It's a Vanity Fair cop, guv

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (M) 3½ stars National release TOBY Young is a British journalist who spent a none-too-successful period of his life in New York working for Vanity Fair and wrote about his experiences in a best-selling book.

Sidney (Simon Pegg) tries to talk his way into a club in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, based on Toby Young's bestseller

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (M) 3½ stars National release TOBY Young is a British journalist who spent a none-too-successful period of his life in New York working for Vanity Fair and wrote about his experiences in a best-selling book.

In turning these real-life events into a romantic comedy for amiable actor Simon Pegg, screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Robert Weide (from television's Curb Your Enthusiasm) have been more successful than they deserve or you may expect.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is not a wholesale reworking and fictionalisation of a factual book as was, for example, Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), but I wonder if Young would recognise himself in the character of his near namesake, Sidney Young.

We meet Sidney when he is publisher, editor and senior reporter of the no-budget Post Modern Review, in which role he is resolutely barred, by eagle-eyed publicists, from attending celebrity functions such as London's BAFTA Awards. (He manages to gatecrash anyway, posing as a waiter, and chats up Thandie Newton before being ejected by, if subsequent photographs are to be believed, Clint Eastwood.)

After this humiliation, Sidney is headhunted by Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), editor of the respected American magazine Sharps. Back in the day, Harding was an anti-establishment hothead much like Sidney, but he has since mellowed into corporate conformity.

For Sidney this is an opportunity to realise allhis dreams, to crash the A-list. But he discovers quickly that the US is a foreign country and that they do things differently there.

For example, an interview with star-of-the-moment Sophie Maes (Megan Fox) is possible only with the agreement of her publicist, the formidable Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson), and the interview can't be published unless Eleanor approves every word. That scandalous state of affairs, unheard of in Britain, is apparently normal in the US and Sidney rebels against it.

He also rebels against the unctuously patronising Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston), a senior entertainment writer at Sharps, who unhesitatingly goes along with this form of corruption.

I'm told that several of these characters are easily recognisable to insiders, but outside that small coterie there's still a great deal to enjoy about Sidney's fish-out-of-water exploits.

His casual way of dressing (T-shirts), his outrageous pronouncements (Con Air is his favourite movie) and his accident-prone misadventures (the fate of Sophie's beloved chihuahua is a splendid antidote to the Disney film) provide plenty of genuine laughs.

The film is less successful when it attempts to mesh all these anecdotes into a coherent plot, with Kirsten Dunst rather subdued as another Sharps writer, a stereotypical small-town girl who wants to write a great novel and who is having a secret affair with the odious Maddox. However, as a vehicle for Pegg, How to Lose Friends is undoubtedly a success and fans of this engaging actor shouldn't be disappointed.