HERE are some words that caught my eye this week as I surfed the web: "This site is dedicated to the greatest woman on the face of the earth."So who is this paragon?

HERE are some words that caught my eye this week as I surfed the web: "This site is dedicated to the greatest woman on the face of the earth."

So who is this paragon? A great writer? A great leader? Perhaps it's a posthumous tribute to Mother Teresa – or even Princess Di?

Actually, the woman in question is Emma Bunton, who I would say was not even the greatest woman on the face of the Spice Girls.

This is clearly a bad case of what an eminent group of American psychologists define as celebrity worship syndrome.

These mental health professionals estimate that up to a third of us suffer from CWS to some degree – and that around ten per cent are seriously afflicted.

A glance over the popular press, at the TV schedules, or the magazine shelves at your newsagent's will be enough for you to see what they mean.

We are bombarded as never before by the most astonishingly trivial details of tedious lives.

Who really cares whether Britney's got a double chin? Whether Shane Richie (whoever he may be) is as fit as Justin Timberlake (ditto). Or what a non-entity with real breasts and a non-entity with plastic ones have to say about each other.

This burgeoning obsession with people famous only for being famous apparently leaves its

sufferers anxious, depressed and dysfunctional.

I suffer the same reaction when I ponder the example some of these supposed celebrities are setting our impressionable children. And it is of course children – of whatever age – that all this fluff is aimed at.

I hate to sound like a member of the so-called Moral Majority, but…