*David Gibbon, author of Ceefax's dismal games section Game Station (BBC1, p550), owes his entire career to this contemptuous fallacy, inexplicably continuing to get away with every letter that's sent to Game Station being written In The Style Of... David Gibbon.

Entertainingly, he's recently acknowledged that the minimum effort of inventing plausible reader names is beyond him (despite the obvious random-pseudonym potential of claiming the questions arrived by e-mail) and now credits the homogeneous correspondents only as "John," "Frank," "Andy," "Pete," etc etc.