All staff at the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs were summoned to a meeting to be addressed by the managing director, Jeremy Deedes. Was it to brief them on the papers’ financial situation? Was it, wondered some of the more optimistic staff, to tell them they were getting a pay rise? No. Mr Deedes wanted to urge them, please, please, not to join the National Union of Journalists. An over-enthusiastic sub adds a phrase; or perhaps you just delegate the item to someone on work experience. So most people will forgive The Guardian for describing the BBC 4 controller Roly Keating as “the former Boyzone frontman” Ronan Keating will be generous about it.

But Roly may never speak to the paper again.The only outright winner from the Channel 5 trip to Kempton Park races was Kim Peat, its head of daytime, arts and religion. Her success was simple: she bet each way on Bible Box in due deference to her job description, and Esteemed Master in honour of Dawn Airey, the channel’s chief executive.The interview with Tony Livesey, editor- in-chief of Sport Newspapers, in the new edition of the industry magazine X-trax contains some memorable answers. He recalled that when the newsdesk didn’t come up with enough ideas, he locked the news editor in the lift for an hour until he came up with 30 ideas. Livesey admits that one of his own ideas was considered too extreme, even by The Sport’s publishers He had a picture of a beheading in Saudi Arabia.

After the decapitation, the head was spinning through the air. Livesey wanted to airbrush out the head and have a “Spot the Head” competition.. What could David Beckham do if fakes of his autograph were being sold? The facts behind Victoria Beckham’s alleged claim that a Bluewater shop was doing just that are disputed, as shown by the shop’s slander claim against her, but celebrities now have better legal protection in the UK against the unauthorised use of their names and images than ever before. While those laws and regulations are mainly aimed at protecting those buying the autographs, different rights come to the aid of the celebrities themselves.It was not until March of this year that the English courts categorically held that the unauthorised use of a famous person’s image in an advertising context could be objected to on the basis of passing off.

This was Formula 1 driver Eddie Irvine’s successful case against the talkSPORT radio station over its use of a doctored photograph of him in a mailshot promoting its 1999 coverage of Silverstone. The court found that this prominent use of a celebrity’s face was passing talkSPORT off as having been endorsed by Irvine, when in fact he knew nothing about the mailshot.Irvine’s legal victory was bittersweet – he was awarded just £2,000 in damages because of the mailshot’s limited circulation (it went to around 1,000 media buyers) and was left with a hefty costs bill. Yet other celebrity “victims” of unauthorised endorsements should be grateful to him for having established a valuable point of principle. While not every single reference to a famous person will amount to passing off, the law has at least been brought into line with modern practices on endorsements.So why haven’t other celebrities fared as well as Irvine when trying to prevent the use of their names and faces? The answer lies in the kind of legal right relied upon, the kind of use and sometimes on the kind of celebrity.