Taking the second group first, you can't help admire those honest churnerouters who stick to the tried and tested tropes and clich�s of the genre, who have no notions about their work other than as pieces of escapist fluff, and are happy to admit as much. In the other group are those people who make big claims for their work and are aggrieved that they're not accorded the respect they think they deserve. Despite my telling myself to be reasonable, I'm inclined to scoff at these types - I just can't believe that anything wedged between pink covers with a typeface that looks like it was assembled out of Barbara Cartland's eyelashes could be taken seriously.

But then that's the kind of caddish, toadlike, shallow, inconsiderate, slimebag of a man that I am - the kind that wastes the heroine's time for a good quarter of a 600-page book before slithering off to allow her get swept off her feet by a real knight in shining armour. I haven't actually read any of these books.

Happily, there were people on Arts Lives: Pop Fiction who had read some of them and confirmed my prejudices with their views.

"These women can't write and no one seems to mind that anymore, " said some guy on a literature course in Trinity. 'Ouch!' I said with a smile.

I loved the contribution too of broadcaster George Hook. An avowed connoisseur of women's literature (as opposed to chicklit), he said he was so annoyed by recent trends that he agreed to write a 10-chapter synopsis of a parody of a chick-lit novel and see how far it would get with the publishers, by way of making a mockery of the industry. Slav to Love - about a nymphomaniac Polish girl on the loose in Ireland - was duly passed around the publishing houses under the nom de plume of 'Rosie McDaid'. The hand of a male was quickly suspected by the inhouse readers, one of whom objected to the workin-progress's "pornography element". So point proven, sort of.

It's very easy of course to sound snobbish when discussing this subject. Programme presenter Ann Marie Hourihane (who was excellent and should be doing loads more television) probably got it right when she said that, under the phenomenally successful 'Irish popular women's fiction' umbrella, "There are good books and bad books, like any other genre." People who know about these things usually hold up Marian Keyes as an example of one of the better writers of popular women's fiction. She found a champion in academic Declan Kiberd - who pointed out that, in her day, Jane Austen was regarded as froth. So maybe Keyes will be given her full due years from now when chick lit has long fallen out of fashion and Watermelon is repackaged in a cover that looks more like the outside than the inside of a watermelon.

There's a reason chick lit is such a phenomenon. It's that it offers an escape from the modern world for women, especially younger women, who've never felt under so much pressure to be thin and beautiful looking. This was the societal malaise examined in such a painful way by footballer's wife Louise Redknapp on The Truth About Size Zero. Over the course of a month, Redknapp, a natural size eight, succeeded in shedding enough weight to fit into a UK size-four dress (equivalent to the fabled/infamous US sizezero). For what reason? For a film audition? A modelling job? No, it was an experiment undertaken completely of her own volition for no other reason than to illustrate the perils of crash-dieting. As such, probably the best thing that could have happened would have been if she'd died while the cameras were rolling. But she didn't; we didn't see her puke her guts up even once and she looked as delicately pretty at the end of her weight loss as she did before it.

The creeping suspicion throughout, of course, was that this was just a foolhardy and ridiculous stunt for Redknapp - a former pop star who's been out of the limelight for some time - to get back in the public eye. Well, if you were cynical that's what you might have thought, but Redknapp was such a charmer that you veered between thinking she was awfully innocent and misguided and thinking she was very brave and martyr-like. I hope for her next programme she takes a leaf out of the chick-lit template and sits up in bed in heartpatterned pyjamas and eats tubs and tubs of ice-cream and allows herself become a shape zero rather than a size zero.

Reviewed Arts Lives:

Pop Fiction Tuesday, RT�1 The Truth About Size Zero Wednesday, UTV