On reflection, it's probably for the best that the story about John and Edward being offered large amounts of money to fly out to the Aussie jungle and join I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! turned out not to be true. The public has just lost one Aunt Sally after Katie Price decided enough was enough. The last thing the mighty Jedward needed right now was to gift vengeful viewers with two more stooges at which to fling their metaphoric missiles.

There was an undoubted cruelty about the visceral reaction which greeted the return of Price, aka glamour model Jordan, to the show which first catapulted her to fame. War criminals and serial killers don't get this bad a press. After the first few public votes to see who should be humiliated on live television, it did begin to look as if Katie would have been selected even if she'd up been against Robert Mugabe in the vote.

She took it personally. She was right. The brutal popularity contest that is Big Brother looks positively benign compared with I'm a Celebrity... On Channel Four's freak show, you only get to vote on who's evicted and to boo in pantomime fashion when they leave the compound.

Ant and Dec's theatre of cruelty offers the chance to decide who has to eat a kangaroo's anus and then delight as they fall apart under the strain. It's also got much worse as series followed series. Either the production companies were going further to pique public curiosity in their product, or we were becoming more ruthless. Whichever it was, it was evident from the start that Jordan wasn't to be given a chance. Her only role in this circus was to be kicked around for our entertainment. Seven times in a row, the viewers voted for her to be put through the wringer. If that isn't personal, what is?

More credit to Katie Price, then, for refusing to go along with it any longer. What has Jordan done, after all, to deserve this kind of bullying? Because that's what it was. A vulnerable and flawed woman who happens to have artificially enlarged breasts and a messy private life appears on national television, and millions of people at home instantly reverted into playground cliques, sniggering secretly as they cooked up ways to humiliate her, egged on by ringleaders in the press. It was Mean Girls replayed as reality TV.

Understanding why there is such hatred for a woman who 99.9 per cent of people at home have never met, are never likely to meet, and who has zero impact on their actual day-to-day lives, would tax the wisdom of the most insightful psychologists.

So they don't like the way she treated her estranged husband Peter Andre following their break-up? Big deal. I don't like the way Brad Pitt treated Jennifer Aniston, but I don't want to see him ritually belittled in my living room on a nightly basis to satiate my displeasure. It's all the more inexplicable when Peter Andre himself has handled his wife's undoubtedly disrespectful treatment of him with dignified restraint.

It's almost as if we feel entitled to be more upset by their break-up than the individuals involved.

Part of that comes from the feeling of fans -- well, ex-fans anyway -- that they had a stake in the love story of Jordan and Andre.

They watched it all begin first time round on I'm a Celebrity... as the brassy glamour model practically steamrollered the helpless chump into her arms. They bought the magazine photo spreads of the wedding, and watched the fly-on-the wall documentaries chronicling their life together. So when it all went wrong, maybe those who had urged it on from the sidelines felt bizarrely cheated.

There are interesting parallels here to Jade Goody, who became a national hate figure on Big Brother for no better reason than being a bit thick and a bit vulgar and not very photogenic, then turned it round against the odds to become loved and even admired for pulling herself up by the boot straps and achieving her dreams; only to ruin it all again by going off on one when confronted by a posh Indian actress on Celebrity Big Brother. "Never go back," was the message there. Jordan must be ruing the day she ignored that advice.

Jade managed to win back a fickle public's affections only by dying.

What does Jordan have to do to be forgiven for whatever crimes she is deemed to have committed -- get cancer too? Or are we now so resentful of successful people that even death wouldn't be a good career move?

Meanwhile, grown women who should know better are following their teenage daughters into hormonal idiocy by jumping on the Twilight express. There's not much that I agree with feminists about these days, but when an assistant professor of English and women's studies at Ball State University weighed in last week to denounce the hugely popular vampire romances for providing appalling role models to young women, I found myself enthusiastically endorsing every word.

Carmen Siering hits the nail on the head when describing Bella -- heroine of the original novel and its sequel New Moon, the film of which is playing to packed audiences around the world -- as a passive shell in thrall to the overbearing, domineering, stereotypically masculine young men around her; constantly needing to be rescued by buff hunks with their shirts off, and falling apart when she's left without a man.

It was about time somebody got the boot into Bella, because she's an irritating little drip. In fact, she's a deluge of wetness. Wetter than a fish's wet bits, as Rowan Atkinson once memorably quipped on Black Adder. That she is, apparently, the girl that every female teenager on the planet wants to emulate is profoundly depressing. Katie Price might be a brash and tactless money-grubbing publicity-junkie, but at least she has a personality, and at least she's real, and at least she can laugh at herself. Weedy, cookie-baking, gazing-sulkily-into-the-middle-distance Bella is a simulacram of pseudo-intense vacuousness, and any independent woman worth her salt would be burning copies of Stephanie Meyer's poorly written saga in the street rather than their bras.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer would kick Bella's ass -- and pasty-faced Edward Cullen's too. Now that's what I call a role model. And Jordan, for all her faults, is made from the same stern stuff. She's never moped around waiting for a man to come to the rescue. She has always seized the day.

Let's just hope the women of the world snap out of their embarrassing Twilight obsession soon, because if they don't, sisters, it really all was for nothing.

Sunday Independent