The scene is a faded three-star hotel in Penrith at which Jools Holland and his TV co-presenter Paula Yates have stopped for tea en route from Tyne-Tees headquarters in Newcastle to a shoot in Blackpool. A courteous white-haired waiter, all oblivious of the fact that celebrity had called, brought the tea and then asked Jools: "Would your wife like some more toast?" One must imagine that Paula deeply resented the suggestion that she would be married to an oik like Holland, for she snapped: "She's on her way to Blackpool (by train), so why don't you go and ask her, you stupid f**k."

This is a nasty story that would have been better left untold. So who do you suppose is telling it? And why do you suppose he's telling it. Jools Holland, of course, and for the simple reason that it makes his new autobiography that much more saleable. I noticed that newspapers plugging the book concentrated on the Paula passages - a familiar litany of drugs, drink, sex and sadness. Holland affects to be a huge friend and admirer of his one-time colleague on The Tube, but some are bound to regard his remarks as an act of gross disloyalty.

As with any celebrity memoir, Holland has been able to plug Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts (Michael Joseph, £18.99) in many of the usual slots. I was not surprised to hear him reading it earlier this month as the BBC's Book of the Week on Radio 4. Nothing better illustrates the celebrity obsession at the Beeb than the way its bosses pick for this programme books that are already guaranteed acres of publicity elsewhere. Amazingly, they then shell out substantial wodges of licence-payers' money to these lucky authors for the privilege of having their work puffed. Better than a free plug, this is actually a plug that pays.

Holland, of course, guested with Jonathan Ross on his Friday night show, no doubt for another lavish fee (though of course nowhere near the loot paid to the appalling Wossy). I could not bear to watch the pair massaging each other's already oversized egos. Similar in respect of their smugness, the two also share another character defect in the way they are able to schmooze celebrities on equal footing or further up the pecking order to them, while dismissing hoi polloi below.

Reading Holland's book the other night - the things I do for The Oxford Times! - I jotted down some of the descriptions he applies to the figures mentioned therein. They include Terry Wogan ("what a truly great man he is"), "heart-throb Hugh Laurie", "British screen legend Terence Alexander (what, the bloke that used to be in TV's Garry Halliday?), "charismatic President Clinton", Bob Dylan ("one of the world's all-time great songwriters"), the "talented Malcolm McClaren", Stanley Unwin ("one of the greatest British actors of all time"), Stephen Fry ("brilliant") and Rowan Atkinson ("one of the funniest men in the world").

As it happens, I agree with most of these judgments; my objection is that, besides being sycophantic, many seem too obvious to need stating.

In this pantheon of greatness, there is, one suspects, none greater in Holland's eyes than his own good self. His fame cannot be overstressed, though overstress it he does. On Page 176, for instance, we learn that The Tube "made me a household name". The passage is worth quoting in full for the absurdly over-inflated claim made for the importance of this tea-time pop show. "It made me a household name but, in a wider sense, it reinvented the way popular music was perceived and shown on television." Wow! Is that so? Advancing to Page 194, Holland (with co-author Harriet Vyner) tells us: "Things started to change for me after the first series of The Tube . . . by the end of the run I found I was becoming a household name". And, just in case we have still not grasped the situation, Page 214 informs us: "I was now a household name and, because of the age of the audience we attracted, I was seen to be a happening, groovy one."

It will hardly be news to readers of this column that I have no respect for Holland as a musician. Now I have little respect for him as a writer and, indeed, as a man. If the unpleasant side to his character had not been revealed in the passages concerning Paula - a friend of mine long before she was a friend of his, incidentally - it certainly emerges from his description of a turbulent flight to Los Angeles. On one side of him was "an enormously fat man . . . who insisted on eating his soup even though it was spelling all over his huge beard" and on the other a "young gay waiter who was going to Los Angeles to audition for an American version of Fawlty Towers". He writes: "I thought that being surrounded by these madmen might be a bit of a portent."

So there you have it - in the starstruck eyes of Jools Holland, to be fat or gay is to be a madman.