Slebs in your stocking

This Christmas, who'd like a badlywritten book about an egocentric has been? Almost everyone, it seems. Or at least all those who have been inducted into the cult of celebrity and want to reassure themselves that their hero is just as hopeless as they are.

Autobiographies of the rich and famous are big business this time of year, and no wonder. These embossed monsters are almost the perfect gift: literate but unpretentious, pricylooking but often on special offer. That they're almost always awful hardly matters.

Paula Radcliffe's effort is a textbook example. Presumably conceived as a post-Olympics glory cash-in, now ominously titled My Story So Far (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), it's a definitively dull catalogue of groin strains and learning curves. But it's already selling by the yard, despite not covering the New York triumph and being both unrevealing and revolting on the Athens wobble (the legs weren't the problem, the stomach was).

Gazza's My Story (Headline, £18.99) is rather livelier. Aided by a not-so-spectral ghostwriter - "with Hunter Davies" says the spine - the Geordie joker traces his story from first memory (his mum winning a tin of beans at bingo) to present-day homeless, jobless, loveless reality ("I don't feel lonely, not really - I like hotels the way I like hospitals").

However bleak your yuletide, it can't fail to look rosier by comparison. Even the inside cover is disturbing: a timeline crayoned by the man himself charting landmarks on his Path to Recovery - "Done for rape", "Beat up Sheryl", "Swallowed tongue". Deaths are indicated by a small box, operations by a little circle. The words "alcohol", "cocaine", "morphine" and "COD" (compulsive obsessive disorder) are scrawled around the border. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a serial killer's basement, pinned up next to the newspaper clippings and fingers.

But it certainly sets the tone: "So let's say about £2 million in total has gone on Sheryl," he writes after totting it up at length. "I'm not moaning, or blaming her. I'm just trying to work out where the money has gone." Davies tries lightening the mood by recreating Gazza's boozy bonhomie of old - "I'd just been to the lav, noticed all these rolls of toilet paper and thought I'd make meself a cossie!" - but to no avail.

Gazza has the honour of being number 25 on Diego Maradona's list of the 100 greatest footballers (and the first Brit). It's not surprising - both were gifted midfielders and both pepper their autobiographies with weight-loss tips (line your tracksuit with binliners, suggests Gazza).

El Diego by Diego Maradona (Yellow Jersey Press, £16.99) was published in Latin America four years ago but translating it into English was clearly a challenge and this finished product even has a glossary explaining the more perplexing phrases - "let the tortoise get away", "give the dog its face back" and "take the milk of the cat". But, in fact, the delay - during which time Maradona has been divorced, received a bill for £23 million in unpaid taxes and nearly died twice - just adds pathos to a story that was already pretty diva-ish. When a match went badly, Maradona recalls, he would stay up all night, weeping. "No drugs, I didn't take drugs. I watched TV, weeping; watched movies, weeping. Always weeping, always."

He dishes generous quantities of dirt and pulls few punches. Even the Pope gets abuse ("sell the ceiling, tiger"). And as for that notorious victory over England in the 1986 World Cup, yes, actually, it was personal: "In a way, we blamed the English players for everything that had happened, for all the suffering of the Argentine people. Bollocks, it was just another match!"

What El Diego lacks in diplomacy it more than makes up for in passion. Most moving is the three-page prose poem to his (now former) wife, the "sensational, organic" Claudia: "She's the computer and the kiss, the wife and the mother, the little girl and the lover."