Very few single girls actually have that much sex

The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of interviews. This meant that some 100 journalists, flown in to hear her thoughts on the movie, had in turn been cancelled. Maddened, they spent two days abusing the PR until, in a furious act of concession, she allocated some of them a far shorter slot with Ms Carrie Bradshaw the following day — seven and a half minutes, supplemented for the fortunate by a round table in which participants had 20 minutes, perched in groups of eight around a table, to ask SJP questions before she was hustled from the room.

Anyway, while all this was happening, the trailer for the Sex and the City movie was playing on a loop in the suite where the journalists were held, like passengers for a long-delayed plane, unenthusiastically eating seafood from silver tureens or squinting at laptops pushed on to gilt tables.