I'VE come to the conclusion that the world is going mad. This is mildly alarming because making such statements is usually a sign of having been around a while.

It comes as a shock to find oneself joining the "Dear Sir, are we all going bonkers?" brigade, but there you are; perhaps it comes to us all.

As with most outbursts of perception, the belief that the world is turning insane can have any number of triggers. In a sense, the issue should not be awesomely large. Questions such as whether or not Tony Blair took this country to war illegally, for instance, belong on a higher plane. Mad world questions have to be, well, madder than that.

Two examples popped up this week. They are not linked, except in raising the possibility of a mad world scenario.

First up is the latest product from Coca-Cola, that well-known manufacturer of sweet coloured water. In a brilliant piece of marketing, the manufacturers of the Real Thing, whose recipe is the sickliest secret in the world of fizzy drinks, have developed a new product.

This drink arrives in a stylish blue bottle which can easily hold its head high in the chiller cabinet. A racy typeface has been chosen so that the letter "s" in the word Dasani has a snaky wiggle.

What is contained inside the bottle is even more clever. This truly is the Real Thing, being nothing other than tap water.

Now Coca-Cola doesn't expect us to pay 53 pence for 500ml of what normally tumbles out of the tap more or less for free. What sort of idiots would we have to be to shell out that much for a bottle of tap water?

No, this tap water is special. It is piped into an expensive new production plant in Sidcup, south of London, where it is passed through three filters which remove organic debris and chlorine.

Then comes the clever bit. The water is subjected to reverse osmosis. Some of us struggle with osmosis. A dip into the dictionary reveals something about passing a solvent through a semi-permeable partition into a more concentrated solution.

Anyway, whatever osmosis is, Coca-Cola does the reverse with Dasani, which is apparently a very good thing, leading to super-purified water. Water so pure, indeed, that something has to be put back in. That's the trouble with the purest purity, it doesn't taste of anything. So calcium, magnesium and sodium bicarbonate are reintroduced.

Now here's the maddest bit. Half the world doesn't have enough water to live on and yet Coca-Cola is spending millions on purifying and marketing tap water - using as its source water that has already been made fit to drink.

A few years ago all this would have sounded like the mad dribbles spurting off the end of a satirist's pen. Now it's just another multinational scheme to make money selling us nothing much.

Mad world stopping off point number two: Italian television.

This week Channel 4 ran a programme with the title The Man Who Ate His Lover. Other programmes due up soon include a documentary about Idi Amin called The Man Who Ate His Archbishop's Liver. Also on the horizon are The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off and Boys With Breasts. If such titles suggest a station collapsing in on itself in a fit of terminal titillation, the Italians have gone one worse.

According to a story in one of the more reputable Sunday newspapers, one of the most popular programmes on Italian TV offers free plastic surgery to volunteers who are willing to have their operations filmed.

Most of the subjects are attractive young women who are encouraged to show their "disappointing" breasts on television, before they are sliced open and stuffed with silicone for the cameras. Ears, noses, bellies and bottoms have also been "improved" for public consumption.

This extreme reality show is called Scalpel: Nobody's Perfect. The programme's defence is that resorting to plastic surgery is "a reality of our times".

And if that's true, it's another cause to wonder if we are not all turning into lopsided loons.

Updated: 12:53 Thursday, March 04, 2004