which I read this week with huge enjoyment, tops the best-seller chart for Christmas, having seen off the likes of Richard Hammond, Nigella Lawson and Chipping Norton's own (they can keep him) Jeremy Clarkson. Unlike many a celebrity book, it is all his own work - as, of course, are those by the aforementioned authors. Did I read somewhere that he had sent his 'ghost' packing - or vice-versa?

He writes in the same inimitable style that he brings to his work as a broadcaster and, indeed, as a journalist in his Saturday column for the Guardian - again self-penned, which is very unusual for a celebrity contribution to the sports pages. Something of the flavour of his prose can be judged in the following paragraph, concerning his hunt for a prostitute in Turkey: "We made our way at breakneck speed through the streets of Istanbul, and eventually arrived outside a brothel - miles away from the boat, so I was already thinking in my drunkenness 'this is a bit mad'. Outside this place was what I can only describe as a snaggle-toothed crone. In fact, if you're ever looking for a 'snaggle-toothed crone' in a film, and this one turns up to audition, book her. Don't go, 'No, there might be a better one round the corner', because there won't be."

This Essex-boy's chronicle of long-term addictions to drink, drunks and sex is already well-known for being seriously filthy. For Brand, quite clearly, the definition of a secret is something to be shared. "For me," he writes, "it was more important that people knew I had sex than having sex." This passage concerns the loss of his virginity to one of his schoolmates (female), but one suspects he may have been like this ever since. One of the book's reviewers - OK, Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times - worked himself into a lather of indignation over Brand's naming of the young lady involved in this "educative and experiential" encounter, as Chris Woodhead might have described it. Perhaps Hart failed to spot on the title page the statement: "Some names and identities have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved".

The book is published, at £18.99, by Hodder & Stoughton. This is a company that will forever be linked in my mind with the work of Enid Blyton. What a prospect of excitement did I conjure up, aged 11, from a row of maroon hardback library books bearing the imprint and such titles as Five Fall into Adventure and Five Go to Billycock Hill. Interesting that the company should now be offering such 'adult' entertainment. My Booky Wook, incidentally, is not the muckiest memoir of its kind I have read in 2007. That accolade must go to Sebastian Horsley, an heir to the Northern Foods fortune, who offers a similar tale of drugs and debauchery in Dandy in the Underworld. This, too, is from Hodder & Stoughton.

Brand more than once reveals himself to have been a reader of Enid Blyton - and of Charles Dickens, whose villainous character Bill Sikes he twice misspells as 'Sykes'. On the first occasion, sensing the mistake, I crossed to my bookshelves, opened Oliver Twist to hunt out the name and was reminded by the very first line I looked at that Dickens had - even if TV's Captain Pugwash had not - a character called Master Bates.

You know, I think in the light of Brand's well-known obsessions, his fans might find this rather funny.