Onscreen was a group of three people, two men and one woman, although that wasn't immediately clear, in heated debate about something or other. Their topic wasn't immediately clear either, but what was apparent was that two of the group, the males, had decided for whatever reason to give the female a bit of a talking to. They laid into her, berating her for her past sins and for some of her current ones, her principal offence being, as far as I could make out, that she wanted to argue with them, stand her ground and make her case. She was called a liar, accused of "talking shit" and not understanding English (she's English). It was suggested to her that she was a pretty dim individual.

The attack was accompanied by jabbing fingers and a physical closeness from one of the males, which looked a little threatening from where I was sitting. Eventually she had enough, started crying and stormed off to bed, muttering something about killing herself.

Fans of Celebrity Big Brother will recognise the scene immediately. The woman involved was Jodie Marsh, a bit of a whiner admittedly, whose main offence both within and without the Big Brother house appears to have been that she has become a kind of celeb through taking her clothes off for money. She's not alone in pursuing this kind of career, of course, but she is the only one in the Big Brother house to have committed such an apparent outrage and has consequently become the target of what many viewers have interpreted as straightforward bullying.

The men in question were the former singer Pete Burns and the comedian Michael Barrymore, in whose swimming pool a dead man was once found. (That detail is a mere curiosity, it would seem, compared to the outrage of wearing skimpy clothing. ) By the following night they had been joined in their attacks on Marsh by most of the rest of the contestants.

Though people in the "serious" newspapers are supposed to get sniffy about celebrities and reality television shows, there's no doubt that such programmes often offer a glimpse into how humanity works and how people interact with each other. The current Celebrity Big Brother is a masterclass in bullying, for example. One person, who for whatever reason is perceived to be an annoyance, or a bit different, or not part of the group, is singled out for hostile treatment. The group members reassure each other about the "badness" or the "difference" or the "oddness" of the targeted one to justify their continued hostility, which then manifests itself in ways that range from the purely nasty to a simulated concern for the other's well-being.

Barrymore, for example, framed his hectoring in terms of concern for Marsh, and for her behaviour, and for her future if she didn't listen to the good sense he was talking to her. Marsh didn't seem interested in listening, which infuriated Barrymore, although she can hardly be faulted for refusing career advice from a cocaine-addicted bisexual who can't guarantee his party guests that they will leave his house alive.

As it happened, Celebrity Big Brother, which had had a dull start, came to life in a week in which bullying was much in the news. Several Dublin schools, of the kind which are often referred to as posh, were reported to have disciplined pupils who contributed to a website called www. hateboard. com.

The site, which does exactly what it says on the tin, allows contributors to be as nasty as they like about whoever they like. Fellow students are a favourite target . On the 14page printout beside me, one girl is described as a "stupid f. . . . ing manbeast, total whore, will do anything for the lads, but the lads all really hate her".

On the same girl: "We all hate her. Every day she hangs around with a different group of people and butts in on their conversations."

On the same girl: "She is a whore who thinks she's so great. . . She has big hairy tits and shows them to all the lads."

That's some of the more printable matter on the site.

Hateboard shows yet again, as though further proof were necessary, that when it comes to bullying, there's nobody more creative than an angry 15-year-old. Having already adapted mobile phones as weapons of meas destruction, kids now have their own websites devoted to attacking their teachers and each other.

What programmes like Big Brother, and RTE's Yo u ' r e A Star, indicate is that such tendencies and behaviour continue seamlessly into adulthood and that neither gender, wealth or celebrity is a barrier to behaving badly.

(Last week too, a group representing teachers reported hundreds of complaints about bullying, much of it by principals. The Irish Primary Principals Network responded by suggesting that some teachers were also bullying principals. ) What programmes like Big Brother and You're A Star, with its obnoxiously brutal judges, also do, however, is celebrate bullying, normalise it, accept it and attach to it a kind of false glamour. The bullying of Jodie Marsh was greeted with gleeful headlines all week, while last weekend's Late Late Show was little more than a celebration of Brendan O'Connor, who appears to have been chosen for Yo u ' r e A Star purely for his talent for being a lout and for reducing people to tears. So far You're A Star has had very little to do with music and everything to do with humiliation as entertainment. It's no wonder sites like hateboard exist.