My View: Hair apparent... why blondes don't prefer some gentlemen

"Being blonde means never saying you don't understand unless you want to be predictable," she rasps in the Radio Times this week. "Being blonde means always trying to tell the blonde joke first."

She gives an example: "What do you call a brunette between two blondes? An interpreter."

Excellent, and now my favourite blonde joke. Like Mariella, I am allowed to tell blonde jokes because I, too, am blonde. Some are born with blondeness, some choose blondeness, and some have blondeness thrust upon them

(okay, so that's only pole-dancers, spies and Angelina Jolie in a dodgy wig, like in her latest film Salt, but you get the idea).

I was born blonde. I've met countless brown-haired adults who say they were the blondest little angels as children, but in the playground I was known as Cotton Wool Head. It wasn't a good look.

Mariella chose blondeness when she dyed her hair at 16, having gone grey after her father's death. She would have thought twice, she says, if she had known what her "shade of choice suggested to the world".

Which is that blondes are stupid and trivial, and that's just for starters, because Mariella is right – some people, and by that I mean some men, do make startling assumptions about blonde women.

One of the most unpleasant aspects of being blonde is that a certain type of man will assume that, if you are not accompanied by another man, you are available and you want to be nice.

I'm referring to the nasty type of saddo you find propping up bars throughout the country, the sort of bleary, unattractive man who thinks he's being friendly when he asks you to give him a smile – and, if you don't oblige, will soon turn nasty. I have had numerous encounters like this over the years, in pubs, in parks, on trains, so much so that one of the benefits of growing older is knowing that this will happen less and less (although I do worry that the saddos will just get older, too).

Since my early 20s, I have dyed my hair dark on three occasions, for about six months each time, and so I know that dark-haired women don't suffer to the same extent. I suspect the saddos think brunettes won't put up with it. It infuriates me that they think blondes will.

Mariella could dye her hair brown, but instead chooses to capitalise on her blondeness by presenting an upcoming Radio 2 programme Blonde on Blonde, examining how being blonde affected the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors and Doris Day. Fair play, as Mariella has done more than most to challenge the sexist and stereotypical view that blonde women are dumb.

As for blond men, well, they really are dumb. Boris Johnson? I rest my case.