Given their subject's innocuous and (relatively) incident-free life, the biographers' interest in David Beckham has always seemed pretty much otiose. There is a limit, surely, to the number of things you can say about a man who, having played his weekly game of football, wanders uxoriously home to tea with his wife and children? Undeterred, at least two rapt pursuers have followed him to Spain; Julie Burchill has written moistly of his iconic status; the man himself has weighed in with a ghost-written autobiography. Now comes the news that this stack of encomia will shortly be joined by yet another eager anatomist - Beckham's father, Ted, whose David Beckham: My Son will, according to the Bookseller, be hitting the bookshops sometime in October.

Eye-catching revelations, alas, will probably be in short supply. Denying tabloid allegations of an unauthorised exposé, Beckham sr has suggested that "people will find the book to be a fascinating insight into the early life of David Beckham, as well as a father's pride and joy watching him grow up and develop into a great footballer". But at the same time, all unthinking, Mr B and his publishers are responsible for a radical new departure in English literature. What might be called the "dads and lads" genre is nearly a century old, inaugurated by Edmund Gosse's Father and Son in 1907 and carried forward by such ornaments of the form as John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father, Blake Morrison's When Did You Last See Your Father? and large parts of Martin Amis's Experience.

Hitherto, though, dadlit has had a fixed perspective: the spin has always come from the juvenile side of the equation. Now, at a stroke, Ted has cast aside the convention that books about father/son relationships shall always be written by the son after the father is dead and with no chance for the latter to state his own case. Clearly, this tendency will run and run. All over London, you imagine, publishers are falling over themselves to commission, say, Bert Prescott's thoughts on how John betrayed his humble heritage with those la-di-da toffs at No 10 or old Mr Jagger's reminiscences of Sir Mick's Eden-era cigarette-card collection. If it comes to that, the teetering arch of royal biography lacks a very obvious coping stone: Born to Reign: My Son Charles by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh.