I recently agreed to become an ambassador for Sony’s new electronic book reader, which goes on sale next September, and several of my fellow authors have accused me of being a quisling. In their view, electronic books will rob authors of their livelihoods in the same way that the digitization of music has deprived musicians of their royalties. Why am I promoting this terrible new technology?

This is unduly pessimistic. It assumes that as soon as the major publishing houses begin producing electronic books, pirated editions will start appearing on the Internet and people will begin downloading them for free. But will this happen? Even if a dedicated group of hackers can work out how to by-pass the anti-piracy software built into electronic books, it is by no means obvious that bibliophiles will take advantage of this. Surely, book lovers are less likely to do something illegal than music lovers. Provided ebooks are reasonably priced, i.e., less than the cost of a mass-market paperback, people will be willing to pay for them.

If that is the case, there is every reason why writers should embrace this new technology. Instead of relying on publishers to distribute and market their wares, authors will simply set up their own websites and sell their books directly to the public. They may have to pay a few hundred pounds to get their books digitized, and perhaps a few more to a publicist to make sure their work gets reviewed and talked about, but after they’ve absorbed these costs they’ll get 100 per cent of the retail price. That has got to be better than the 10-15 per cent they receive presently.

Of course, if ebooks catch on, and people are prepared to pay for them, most publishing firms will go out of business. But I cannot think of many writers who will be sorry to see them go. Whenever more than one author gathers around a bottle of wine, the sole topic of conversation is how terrible their publishers are. Their editors are illiterates, the publicity departments are staffed by air-heads and the people responsible for designing their dust jackets should be shot.

Agents, too, will be a thing of the past. Who needs an agent when you no longer need a book deal? Writers are marginally better disposed towards their agents than their publishers, but they won’t miss having to pay them 15 per cent, rising to 20 per cent when it comes to foreign rights.

The real beneficiaries, though, will be all those authors out there who can’t get an agent, let alone a book deal. If ebooks take hold, there’ll be nothing to prevent them setting out their stalls alongside more established writers -- and that can only be a good thing. Perhaps the real reason my colleagues are nervous is fear of competition.

A new BBC food series debuts today called Eating With the Enemy. It's a cross between MasterChef and the Dragon's Den in which a succession of amateur cooks submit themselves to the withering scrutiny of four food critics: Charles Campion, Jay Rayner, Kate Spicer and yours truly. It's on BBC2 at 4.30pm and will be shown at the same time every week day for the next month.

Last week, one of the national film critics emailed to ask whether I had a copy of The Apartment he could borrow. “The problem is, it’s being re-released and I’ve got to review it and I really don’t fancy a trip to the BFI,” he said.

I was shocked. I can understand why he wouldn’t want to drag himself to a screening theatre to watch the latest Madonna film, but The Apartment? For my money, it’s one of the two or three best films ever made. He had seen if before, of course, and was conscientious enough to want to re-watch it on DVD. But even so. If I had the opportunity to go and watch The Apartment on the big screen for free, I think I would go.

Made in 1960, it was the highpoint of Billy Wilder’s extraordinary career as a writer-director, starting with The Major and the Minor (1942) and encompassing The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sabrina (1954), Witness For the Prosecution (1957) and Some Like It Hot (1959), among others. The Apartment was a comedy, but unlike Wilder’s previous comic films it was shot through with Wilder’s tragic sensibility. Even Stalag 17, his groundbreaking comedy about life inside a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, was light by comparison.

It is a fair bet that most of Hollywood’s writer-directors, particularly those at the top of their game, would have balked at having the female lead attempt to commit suicide. Not Wilder. He was a confident enough artist to take that risk, knowing it could have killed The Apartment stone dead at the box office. In fact, the inclusion of the suicide scene, in which Jack Lemmon discovers an overdosed Shirley MacLaine, is what lifts The Apartment from being just another (admittedly very good) romcom into the realm of an all-time classic.

Like Chekhov, who described his own plays as “comedies”, Wilder knew that the key to creating a great work of dramatic art was to straddle the line between comedy and tragedy, staying just the right side of it most of the time, but not being afraid to occasionally stray on to the wrong side. Tragi-comedy is the toughest genre of all to pull off -- and Wilder himself came a cropper when he tried it again in Kiss Me, Stupid. But when you can make it work, as he did in The Apartment, the result is far more satisfying than a drama that falls more squarely on one side of the line or the other.

At the 1961 Academy Awards, The Apartment won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. As Moss Hart handed Wilder his screenwriting statuette, he leaned over and whispered, “This is the moment to stop, Billy.” “And how right he was,” Wilder told his biographer, Maurice Zolotow, fifteen years later. It simply doesn’t get better that The Apartment.

The fifth and final season of The Wire -- the best American TV show ever broadcast, according to Slate editor Jacob Weisberg -- will make its British debut on July 21. Rather surprisingly, it will be shown on the little-known cable channel FX. The sad truth is that The Wire has never been a ratings success. When the series was originally broadcast in America it was rarely seen by more than four-and-a-half million people.

I’ve only recently started watching it, having bought season one on DVD, and can’t say I’m completely mesmerized. Set in the city of Baltimore, it is certainly well-written and no one could doubt its authenticity. The show’s creator, David Simon, worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years and his writing partner, Ed Burns, is a twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department. The Wire’s depiction of life in a failing American city -- and the African-American experience, in particular -- is surely the most accurate there has ever been on television.

Yet The Wire doesn’t just strive to be more realistic than shows like CSI and Law and Order. Simon has employed some of America’s best crime novelists to write individual episodes, including Dennis Lehane, Richard Price and George Pelacanos, and his literary ambitions easily outstrip those of his competitors. Last year, he told The New Yorker that the writing staff had “ripped off” authors such as Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. “We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state,” he said. That, in turn, points to another distinctive feature of The Wire: It is animated by Simon’s abiding anger about the destructive effect of what he calls “raw, unencumbered capitalism”.

The upshot is that each season of The Wire is less like a television show than an epic novel, with a sprawling cast of characters, a dense, interlocking plot, and an underlying moral vision. The problem is, it is more like the work of an early 20th Century American novelist -- Upton Sinclair, for instance -- than a 19th Century English novelist. David Simon is so intent on venting his rage about the collapse of America’s social fabric, he leaves out all the lowbrow devices that make the greatest works of social realism so entertaining. Charles Dickens, for instance, included a good deal of mystery and romance in his novels, not to mention comedy, horror and suspense. Without such cheap tricks, The Wire can often be quite heavy going.

Don’t get me wrong. Once you have watched four or five episodes of The Wire, you start to care deeply about the fate of the characters and I’m looking forward to seasons two to five. But the best American TV shows, like The Shield and Damages, manage to combine serious themes with a cornucopia of cheap tricks -- and there’s nothing wrong with that.

MGM's official site for How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is up. It's only a matter of days before the first US trailer appears. I've been told it contains the line: "Based on the true story of a real idiot."