Editor-At-Large: What did we do to deserve Danniella Westbrook?

By 10pm a couple of nights ago I was wondering what I might have to do to be transported to a world where there is no television, no tabloid press and no mention of the two most irritating words in the English language – Danniella Westbrook. Own up, we live in a sick country. A culture that has spawned inspirational thinkers and writers from Shakespeare to Chaucer, Stephen Hawking to Isaac Newton, has started the 21st century in the grip of an illness so addictive it seems to permeate every aspect of our lives.

Can you believe 11 million people, most of whom have "benefited" from secondary education and can read and write, decided to tune in their televisions last week to watch the pathetic outpourings of a bunch of second-division achievers, people for whom the state of their manicures is more important than the state of the economy?

As for calling them celebrities, I've seen more natural talent in the rare sheep class at the annual Upper Nidderdale agricultural show. Women with bad bleach jobs, rebuilt faces and over-plucked eyebrows. Men with paunches, feeble jokes and dubious leadership skills clutching at cigarettes as if they were life- support machines. All orchestrated by a pair of irritatingly facile Geordies whose faces are permanently stretched in clown-like expressions of glee. Ant and Dec are the ventriloquists' dummies of reality television. As the "drama" unfolds with all the tension of a slug passing goo out of its rear end, our plucky teams perform various tasks in the Australian rainforest to win food. Then, commercial breaks assault us with images of Cadbury's fruit and nut bars counterpointed with ads for WeightWatchers. Mass confusion reigns.

I'm a Celebrity seamlessly melds the two most potent aspects of popular culture – "reality" and fame. Within two days Danniella Westbrook, a woman who has taken so much cocaine her nose has been entered for the Building of the Year Awards in the luxury remodelling category, was bawling her eyes out and begging to come home. It was so obviously a masterclass performance in angst, because Danniella clearly has trouble separating fact from fiction. Her life has been a seamless soap opera featuring car crashes, millionaire husbands, new boobs and rehab. Here is one psychodrama she didn't even have to learn a script for.

The Beeb might be cutting back on the decorating and cooking shows, but all broadcasters think that the brain-rotting world of reality TV has a lot more to offer us. Never forget television schedulers are trained to repeat the mantra "flogging a dead horse" in their sleep. And it's not just the proven winners such as Big Brother – which returns at the end of the month. Dozens more shamelessly similar formats featuring the nearly famous are on the way. Even I turned down a series recently called Celebrity detox and the chance to go to Thailand and have a colonic irrigation on camera for you all to marvel at. Then there's Gender Switch, being made for Channel 5, in which well-known men and women are turned into members of the opposite sex. Imagine Jonathan Ross in a frock on a perfume counter or Geri Halliwell refereeing a football match. I also passed up Celebrity Wife Swap – soon to hit Channel 4 – no matter that I'm not married and I've damned the concept in these very pages.

Do we care one iota about the people in these programme? No, we do not. They have replaced goldfish as the no-bother pets in the living room. No need to feed them or even empty their cat trays. Reality TV provides us with no-effort viewing. Unlike pornography it stimulates no nerve endings, arouses no passions and certainly doesn't end with messy emissions or a visit from the vice squad. Let us not even waste a sentence on the morality of turning addicts into entertainment – we passed that stage years ago when people such as Jerry Springer unleashed freaks who fought each other over their failing relationships on his show.

But, there is hope, for from the most unlikely sources come great art and innovative ideas. And so, after a couple of years of being moulded and work-shopped, one of the best musicals I've seen in a decade opened last week at the heart of our cultural establishment, the National Theatre. The composer Richard Thomas and co-writer and director Stewart Lee have created a brilliant entertainment based on this loathsome desire for five minutes of fame which so grips us. Jerry Springer – the Opera is a gas. It's an exhilarating, challenging satire, destined to be a huge hit in the West End and surely on Broadway. It's vulgar, crude, sexist and vile. But it makes us think, unlike the ramblings of Toyah and her ramshackle crew. It's performed by real talent, people who can sing, dance, and act. And you come away uplifted and humming a tune, which is more than you can say after an hour of whining Danniella.

Sneering with flowers

Country Life, that bible for Barbour-wearers, has conducted a survey of more than 300 top gardeners to find their favourite and most loathed plants. As usual, the results tell you more about the taste of women when they go by the prefix "Lady" than anything else. Lady Carrington, Lady Cranbourne, Lady Mary Keen and Lady Baker Wilbraham are all quoted, as well as a couple of lords. Opening your garden to the public (which this survey promotes) is a terrific charitable scheme, but how come all my cheerful favourites like dah-lias, red hot pokers, gladioli and marigolds are high on the list of horticultural horrors?

Only old-fashioned roses are acceptable, and not hybrids. Wild grasses are fine, but God forbid anything as vulgar as pampas grass. I can't imagine how good old garish geraniums made it to the acceptable list – they must mean those swanky pelargoniums which are definitely not pillar-box red. I can't help feeling this is another way of sneering at the lower middle classes with their window boxes full of salvias and lawns ruthlessly demarcated with leylandii. Being "natural" is in, garish or exotic most definitely out. And don't mention water features, or anything made-over by Charlie Dimmock and her hit squad.

A scientific study claims to prove that rainbow trout can feel pain. Earlier this year Americans concluded the opposite, when a professor at the University of Wyoming demonstrated that fish could react to stimuli, but did not possess a consciousness that would let them feel pain. Now that has been contradicted by the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Dr Lynne Sneddon asserts that fish exhibit signs of stress and pain on being caught. The worse thing to do, it seems, is throw them back. Does this mean that hunting is OK if those pink-jacketed people serve up Basil Brush in a stew afterwards?