Derek Jameson - Do they mean me?

It's just as well that Rigsby, the shark landlord in Rising Damp, is no longer with us.

He would have been down to Brighton and Hove like a shot making a fortune in student rents. Not that he could have taught our lot anything.

I spoke to a bloke this week who lets out six five-bedroom houses to students at around £50 each a week. That adds up to something like £75,000 a year in easy money.

Multiply that by some 22,000 students living in Brighton and Hove and you have a bunch of property owners raking in millions from youngsters forced to pay up - or go and whistle.

The way some of these young people are treated is scandalous. Supposedly respectable property owners are ripping off young people who have little or no experience of life.

The name of the game is to turn every possible bit of space into bedrooms. If a room is any size at all, shove up a partition and call it two rooms at £50 each weekly. Don't spend money on communal space. Let five of them cram into a tiny "lounge" and share a kitchen not much bigger than a broom cupboard.

It doesn't end there. Many tenants are forced to pay rent for some ten weeks during the summer holidays or lose their place. Youngsters pay up out of fear of being left with nowhere to lay their head. True, some landlords charge only half-rent but you have to be lucky to find them.

Are you shocked? It gets worse. There are landlords who charge £70 a year for use of a washing machine. Lighting and heating are charged separately, usually through a charge key. Any damage has to be paid for.

Our universities, colleges and language schools know the problem their students are facing but there is little they can do about it.

"It's all to do with the market," an accommodation officer told me. "We are concerned about rising prices but we live in Brighton and Hove. There is a huge demand for places."

When the University of Sussex issued its list of private lettings last week there was a rush to find places six months away in September.

By midweek landlords were not bothering to answer their phones since dozens of early callers had already made appointments to view.

One told me he had 150 calls in a couple of days.

They argue that the cost of maintaining property is high and it is unfair to accuse them of excessive profiteering because rents in the region of £45 to £62 a week are reasonable in a busy seaside resort.

Grotty lodgings and overcrowding are part of student culture, the youngsters tell me resignedly. All the same, they would appreciate a lick of paint and a bit more legroom. How about it, you fat cat landlords?

Get back to the real world!

My goodness, Sir Paul McCartney must be incredibly naive to expect the media to ignore his blossoming love affair with model Heather Mills, who lost her leg when she was hit by a police motorcycle seven years ago.

"Give us some space," he says. "What we don't need is photographers lurking in bushes and people stalking us."

A rather forlorn hope, that, on the part of a former Beatle. A paparazzi had already taken several shots of him snuggling up to the 31-year-old model in a London park. Calling for privacy was a challenge some scribes couldn't resist.

Turn on, tune in and switch off

What delight it would be to have a signal in television studios to interrupt producers with the news that vast numbers of long-suffering viewers have switched off their programmes.

True, they get audience ratings several days after the event, but nobody takes much notice. Now it seems my wish is about to come true.

Something called Peaktime has been launched to monitor the age and class of people switching on and off, minute by minute. What a wonderful prospect. All those people we love to hate will get their comeuppance.

Most politicians have had it, with Jack Straw and Michael Portillo heading the rout. David Dimbleby would be out, along with Jon Snow and all the others with pious, know-all voices. People who bellow at the audience, a la Les Battersby, can pull down the shutters now.

What I savour most of all is some researcher who has been treated arrogantly muttering into the ear of a tetchy guest: "I'm afraid everyone switched you off within two minutes."

Spring has sprung

Lambs are gambolling and the daffodils are in bloom. This is the first day of spring.

Most people agree the seasons would be better organised if spring fell on March 1, but the Romans went for the solstices and equinoxes and we've been stuck with their system ever since.

March 21 falls conveniently in the middle, with equal hours of light and darkness, and it will get lighter until the longest day on June 21, the start of summer.

Some say spring begins when a virgin can cover six daisies with her foot. Sadly there aren't that many daisies about nowadays. There aren't too many virgins either - at least with feet big enough to cover six daisies.

This is the time when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of you-know-what. Girls, too, have their thoughts.

Brighton's very own Jordan has just told Loaded magazine she thinks of sex every six seconds, which doesn't leave her a lot of time to concentrate on other important matters, like our bid for city status or the Seagulls' place in the table.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.