IT WILL be a wonder if any criminals are getting convicted at present. The courts have been so full of aggrieved celebrities and cheating quiz show contestants, there can hardly have been room to swing a murderer.

A public fortune was invested in deciding that the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire defendants were guilty, although not deemed worthy of a spell in jail. And hardly had that judicial outing drawn to its high-profile conclusion than the curtain came down on six weeks of the Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas hearing.

Both cases concerned important principles: honesty and privacy. Yet it was still possible to wonder if the centuries-old legal machinery of this country might not be better employed than by adjudicating in show-business squabbles.

True, the Millionaire defendants tried to cheat their way to a million. Yet the publicity the programme's makers received from the trial was surely worth more than that mighty sum, especially with the ratings slipping so. And the defendants, while unworthy of any sympathy at all, didn't exactly deserve their headline billing as top-flight criminals.

As to the Zeta-Jones Show, there can hardly have been a less edifying hearing in recent times. The Welsh-born actress and her movie star husband last week claimed legal victory in their case against Hello! magazine over illicit photographs taken at their wedding. These were no ordinary nuptials but a high Hollywood bash at a New York hotel, for which the wedding pictures had been sold to OK! magazine for a million quid (no need for Catherine and Michael to cough their way through a TV quiz show).

I am with Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, on this one. Mr Morgan said the moral of this case was: "how dare you invade my privacy when I am making so much cash invading it myself".

As something of a sparkler, Zeta-Jones turned the judge's head. Mr Justice Lindsay said he was persuaded by her courtroom tears that the celebrity magazine Hello! had caused her "real distress".

Well, I'd have thought that what is really distressing is people's seemingly insatiable appetite for the tame and tedious stuff about dull celebrities that slips off the glossy, but vacuous, pages of such magazines; but perhaps that's just me.

Anyway, the judge was convinced. But hadn't Mr Justice Lindsay missed something here? Catherine Zeta-Jones is an actress, a dissembler, a pedlar of the pretend, a woman who puts it on for a living. In other words, she managed a good performance in court and he believed every simpering word.

Judges can be prone to this sort of behaviour in the presence of women. Who can forget the over-heated gushing of the late Mr Justice Caulfield, who turned to the jury in the 1987 Jeffrey Archer libel trial and said of Mary Archer: "Has she not grace? Has she not fragrance?" These words formed part of his summation, but could easily have been mistaken for the more elegant sort of chat-up line.

Douglas and Zeta-Jones were able to claim a legal victory, although not everything went their way, and damages have yet to be set. I suggest these should be formed into a nice round figure, say a one pound coin.

By chance, this unappetising Hollywood couple ended up in court during the Iraqi war. So while Zeta-Jones whinged on about her violation, children with their limbs blown off were appearing on the TV news and in the newspapers.

I don't know about you, but I'd say one of these was the greater violation.

Updated: 10:46 Thursday, April 17, 2003