It is sometimes said that there are only seven showbiz stories, with "X has splashed out on a new X" one of the great ur-myths. Within that category, though, Lost in Showbiz has a special weakness for a notable subgenre: "Celebrity has splashed out on a private island."

All you can be absolutely sure of, whenever you see a variant on that tale, is that the one thing the celebrity has not done is splash out on a private island. To read the headline "Celebrity has splashed out on a private island" is to know that the opposite is axiomatically true.

This week, it was the turn of Angelina Jolie. "Angelina Jolie is splashing out £12.2m to buy Brad Pitt a heart-shaped island," the Daily Mirror informed us of an island 50 miles north of Manhattan. Or as a representative of the family who own the island told the New York Post: "I don't have any idea where that came from. The family threw it out there to see if anyone was interested, but so far no [potential buyers] have [come forward]."

Excitingly, this isn't even the first time Jolie has not splashed out on a private island – the last one she had absolutely no intention of splashing out on was in that much-vaunted Dubai development, The World. Do you recall that thing? It was one of those artificial archipelagos dredged out of the sands of the ocean shallows off Dubai's coast – created in the shape of a world map, with each country its own island – and was rumoured to be the most highly sought residential address in the galaxy or something. It seems to have gone mostly tits-up since the financial crisis, with subsequent descriptions ignoring its intergalactic desirability, and referring to it instead as "the world's largest shipping hazard". Anyway, back in the day, celebrities were reported to be splashing out on it left, right and centre. Rod Stewart had splashed out on Scotland, and Angelina and Brad … well, they had splashed out on Ethiopia. (It was just after the couple had adopted an Ethiopian-born daughter, so you can imagine The World's marketing "guru" reckoning it was worth a punt.)

Alas, we'll now never see Rod powerboating over from Scotland to Ethiopia to borrow a cup of sugar from Brangelina, perhaps calling in at Greece, which – if I recall correctly – was being not splashed out on by Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee.

And we'll certainly never see armed vessels patrolling Spice Island, the subject of a classic of the genre written by a late friend. Its premise? "Posh and Becks plan to buy a £6m private island … just off the coast of Essex!"

No. No they don't – but long may such non-splashings-out continue, in a genre that should really be labelled Isle Be the Judge of That.