IN its Money section, the London runs a feature called Fame and Fortune. A star of stage or screen is interviewed and his or her financial habits discussed. Many consider the inner thoughts of celebrities interesting, so much so that the newspaper presents them without comment.

In last Sunday's paper, the interviewee was a British actor called Peter Dean. You probably won't have heard of him. His biggest role was as a barrow boy (a street seller of fruit and vegetables) on , a British television soap opera about the ways of those who live in the eastern reaches of London.

Mr. Dean earns roughly the national average wage. Last year, he told the paper, he earned ?26,000, or a little over $40,000. No longer on the TV series, his dual sources of income are from "investing and gambling", he said.

Here are some of Mr. Dean's thoughts. Read them and see if you can spot what is wrong with his approach to money.

"Q: What has been your best investment?

"A: I would say my Ford Mondeo (a car). I've had it for ten years and hardly anything has gone wrong with it. I bought the car new for ?7,000 ($11,000) and it just keeps running and running.

"Q: Do you manage your own financial affairs?

"A: The savings I deal with myself are premium bonds. I've accumulated ?8,000 ($13,000) in premium bonds. I've won ?1,500 ($2,400) in seven years, which is very good."

Premium bonds are sold by the British Government to encourage gambling, for some reason. The "bonds" pay no interest, but a monthly lottery is held, in which one bond holder wins ?1 million ($1.6 million) and many others win smaller amounts.

So, from a financial perspective, what is wrong with Mr. Dean's comments?

If you answered "everything", you'd be about right. His notion of investing, earning and saving are all completely incorrect and will lead him to the poorhouse in his old age. His penchant for gambling will likely speed the process.

To be specific:

A car is not an investment. Cars lose value from the moment you drive them off the dealer's lot. Unless you place a car in cold storage and never use it, its value will never exceed what you paid for it. Even then, the best-kept unused vehicle will not exceed its purchase cost for decades. Used cars never increase in value, unless inflation so badly destroys a currency that prices of new cars increase by thousands of percent.

So Mr. Dean's "best investment ever" is one of his worst.

Next, he said that the savings he deals with are in premium bonds. Since the bonds pay no interest, they cannot be considered bonds, or savings. Bonds are evidence of loans made by governments or corporations, and almost all of them pay interest, or increase in value through the use of more complicated payment mechanisms.

Premium bonds, like lottery tickets, are swindles organised by governments to tax the poor. Rich people don't buy lottery tickets. They don't need to win big money, because they already have big money. They probably also have investment advisers, who would counsel them not to waste their money on gambling.

That governments are allowed to cheat people in this manner is nothing short of scandalous. They do so with such efficiency that an otherwise semi-intelligent fellow like Mr. Dean can believe that throwing his money away is investing.

Mr. Dean's claim that a return of ?1,500 on an investment of ?8,000 over seven years is "very good" shows that he may not have any brains, after all. His "winnings" represent almost a fifth of his "investment". Had he invested the same amount in a bank account over the same period, he would have had to earn less than three per cent per annum to earn the same level of income that his "bonds" returned. Interest rates are low today, but sterling still pays three per cent. Over the past seven years, Mr. Dean would have done almost twice as well to leave the money in the bank.

Bank accounts don't offer million-pound payouts, it's true, but then nor do premium bonds, really. You stand a far better chance of being struck by lightning than of winning the million. You stand a much, much better chance of winning nothing at all, which is where bank savings accounts really win out. If you put your hard-earned cash into a savings account, you will "win" every month.

There can be no objection to Mr. Dean's ignorance being plastered all over the newspaper. It's his life, after all. But his comments went unchallenged.

Mr. Dean is a financial illiterate, but because he is a star, there is a danger of others following his techniques, which are the high road to permanent poverty.

I DON'T mean to be a spoilsport - by all means have a flutter every now and then; I certainly do. But don't fool yourself into thinking that buying a car and a bunch of lottery tickets is "investing". Those activities fall into the same category as buying a shirt or spending a weekend in New York. They are disinvestments.

Of course, anyone who would look to an actor for financial advice probably deserves to be poor, as does anyone who gambles away his or her savings.

It's hard enough to make financial progress in this world, without stacking the odds against yourself by playing the horses. Gambling offers a short, sharp spot of fun. Investing offers a lifetime of comfort.