A new book of entertaining entertainment factoids is a browser's delight, reports happy anorak Brian Boyd

David Hepworth's The Secret History of Entertainment is a bit like a collection of E.L. Wisty columns as written for Heat magazine. The book is an assiduous accumulation of top-end entertainment trivia by a noted journalist/publisher and broadcaster who is perhaps still best remembered as the ashen-faced BBC presenter who was told to "fuck the address" by Bob Geldof during the Live Aid concert of 1985.

Hepworth has launched some of the most influential magazines of the last 20 years: Q, Empire, Mojo and his current publication, the most excellent Word magazine. If nothing else, he will always be known for one of the best descriptions of a musical genre ever! "World music" he once wrote, "is anything not containing the word 'baby'."

You could call Hepworth an entertainment trivia anorak. But he'd just patiently explain, as he does in the book, that the term "anorak" is "the standard way of describing any individual - generally a male - who takes an excessive interest in minutiae. It dates from the 1960s when, during the heyday of pirate radio in the UK, devotees of the stations would take trips out into the North Sea to photograph the boats from which they broadcast.

"These radio fans were instantly identifiable by the brand-new weatherproof gear they purchased for their voyage. Hence 'anorak' became the noun to describe anyone with the kind of chemical imbalance that would lead them to undertake that kind of expedition for no reason beyond the satisfaction of their own curiousity."

As the young people are wont to say: I've so loving this sort of stuff.

That out of the way, onto the stories. Do you know about the enduring link between "TV superchef" Delia Smith and The Rolling Stones? Hepworth explains: In 1969, Delia was a freelance cook who had just begun a column in the Daily Mirror. One day she got a call asking her to make a cake for an album cover. That's Delia's glacé-cherried cake on Let It Bleed.

Elsewhere, you can find out why if you ever sing the tune Happy Birthday in a restaurant, you are breaking the law; how and why Jack Nicholson found out that his "sister" was actually his mother; and who the only real Mancunian is in Frasier (and it's not Daphne Moon).

Some of the stories you might know already: How Kevin Costner made Nick Lowe a millionaire; how Madonna co-wrote a hit with a dead man; and the tragi-comedic story behind the songwriting credits for The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony song (it's some saga). Other stories you probably thought you knew the answer to but weren't sure: why The Simpsons can't use a laugh-track (and the related story about how many of the laugh-tracks we still hear today are from a Lucille Ball TV show in the 1950s); just who owns the legs on the famous film poster from The Graduate (they aren't Anne Bancroft's - they belong to Linda Dallas Grey).

The book's real strength lies in the deeper levels of trivia that Hepworth turns over. The link between C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy; why there can never be a film starring Julia Roberts and Jim Carrey and directed by Stephen Spielberg (and it's nothing to do with egos or personal enmity); and where and why Frank Sinatra announced that his new record was going to be called I'm Gonna Put a Bar ithe Back of My Car and Drive Myself to Drink.

Better still, perhaps, are the type of stories you never get to hear but are pulled in from the margins. Hepworth recounts a musical spat between MOR sax man Kenny G and noodly jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. The latter was asked for his opinion about Kenny G's new record, which featured a "duet" between the pop saxophonist and the late Louis Armstrong courtesy of digital technology. "I think it's crap" might have been the most appropriate answer in the circumstances. Instead, Metheny answered thus (strap yourselves in):

"When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked-up playing all over one of the great Louis tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible.

"He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years, developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.

"By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and, by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of."

This book is brilliant - buy it. The only problem is it's a slim volume.

We want more of this type of thing.

The Secret History of Entertainment is published by Fourth Estate