There's a bit of the voyeur in all of us. There's an awful lot in some of us. I'm one of the worst.

I'm not talking about climbing over people's walls and peering through a crack in their curtains on a Saturday night. But I'm incredibly nosey about what people are up to and talking about.

Whether it's visual or aural we like to tune in to other people's lives. The more interesting their lives, the more famous or glamorous they are, the better it is to pep up our own miserable, boring existences.

That's why programmes such as I'm a Hasbeen/Wannabe Please Please Don't Sling Me Out of Here are so successful. If there's a chance of seeing a toff tumbled and the silver spoon ripped from his mouth, or a toothless, faded ex-punk rock singer swear outrageously, how titillating.

And if there's the occasional flash of flesh by a young lady whose only asset is her double-FF chest, so much the better. At least it's something to talk about in the office instead of the unpleasant antics in last night's cheery episode of EastEnders. Was I hallucinating or did you spot someone actually smiling in that programme the other week?

Anyway, back to voyeurism, it's far more interesting.

If you have ever arrived at York by train, I'll bet you've strained to peer through the windows of all those houses on the trackside, your head swinging round keeping time with the speed of the train to retain a bead on a particular window where the light's on and the curtains are wide open.

Most of the time you merely spot the eerie, blue glow of a television tube emanating from the windows, and you catch a glimpse of a couple of pairs of feet pointing towards the light source.

It's not some sort of weird perversion, it's merely normal, human curiosity.

The odd thing is, these lineside residents know their windows are being passed by thousands of nosey parkers every day, yet they still never draw the curtains, always allowing their homes to be scrutinised like some real-life, soap opera clip.

It's the same when you walk down a residential street in a leafy suburb and you spot the inevitable home where a family are sitting there with their windows open to the world like a wide-screen, technicolor showcase.

The street is as brightly lit as their lounge, so you know they can see you as well. Do you look blatantly in to admire the decor, or do you sneak a peek? If you do look in, they are sitting there glaring out because you have had the temerity to visually burgle their property.

What appeals to me most is verbal voyeurism. I'm a fully-paid-up eavesdropper, I've seen the doctor and he's given me tablets for it.

In the street, on a train or bus, in the shops or in the pub. It comes at you thick and fast from every direction, you don't know which crop to pick first.

One walk through the centre of York the other day reaped a rich harvest. A shopkeeper was standing at his door chatting to a traffic warden talking about York City retaining their home at Bootham Crescent. I stopped to listen under the pretext of looking in the shop window. The traffic warden reckoned he had inside information and I strained to catch the gist. It's the journalist in me, honest.

They spotted me and closed up, so I moved on. Two workmen were digging a hole in Parliament Street. "Ere, clock this bird with the short-cropped hair. My mate reckons she a right..."

I stopped and clocked the bird and wondered what she had been up to with his mate. A few yards further on two girls were chatting: "I'm gonna tell Dave about Richard tonight. It's time he knew. I can't go on like this..."

Later on in the Red Lion pub I sat with a drink and idly watched a bloke reading the Evening Press for 28 minutes 47 seconds, straining to see which bits he was most interested in - you know, a bit of market research.

He only stopped - half way through it - when his mate walked in, ordered a pint and asked him what he was up to. "Just reading the rag. Nowt in it as usual."

You know what they say: eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves.

PS: Bill Bogolo Fun Services has gone into involuntary liquidation. Last week's column, in which I offered to sell my body as a gigolo to raise a bit of extra cash, attracted only two offers - one for a fiver, the other a tenner.

Oh, and there was one outraged comment from a singularly humourless reader who remarked that my tongue-in-cheek comment about my wife was "totally gratuitous, unnecessary and degrading" and another - male - reader who offered to send to my wife recipes for cooking up castration leftovers.

Updated: 11:15 Tuesday, February 10, 2004