And they fabricate their cars in conditions of grinding poverty . . . by hand.

The main attraction for me, however, is not their ingenuity or their mechanical skills or even, indeed, their swearing. It's just that I won't have seen any of the people on the screen before.

After a week of watching Stephen Fry in the grip of a torturing depression . . .

excruciating to watch . . . and Michael Parkinson bashing up not only Helen Mirren but Trinny and Susannah as well, I feel like someone who has spent a fraught Christmas with relatives she sees that little bit too often.

It is a shameful admission, particularly from someone who once worked in television, but I actually feel that I know Stephen Fry and Michael Parkinson and Helen Mirren and Trinny and Susannah.

Mind you, if I knew Trinny and Susannah in the real world then I would certainly be better dressed . . .

would I be any happier, I wonder? These are the sad thoughts that fill a television viewer's mind as the remote control is wrenched from her cold, dead hand.

But now my fake familiarity with celebrities is causing me difficulties in the real world. I get distressed. I sit there shouting "No, Stephen, no!" as we go in for a close up of Fry's wretched face. Stephen Fry said he didn't want to commit suicide, he just wanted to be dead. It's not exactly Wanderly Wagon , is it?

I am still absolutely furious with Michael Parkinson, for his patronising attitude and aggression towards Helen Mirren. Parkinson asked her if she had changed since he had last slavered over her in 1976. Helen Mirren should have asked him if he had changed, the miserable, smug, old bore. But she didn't.

She just said that she had changed, because she is very clever.

Then Parkinson poured scorn on Trinny and Susannah, because they deal in fripperies like fashion; I suppose not everyone can have their own chat show on ITV, or whatever it is they are calling it these days.

I guess you had to be there. When I say there, I mean on your couch at 10.30 on a Saturday night, getting riled by people who don't even know that you exist.

Who are not even in the same country as you.

This is why I'm a tiny bit worried about this celebrity culture thing. It's not the Kate and Pete visit, about which no one could really care less. It's not the sweet teenage girl who went "I was so, like, Oh. My. God, " as Michael Jordan (basketball player) walked past her at the Ryder Cup. It's not even the 10-yearold who solemnly said "Tupac's dead, " the other day, even though she was in nappies when Tupac was killed. (Tupac was a rap star. ) It's certainly not Heat magazine, which is clever and enjoyable. It's not even Big Brother, which you don't have to watch if you don't damn well feel like it.

Kate and Pete and the teenagers and the 10-year-olds and Big Brother are unsurprising. It's the grown-ups that worry me.

Who ever would have thought that the celebrity tsunami would hit golf? All that hero worship coming from grown men (all right, and a few women) for days and days and days?

Although golf has always had the potential for bling . . . all those checked trousers and pastel sweaters . . . who would have thought that golf would turn into the sporting equivalent of the Beatles' arrival in America? It just doesn't make sense.

Of course Kate and Pete don't make sense, we don't expect them to. They are youth celebrities . . . although Kate is pushing it, bless her, she is still a goddess.

She is a modern Garbo really, never saying a word, bar the odd well-aimed expletive.

No, it's the grown-ups I feel sorry for.

When you're young, hero worship is natural, when you are old it's just delusional. Time to whip out the knitting, I think.