Why Deal or No Deal absolutely encapsulates in one show what's wrong with our society.

Cue tense background music. At £15,000 Ceejay, deal or no deal?

Ceejay stares longingly at the strategically placed photos of her dead mother, who died tragically in her sleep, aged 85.

The camera cuts to her husband Wayne in the audience. The incredible tattooed man. The veins in his temple bulging as he struggles to control his roid rage.

"No deal, Noel!!"

Everybody screams, "Come ooonnnnnn!"

What particularly annoys me about this show is when Noel tells the contestant they are "playing a really clever game", or similar. I find myself instinctly shouting at the television, "It's pure fuckin chance, you morons."

Deal or No Deal sums up everything that is rotten in Dodge, with people having vast sums of money thrown at them for doing absolutely nothing of merit, without having to excel at anything.

There once was a time, before the insidious cult of celebrity, when to become famous you actually had to be good at something. No more. Now one can become a media personality and a multi millionaire simply for spending a few weeks locked in a house with a group of people similarly under endowed in the brain department. If you think I'm being harsh, just remember when one the BB housemates was called a psuedo intellectual for having the audacity to know that Neil Armstrong was the first man to land on the moon.

Increasingly, when I read of the latest contestants taking part in this week's gravy train celebrity fest programme, my usual reaction is, "Who the fuck's that?"

We live in times where the only thing we aspire to is mediocrity.

Witness the current media circus, as the final weeks of Jade Goody's life are played out in the tabloids, all taste and decency, together with any notion of dignity, a distant memory (quelle surprise Max Clifford is loitering nearby). It's a tragedy that any young woman and mother of two should be struck down by cancer, at such an early age, but what makes Jade any different from the thousands of other women in a similar situation. Oh yeah, she's a celebrity, but for what? Because she thought East Anglia was a foreign country...

And thus everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. I blame the comprehensive system.