By Stafford Hildred and Tim Ewbank.
Blake Publishing, £16.99 UK, hardback, 249 pages.
There's an obvious difficulty if you decide to write the biography of someone who's only lived for twenty-six years; what do you fill a whole book with? I know, Alexander of Macedon had conquered the known world by that age, but for most people it takes a lifetime to live through enough experiences to fill a book. This is clearly not the view of Messrs Hildred and Ewbank, two Fleet Street journalists who write celeb biogs, and whose latest offering is the biography of Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef.

If that appears to you on the surface as a blatant attempt to cash in on a celebrity name before it disappears into an abyss of oblivion, you'd be right. The first thing you notice as you open this book is the size of the print: it's big, reminiscent of books printed for children who have just learned the art of reading. Lots of white space and a large type face means that you can have 250 pages without a whole lot of content weighing it down. Couple that with the breathlessly enthusiastic tabloid style of writing and you begin to believe that this book might well be aimed at twelve-year-olds. Nice, short, uncomplicated sentences and no nasty big words. This might also explain why the first 48 pages cover in mind-numbing detail Jamie's primary school days. We learn that he was a cheeky chappie, not very academic, loved to run across the fields, occasionally stole apples, knocked on people's doors and ran away - the whole gamut of boyish behaviour that in no way distinguishes Jamie from any other kid of that age.

You can sense that it wasn't easy to fill up the pages. There are endless repetitions, as well as stories from people Jamie once knew, perhaps having met them in his parents' pub. Here's a quote from one of his teachers: 'Jamie was a very nice boy and he was always very popular.' Insightful stuff. Outside of other peoples' quotation marks the authors occasionally break from the tale of Jamie's rise to televisual stardom by offering insights of their own; 'To this day, Jamie has a very active imagination and loves well-crafted cartoons and slapstick comedy.'

If I were Jamie Oliver I'd be very cross about this book. However short his life has been outside of celebrity, it can't have been as banal as this lightweight hagiography makes it seem. But there's a fair chance that the Naked Chef himself hasn't read it. On page 42 we discover 'I have honestly never read a book from cover to cover in my life.' Fair enough, Jamie, I couldn't get past page 100 of this one.