Dear Suzi - please tell me you're not faking

Great parody is barely distinguishable from reality. The joke is in the "barely". So which of these following quotations is a spoof and which is the writing of a real columnist in a national broadsheet?

"Sex in the great outdoors may not be legal but it is a thrill ... Flouncy skirts and petticoats slide up easily when standing and create an effective tent-like disguise if sitting astride your partner."

"Sex should be a feast of the senses, and that includes taste ... I often think that my relationship with a commissioning editor from GQ would have gone further if he hadn't been so fanatical about cleanliness that he would not allow anything to be eaten in the bedroom."

The first is a serious sex column by Suzi Godson in The Independent on Sunday; the second a brilliant spoof in The Sunday Telegraph magazine. The name of the writer of the latter is Suzi Gossard, after the Wonderbra manufacturer.

The saucy Ms Gossard is, in fact, the invention of a man, sports columnist Giles Smith. When she first arrived with the magazine's redesign earlier this year there were those who thought her genuine. The column, illustrated with a fleeting sight of Ms Gossard, her face obscured and a phallic symbol close to hand - a traffic bollard, melons. That and references to "fellow erotic columnists", who turn out to be weighty commentators on the op-ed pages, surely give the game away - but slowly. Suzi is a tease.

Dominic Lawson, the Sunday Telegraph's editor, says he has received a few letters of complaint, to which he has replied. The parody was clearly too obscure for one BBC researcher, who asked if Suzi Gossard would appear on a media show.

The success of the creation is such that a rereading of the IoS template reveals unintentionally hilarious remarks. "To celebrate national kissing day, why not try the following," writes former convent girl Ms Godson. "Salt your lips or dust them with icing sugar or cocoa powder. Pass liquids or foods from mouth to mouth - try champagne, ice cubes, oysters, caviar, strawberries ... Lick, taste and smell the natural salts on your partner's skin, particularly under the armpits."

The best spoofs are horribly compelling in their own right and the master spoofer is Craig Brown, creator of The Guardian's now-deceased Bel Littlejohn. Bel was fastidiously PC, capable of gravity-defying grammar - and close to New Labour. Of Peter Mandelson's fall, she writes: "I found myself weekending with him in Cornwall for research purposes when he offered me an expensive Cornetto ... Call it instinct, call it integrity, but I simply wasn't prepared to accept a free ice-cream from this man."

A few readers who shared Bel's enthusiasms were puzzled. The more knowing began to suspect - wrongly - that other columnists on the paper were fictitious. Kindness prevents me from revealing the names.

Newspaper spoofs are sometimes criticised as a joke on, rather than for, the readers. But the best succeed precisely because they confuse. One national newspaper editor berated his staff after reading Bel's account of a tête-à-tête with Gordon Brown. Why didn't his people have these sort of contacts? The same cannot be said of Suzi Gossard, whose contacts are impeccable.