COMPARING notes via a Whats App group, during Saturday night’s Strictly Come Dancing launch, I realised I only recognised about a third of the ‘celebrity’ contestants.

‘You Tube boy’, ‘Casualty bloke’ and ‘Dr Eyebrows’ were our more polite descriptions for contestants we didn’t know from Adam, or Eve.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Strictly’s professionals would become more famous than their celebrity partners, but c’mon - this is TV’s biggest entertainment show, yet the celeb line-up this year barely reaches D-list. When your biggest names are Lee from Blue and one half of Trinny and Suzannah, you can’t blame viewers for feeling a bit short-changed.

Thanks to endless reality shows clogging up TV schedules, the celebrity gene pool is spreading ever thinner. From ‘Teen Moms’ to ‘Real Housewives’, practically anyone can become a ‘TV personality’ if they hog enough camera time. If you haven’t had your own ITVBe series yet, it’s only a matter of time.

Heck, you can even get famous watching telly. Just ask Scarlett Moffatt, (who was much funnier on the sofa in her family’s Gateshead terrace than she has been post-Gogglebox).

The usual route to a reality show is via a failed soap or pop career. Also eligible are retired athletes, politicians who fancy themselves as national treasures, people who got fired for being useless on The Apprentice and the offspring or exes of celebrities. You only have to date a Z-lister or be married to one for five minutes, and you’re in. If you’re Calum Best, you’re a dead cert.

Currently, there’s celebrity caravanning (Tony Blackburn changes a tyre with Corrie villain Richard Hillman), ghost-hunting (TOWIE’s Arge freaks out in a dark cellar), island survival (Martin Kemp has a crack at building a hammock), even Celebs in Solitary; a “social experiment” in which Anthea Turner sits alone in a room, with only a panic button for company. It all makes Alan Partridge’s ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’ pitch seem quite high-brow...

What did these people do before Dancing on Ice or All Star Driving School? Did they just slip back into civilian life and get real jobs? In an age of ubiquitous low-level fame, that seems unthinkable.

As well as offering a lifeline to hasbeens, reality TV has spawned a new breed of wannabe - the TOWIEs, Geordie Shores and Made in Chelseas. By simply turning up and pretending to be themselves, they become big fish in small celeb ponds. They move from show to show - Celebs Go Dating to Celebs in Therapy, Celebs Go Sugar-Free to Celebs On The Farm - creating a bewildering cross-pollination of ‘dramality’.

To get ahead of the pack you need zero self-awareness and the ability to throw at least one ludicrous tantrum per episode. Gemma Collins (TOWIE alumni) is the Meryl Streep of this peculiar strand of celebrity culture. Gemma, or The GC as she brands herself, has been on I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here (if you blinked you’d have missed her; she barely lasted 24 hours), Celebrity Big Brother (“It’s like having a job,” she wailed, refusing to take part in yet another task) and Celebrity Masterchef, (buckling beneath the strain of peeling potatoes, she offloaded kitchen duties onto a couple of sous chefs.) She’s currently in Diva Espana, which I’m pretty certain is a show where the title came first.

I quite like The GC, because at least she’s a ‘personality’. In a genre largely populated by shallow, unlikeable dullards, she’s refreshingly self-deprecating, and entertaining. Let’s face it, she’d be a hoot on Strictly.

* WHEN my mum lost her sight, I would often read her articles from the Telegraph & Argus. It was a way of keeping her connected with local events via the paper she’d had delivered every tea-time for decades.

She’d even been in it, thanks largely to the local am dram scene she was involved with. When our garden wall was knocked down by a runaway lorry, it made the T&A front page, with a photo of my parents pointing at the rubble, looking glum.

Reading the paper to my mum made me realise what a lifeline a talking newspapers service is to the visually impaired. Talking Telegraph has been providing this vital free service for over 30 years, and needs volunteers who can offer just two hours every five weeks. That's something most of us could offer.

* A COLLEAGUE and I once became so sick of how badly journalism was depicted on TV we started a mini campaign called, embarrassingly, SOAP (Stop Our Awful Portrayal). We wrote to Brookside producer Phil Redmond. He didn’t reply.

When it comes to portraying the press, TV dramas rarely get it right. But so far I’m liking BBC1’s Press, about two rival newspapers. Aside from the unrealistic glossy newsroom teeming with reporters (if only), it tackled issues like press regulation and public interest pretty well. Weatherfield Gazette, take note.