Why are they famous?; Molly Parkin

MAIN CLAIM: Turbans, panda eyeliner, men, inappropriate social behaviour, unwise comments, more men, alcohol, drying out - you know the kind of thing. In other words, Molly is thoroughly, vigorously and rampantly famous for being famous. If Paula Yates is mother of a whole generation of It Girls, Molly Parkin is grandmother to them all. Now, claiming to have gifts as a healer, the Sixties swinger has always been a micro-celeb in search of a cause. La Parkin's chronic addiction to fame by way of cringe-inspiring self-exposure means that dirty linen meets crazy-paving career path in a budget chat-show combo that will inspire weary attention.

APPEARANCE: Eccles cake in tea cosy. Cartoon pasha. Mystic Meg's mother after Saga trip to India. Head accident victim.

HEAL THYSELF: "Everyone stared in concentrated silence. A crowd gathered around," says Molly of one of her healing sessions. Nothing too distressing for her, then. Molly heals the ill and suffering with the heat of her hands, and this skill, evidently one among many, is a "God-given gift".

CHILD WITHIN: Molly likes to talk to interviewers about her childhood. She can also access the child within by bursting into tears on screen. While Molly spent a chapel-and-chilblains childhood in Wales, she brought up her own daughters on London's Kings Road, among a whole host of Sixties glitterati who have provided three decades worth of neighbourly name dropping.

VICE SQUAD: Molly particularly likes to explain to us the nature of her reformed habits and the misdemeanours that inspired them. Namely, alcohol and sex. According to her many interviews and her own terminology, she used to "pleasure" whole rugby teams, butchers at Smithfield Market, and nameless other males who wandered into the vicinity. She was also an accomplished piss artist. Now gallantly teetotal, she has enjoyed a period of celibacy, although admitted to finding late blooming love, while mentioning the KY Jelly necessary for attendant activities. We don't want to know, Molly - we just don't want to know.

SWEET VALLEY HIGH: Molly modestly paints her youthful self as a Vamp of the Valleys, who used to thrust her "beautiful" Welsh breasts onto restaurant tables and inspires male lust a-plenty. The saucy siren turned into a turban-clad artist-novelist-agony aunt, wrote her autobiography, Moll, and appears to have retained an unshakeable conviction that everyone is terribly interested.

FUTURE PROSPECTS: Molly Parkin is a trouper, it has to be said, a great, ridiculous, and quite inexplicable British institution. Let us applaud her

staying power. Let us wish her many more decades of entirely silly fame. La Yates has a role model and a half in Miss Parkin.