Still, everyone else seems in quite a lather about how skinny Teri Hatcher is getting. I mean, Teri Hatcher is a big girl. Or at least she was. When she was playing Lois in the Superman series she was an athletic American beauty, and they don't come much more beautiful than that. Now she looks like Posh Spice on speed, which is to say exactly like Posh Spice. Of course the question is, isn't she old enough to know better?

To which the answer is. . . a lot more twisted than wisteria. The rules for women never change. It doesn't matter how old you are, if you're on television you've got to be skinny. This is true even for the few television women over 40 who are taken seriously.

Anna Ford, Miriam O'Callaghan, Joan Bakewell. . . they're all skinny. Miriam was even skinny when she was pregnant. There is a size apartheid here. The posher the programme the thinner the women. In fact it's getting so that you can identify so-called reality television simply by the size of the females on screen. Ah, you say, that'll be the general public.

Judy of Richard & Judy isn't skinny.

Blathnaid on The Afternoon Show isn't skinny.

Lorraine Thing from Scotland isn't skinny and Oprah is only skinny periodically.

However, big girls seem to feature on the lighter side of television . . . I know all sides of television are light, but still. The only big woman I can think of on a news programme is Bridget Kendall of BBC1. That lovely fat weather girl has vanished without trace.

Which brings us to Anne Diamond and her stomach stapling. An experienced presenter . . . albeit an experienced presenter on the slide . . . who must be in her 50s, no matter what she says, underwent this cod surgery before joining Celebrity Fit Club. Anne's been in television long enough to know the rules.

Of course the camera is murder and it is really true about it adding 10lbs to the human frame. Most people shed a little weight before they go on television, if they have fair warning . . . God knows I did. But it is the uniformity of the female forms on television that worries me. Experience tells us that truly adult males find a bit of heft unattractive . . . au contraire . . . so we are left wondering what fantasies this legion of telly skeletons is designed to fulfil.

And it is a female fantasy. What other group would look at Sarah Jessica Parker's manly six pack and sigh with envy? Who else would have made a heroine out of the cadaverous Ally McBeal? Who else would long to be like Teri Hatcher, a woman in her 40s who looks like a teenage boy when she puts on a pair of jeans?

It was Marcia Cross (she plays Bree) who revealed that the cast of Desperate Housewives were "paid not to eat". Other women choose to starve themselves for nothing. It is unfair to identify eating disorders with teenage girls. For every Mischa Barton (poor child! ) and Olsen twin there is a Teri Hatcher or a Calista Flockhart, gamely taking their television bosses' instructions to their logical conclusion. For women the food issue goes on forever.

And perhaps there is another fantasy at work here too. The fantasy of an ordered world, where everything looks perfect . . . in other words the fantasy we goggle at for several hours every night. Female fat has always been synonymous with disorder and an unhealthy disregard for the rules, with being out of control and not caring. Not the characteristics of your ideal, obedient audience. In the world of body fascism those Desperate Housewives wear the jackboots.