WHEN did stupidity become something to aspire to?

When I was at school the only glamour girls we knew of were on page three of The Sun or saucy calendars on oil-stained garage walls.

Nobody took these women seriously, and they certainly weren’t inspiring to any teenage girl with an ounce of sense and ambition. To girls in the 1980s, feminism was to be embraced and we looked up to strong, accomplished, intelligent women.

But now the kind of women we used to dismiss as “bimbos” have become strange icons. The rise of reality TV, particularly the curious world of “dramality” in which Essex girls and Chelsea girls deliver wooden, scripted chunks of dialogue in heightened scenes of their lives, has spawned a new breed of celebrity. Self-obsessed young women teetering through life in towering heels, gazing vacantly from behind false eyelashes and taking endless selfies, are now role models for largely female fans.

It’s a weird world of perma-tanned WAGs, high-society party girls and mega-rich heiresses vaguely famous for being vaguely famous. Now they have their own niche on TV thanks to new channel, ITVBe, devoted to sugar-coated scripted reality shows. One such offering is about billionaire’s daughter Tamara Ecclestone, who doesn’t appear to understand what toast is. The socialite is filmed in the kitchen of her £45 million Kensington mansion making her husband a bacon sandwich, and asking him if toast is toast even when it’s not toasted. When he explains that non-toasted toast is called bread, she struggles with the concept. How that can be so, wonders Tamara, when bread is the stuff that comes in a bread basket in a restaurant? Endearingly kooky? No, just pretty depressing when you consider that this is a 30-year-old mother who claims in interviews that she wants to be taken seriously.

This bubble of vacuous TV celebrates young people who casually announce they never read books and know nothing about the world. It isn’t just women. Joey Essex, who admits even he doesn’t even know what he does for a living, appeared on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here last year and revealed he couldn’t tell the time. His £70,000 watch, he declared, was “just fashion”.

Another bright spark from Towie’s alumni was asked to identify America on a map of the world, and dithered for a while before pointing to China. “I fink it’s up there,” he grinned.

These are grown men who, it would seem, can barely tie their own shoelaces.

It isn’t kooky and sweet. It’s sad and pathetic. Dramality is marketed as a guilty pleasure, but in reality it’s a cold-hearted, soul-selling affair.