Sean Bean. And your white-haired paint is? Tomorrow.

Welcome to the Monte Carlo TV Festival where TV stars dressed in chic gunas and journalists armed with perilous questions faced each other across moneyed tables. With nothing to trumpet but the greatness of their show - and these included 'Desperate Housewives', 'Grey's Anatomy', 'Shameless', 'Nikita', 'Modern Family' and so on - the actors were in condition and content but occasionally guilelessly not able to explanation the conundrums tossed in their direction. Like the uncertainty from the French newsreader who pressed Felicity Huffman on whether she vision former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was what is more guilty. It was clearly an crack to splash a headline but Huffman, severe cookie that she is, was not taking the bait.

Shrugging her shoulders she answered without very saying anything. Weird questions are nothing creative in the faction of showbiz. I once was tender at a small gathering where some scribbler enquired of Rowan Atkinson what his selected colour of Malteser was. The leading light of Mr Bean - for that was as a matter of fact the show being promoted - was for once at a loss. Then someone acicular out that in the silent the hapless hero was rather fond of the aforementioned sweet.

Aha, you imagined Atkinson slapping his brow in eureka frustration, how could I have not realised the sharp cunning of such a question! Of programme journalists come to the offer with unlike agendas and a range of magazine editors to satisfy. So that doubt about whether you like to ride ancillary saddle could be coming from a hack who earns his accumulate with 'Horse and Hound' and an probe as to your preference of garden vegetables might be targeted for the disguise page of 'Cucumber Weekly'. Finally though back to Monte Carlo and a converging discussion with the stars from 'Game of Thrones'. A grizzled Sean Bean - who plays the King's right-hand houseman Ned Stark in the grisly HBO dramaturgy - is an actor who doesn't take fools cheerfully or any other way.

Looking measure worse for friction it would have taken a foolhardy overworked to cross swords with him. Or else someone who was a few bob squat of a euro. Cue the uncertainty - in unsteady French - from somewhere very far port of field. It was an epic which took the moderator/translator a while to winnow down to: 'So Mr Bean, what beget of dog is old in the film?' The actor looked around the room, as if in a family way Ashton 'Punk'd' Kutcher to transpire from behind a couch. But no.

As the assembled hacks - a fell clutch it must be said - laughed at their colleague's discomfort, a relieved Bean smiled. It just goes to develop that in show occupation there are always more questions than answers.

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