Vinnie Jones, the actor Britain couldn't keep, bigs himself up

With the exception of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, has anyone ever seen a movie starring Vinnie Jones? All right, I'll give you that Nicolas Cage one about car thieves – Gone in 60 Seconds – in which Big Vin made out that he was basically equal billing to Cage, but in fact turned out to be playing a somewhat less significant character. Who was mute.

And at a push you can have X Men: The Last Stand, in which he had a few lines. But if you are planning to see any of the 16 motion pictures the IMDb lists Vinnie as making or having made in 2013, then do get in touch. Not with me, but with someone. They are not so much straight-to-DVD as straight-to-linkrot.

In the interests of what we might loosely style as research, Lost in Showbiz called in a few of Vinnie's filmic outings from the past couple of years. And there was one set in Kazakhstan – the only country in which it was released – in which Vinnie plays a main character. Who is mute.

But with a few of the other movies, he frequently took so long to pop up that I began to assume he had imported his football playing-style into moviemaking, and been sent off before the title sequence. None of these is what might be described, in Hollywood parlance, as a "Vinnie Jones vehicle". No, if you seek the precise vehicular analogy for the kind of roles Vinnie mostly gets, then picture one of those hugely overcrowded Indian trains. Vinnie is the fourth passenger from the left in the fifth row of those travelling on the roof of the seventh carriage.

Still, we are gathered here today to celebrate a man who returned to our headlines this week. Vincent Peter Jones formerly played association football on this septic isle, but now lives in Los Angeles in That America – though of course, he doesn't like to bang on about the place.

Vinnie is currently promoting some cable series about people who have tough jobs in Russia – trawlermen and construction workers and whatnot. The format is not believed to have been the subject of a bidding war. Anyway, he has been interviewed for the Radio Times by Brian Viner and, in the course of this, Vinnie explained that he was so displeased by what immigration had done to Britain that he was staying put in LA (a timely reminder that it's not immigration if British people do it).

On the basis that the latter debate has entranced us enough already this week, our business today is with Vinnie's reflections on his place in Hollywood. "I'll tell you something," he confides generously to the Radio Times. "Americans are crazy about sport." Are they really? Do go on. "Kobe Bryant is bigger than Brad Pitt. Even the President wants to shoot hoops with Kobe Bryant. So that gives me massive credibility. Massive."

Doubtless it will not be long before the White House calls, inviting Vinnie to do one of the president's knees – but in the meantime he has a whole heap of names he needs to drop like 10-tonne weights. "People say: 'What's it like working with Stallone, and all that?'," he explains at one point. "Robert Duvall told me to do a western," he reveals at another, "and I'd love that."

Or as Duvall himself put it in a press conference to promote Gone in 60 Seconds: "Vinnie tried to direct everybody. I was like: 'Vinnie, I think I know what I'm doing.'"

Yes, but does he? Because the way Vinnie tells it, onetime membership of the Crazy Gang really is an international calling card that puts you on a cinematic par with any major movie star out there. "Nic Cage said to me: 'Hey man, I didn't know you were a pro soccer player, that's awesome'," he boasts. "It means I'm going in on an even keel with them."

Mm. Short of tattooing RUBE across his forehead, of course, these anecdotes serve only to telegraph Vinnie's insignificance – but he appears to remain convinced he can get away with them on this side of the Atlantic. As the Radio Times notes, his PR machine literally bills him as a "Hollywood superstar". It is almost touching, really – the quaint belief that Britain isn't on the internet or anything, and will accept his tall tales of ongoing Hollywood superstardom even as Ryan Gosling and Robert De Niro and all the others seem to keep muscling in on his aisle seat at the Oscars. In Vinnie's head, we Brits are a benighted folk, scarcely hooked up to the telephone network, who will swallow any old cobblers. He may even be slightly surprised we haven't hailed him as a golden god during this latest sojourn, like the Ewoks do with C-3PO in Return of the Jedi.

Yet when the call from Inside the Actors' Studio eventually comes – and I hear that well-placed anonymous sources close to Vin are telling the Sun that it's only months away – there is one clip I hope the star can persuade the producers to show. You may never have watched the Royal Variety Show in 2001, but Lost in Showbiz did, and implores some kind soul at ITV to put it on YouTube to make it available for previous generations. For reference, it's the bit where Vinnie comes on stage dressed as Macavity, and does a rendition of Macavity the Mystery cat, in tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Ever the self-effacer, Vinnie later opined of his performance: "I nailed it." And it was certainly crucifying, if that's what he meant – in fact, the presence of Her Maj might technically elevate its radioactive awfulness into an act of treason. That, stargazers, is what going in on an even keel with the A List looks like – and I defy anyone to watch it and not be struck by the blinding realisation that Britain is far, far too small to hold such an artiste.