From F365 by John Nicholson. In recent weeks you could have been forgiven for thinking we were living through the last days of Caligula's Rome, with so much 'scandal' and moral outrage in the press and TV over sportsmen's bedroom antics. This a prominent part of the cultural landscape we inhabit but is it one most of us really want? Tiger Woods' 'speech' was an especially bizarre event as he publically apologized to his fans and even his sponsors, amongst others. He pleaded for fans to try to believe in him again. Believe in you? Who do you think you are? A god? Who wants or has that kind of emotional investment in a distant golfer? We don't believe in you and we never have. This isn't an insult. Why would we? We don't know you. We don't expect anything except golf from you. The rest is surely irrelevant to us. You are not that important to almost all of us. We have our own lives going on. We don't hang on your every move. Tiger may inspire you to play better golf but his job on earth was never to set you an example of how to live your life, even though he was apparently seen by many corporations and indeed by himself, as being exactly that. Wrong. The exact same thing goes for high-profile footballers who are dragged through the press for their 'indiscretions'. This is part of the industry of hysterical celebrity culture which has made some of the public think such people should be other than mere mortals. In this world they are 'icons' and 'role models' and 'ambassadors' whereas you and I know that they're just horny blokes with money and endless temptation. It's a story as old as the hills. These types of revelations are not shocking or even surprising but look at the press inches dedicated to it every day in this country. Another aspect of this came to the fore when Chelsea warned their players to behave themselves off the pitch 'to protect the image of the club'. If the club was selling enriched uranium to terrorists, that might make the place look bad but some footballers having sex just doesn't. In fact, if you're not getting any yourself, you might even admire them for filling their boots. This smacks of a corporate 'brand awareness' attitude being applied to football. Are they worried that parents will burn their kids' Chelsea shirts because the team contains people whose morals are questionable? We know that's not how it works. Most of us are not buying a product brand or a moral code with a season ticket. Perhaps if you consume your club as though it is just another entertainment purchase, then players' private lives do make a difference to you, but I doubt it. This over-lauding, over-rewarding and over-focusing on sportsmen's private lives is idiotic and prurient. Most of us just don't care which footballer is humping which over-made-up lady, which £50k watch he has bought her, where his wife is, why she is wearing pink today or which player is out on the town drinking his own pish from a stripper's bra. Actually I wish that last one was true. But clearly, there is a sizeable minority of people who work themselves into a lather over rich, famous people's lives; being judgemental and presumably feeling superior if they are 'caught out'; certainly getting off on it. Some say the British are sex-obsessed, forever caught between wanting to peek and wanting to take the moral high ground; we're both pervert and puritan. I don't normally read the tabloids but for this column I went to all of their websites every day for a week. It's astonishing how dull they are. How many times can 'someone famous has sex with someone else who isn't their wife/girlfriend' be a big headline story? In the era of instant free internet porn, who is even titillated by this? At least if they were doing something extraordinary with a goat called Elsie dressed in leather panties it would have an exotic flavour to it. But no. It's usually just regular sex in hotels, which frankly, if I'm not doing it, I'm not interested in. So why do people buy this slurry in their millions every day? I really haven't a clue and would welcome suggestions, but it is they who feed this surreal culture that leads witless company executives to believe that we all have a Pavlovian response to seeing a famous person advertising a product; running out and purchasing it. Thus they dish out lucrative sponsorship and image rights deals to sportsmen. Remember, Newcastle paid Joey Barton over £600k to licence his image rights! But sadly, those witless company execs may not always be so witless after all. Thomas Cook tells us that trade has gone up 15% thanks to those utterly, utterly loathsome, puke-inducing, Top Top & Lou ads. Do people think they will become like these two rich people if they book a holiday at Tommy C's? Surely I'm not the only person mystified, nay, horrified by this. We should be saying to footballers, if you can avoid making yourself look like a first-class hypocrite by not taking money for being something you are not, that'd be nice, but I'm really only interested in you as a footballer. And we should say to the over-wrought news media, these footballers can't let us down because we haven't asked anything of them outside of football. Leave them alone. Most of us don't look up to these people; don't look to their behaviour for guidance, not in the slightest, even if the agents and tabloids insist that we do. We are not 12-year-old boys with a crush. We're adults. I'm sure most players know this and resent being held to standards they did not create or volunteer for and just want to get on with their lives without intrusion. If, like me, you're weary of all these endless, uninteresting, so-called scandals and the inescapable media fall-out from them, you'll try not to feed the beast with your money or time. Players may endorse boots, monkey hats or vaginal speculums but it's of no interest to most of us. But it is the consumers and believers of this crappola that are the real problem. They create the market and the ludicrous culture which goes with it. Trouble is it infects all of us. As my wise old Granddad Fred used to say, 'life is unfair our John; one bugger p***ing in the barrel spoils everyone's pint'. And yes I'm aware that even by writing this column about such matters I perpetuate the problem in a way. But I see this as a modern blight; a cultural plague to challenge. It leads directly to less foreign correspondents and more gossip columnists. It is a dazzle ship, leading the public away from the important and the interesting news. And after a week reading tabloid websites, I'm also left feeling that it debases the nation, makes us more stupid and unhappy. When pictures on a phone become a front-page story for a few days, we're right to question this rolling news of utter vacuity and ask, how and why it has come to this and who exactly likes it this way. Will it change any time soon? It could if people stopped buying this nonsense. The silly money and attitudes would all dry up and wither. But it seems this celebrity culture has hypnotised too many people and it's become too powerful a money-making industry to stop. So for all of us who find it crushingly dull and a little depressing, all we can do is ignore or mock it.