The most apt comment on Team GB's haul of Olympic medals came from the satirical website The Daily Mash, which reported on our medal-winners being welcomed at Heathrow by “thousands of ecstatic advertising executives”. Their names seem to have appeared on Tube ads with remarkable speed.

And the silly stunts keep coming. Only yesterday, British Airways was putting out some tosh about members of the Paralympics women's basketball team putting on an impromptu game in Terminal 5.

BA sponsors the team and has made much of the gold-nosed jumbo jet that flew them back from Beijing. Or did it? Another satirical site, Popbitch, claims that only the top medallists were in first class, the lower orders travelling economy, while the entire lot flew out steerage in the first place. BA seems weirdly unwilling to comment.

“Deciding who sits where was a decision taken by the Olympic Association.” Yes, but you know if it's true. “We don't talk about who sits where on our aircraft because of data protection.” So how much of their travel did BA pay for? Can't say, as it's part of a commercial deal. Enough.

Slice of life in Liverpool

One of the most famous ads in history was the original Hovis in the early 1970s, with the little boy pushing his bike up a cobbled street in Yorkshire, so grittily authentic it was filmed in Dorset, lad. (Director Ridley Scott went on to relative obscurity with some more low-key stuff about aliens, robots and gladiators, I believe.) As part of the revival of the Hovis brand, the ads are being refilmed. No one is saying much about the content ahead of the first screening, during Coronation Street on September 12, but I hear it will feature a little boy going into a baker 122 years ago, when Hovis first launched its loaf, and then running back home through all the periods of British history - suffragettes, Blitz, miners' strike. So grittily authentic, they used Liverpool this time.

The 99-cent store has a place in American history, a successor to the old five-and-dime, where you can buy anything from cheap detergent to milk to Pyrex dishes. But even these are not immune to the credit crunch and a battle has broken out in Harlem between two of them. The first, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is the curiously named New Futa 99 Plus. The second, a few doors down the street and run by Baba Diouf, a Senegalese immigrant, has cunningly undercut its rival on price by rebranding itself as Bab's 98 Cent Plus Discount Store. “I'm uptown,” Diouf says. “The further you go uptown, the less people have money.” Yes, but how far uptown will this crazy price war end?

Who, exactly, knew what before the surprise collapse of Zoom, the budget airline? Howard Lee, who runs HeadLand, the City PR firm, tells me that his 22-year-old daughter Harriet flew out to Bermuda on Zoom the other night. The aircraft taxied out on to the apron, lined up for take-off, then taxied back in again. After some mumbling over the intercom about changes to the flight plan, the aircraft taxied out again and duly took off. Did someone decide that, with a full tank of fuel, it wasn't worth aborting the flight? I couldn't say. Student Harriet is now stuck in Bermuda, to her evident delight, sending any extra bills back to Dad in London.

Oh, no. Some absolute rotter has gone and leaked to another newspaper the details of a backdown by Marks & Spencer on its proposed changes to redundancy terms for staff. M&S is taking disciplinary action against an employee who leaked news of the original plan. Will there be a similar witch-hunt over who sent out the more favourable story? Somehow I doubt it.

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