Some of the girls arrive with the most enormous pieces of hand luggage It all has to be stuffed into the hold somehow. Moving 94 nations plus luggage is an experience!When we arrive at Malta there is a big reception at the airport. The minister of tourism is there, with an entourage dressed in the most wonderful gold and crimson uniforms.We arrive at the hotel and brief the girls with a schedule for tomorrow. They are divided into different groups, representing a good cross section of cultures, for filming. In the evening there is a cocktail party and dinner for us.FridayWe go straight into filming Two groups of girls are up at 4.30am for a sunrise sequence A huge number of the press have come along. I try to look after them as best as I can, in addition to taking care of the girls’ families and their supporters.I never get tired of it all. It is an exacting time for all of us, but we have a lot of laughs along the way.

If you don’t have a sense of humour, then forget it.Miss World will be broadcast live on Channel 5 from Olympia on 4 Dec. After coming a poor second when wrestling with the monumental Times Atlas of the World last week, I was grateful that a publishing outfit called Ellipsis kindly sent me a selection of its diminutive but stylish guide books. Measuring four inches by four inches, they are about the size of a chocolate bar but less melty in the pocket. Their best-known work is a guide to London’s recent architecture by Samantha Hardingham. I particularly like her remark that MI6’s immodest Thameside HQ is “theatrically ominous – apt that its neighbour to the west should be the Nine Elms Cold Store”.

The same author has produced a companion volume called Eat London. This must be one of the most unusual guides to the capital’s nosheries ever published, since Ms Hardingham is concerned with design rather than scoff. She notes, for example, that the “distillation of references” in the fixtures and fittings at Noho in Charlotte Street “becomes over-simple and is indicative of a self-referential moment”. In similar vein, she remarks that “the treatment of the stairwell” at Mash in Great Portland Street “achieves the ultimate in plasticity”. The same seems to apply to Mash’s menu which is described as “painful to peruse (confit of duck pizza) and hard to digest”. The author permits herself another rare reference to food when assessing Quo Vadis in Dean Street, where the pale grey upholstery was “a similar shade to the seared tuna on my plate”. My appetite whetted, I plunged into Art London by Martin Coomer, which does much the same job for the galleries of the metropolis.

Once again, this guide is extraordinary, largely because the photographs all look virtually the same. The fact is that one white-walled interior is pretty much like another. In fact, a single snap could almost have been used for all 60 entries with no one being any the wiser Of course, Ellipsis has not taken this economical route. At Entwhistle, 6 Cork Street W1, we’re treated to a shot of the receptionist’s head peeping above her white desk. The austere emptiness of the Victoria Miro Gallery, 21 Cork Street, is lent interest by a shadow of someone’s head.
Mr Coomer’s text concentrates on the art-works shown to their best advantage in such pristine surroundings. I am irked beyond all telling at missing the “Spectacular Chunder Field” show (“elegant stains and vomit-inducing lime-green fabric”) at the Duncan Cargill Gallery in Warren Street. I also seem to have missed out on the birth of a new artistic movement, judging by the “mountain of rat casts” shown at Chapman Fine Arts, E1, and the “wax model of rat under a plastic dome” at the Richard Salmon Gallery, W8.Surprisingly, perhaps, the most conventional of Ellipsis’s guides to the capital is Gay London.