Shouldn't we all be running around like headless chickens, tearfully clutching our loved ones to our bosoms while frantically stockpiling tins of corned beef and knitting ourselves crash helmets?

Isn't that what we are supposed to do when an asteroid roughly the same size as Pickering hurtles towards us from outer space? If this were a movie Bruce Willis would be suiting up ready to blast off in an MFI self-assembly rocket to do something very manly, but ultimately very stupid, to blow the space rock out of the heavens.

A 60ft by 40ft image of Martin Sheen would be projected over every major city accompanied by a calming looped soundtrack saying: "Don't worry guys, it's gonna be OK". And a plucky female newspaper columnist based on yours truly and played to pouting perfection by Liv Tyler (you have to admit the likeness is uncanny) would be stumbling across a vital piece of world-saving information supposed to be top secret but which some mad moustachioed major or other has left lying on his desk. But at least he had the sense to leave it in a brown folder marked "top secret" so the journo wouldn't break her nails jemmying his filing cabinet.

This isn't a movie though, it's real life. Bruce Willis is a balding father-of-three with an ex-wife more muscle-bound than himself; Martin Sheen pretends to be the president of the United States for a living, reading words others have written (not unlike the real resident of that pretty little white-painted two-up, two-down on Pennsylvania Avenue); and Liv Tyler is a young actress with a bold, but admirable, dream that one day, if she is very lucky, she will play me in a movie.

In real life, asteroid 2002 NT7, first spotted by the Linear Observatory's automated sky survey programme in New Mexico on July 5, has caused very little panic. And those who have panicked at the thought of a 2km-wide rock hitting the Earth on February 1, 2019, and wiping out life as we know it have managed to control their jitters.

An eyebrow raised here, a small, yet faintly audible, intake of breath there. The problem with the disaster movie that we call real life is we all know the chances of a Pickering-sized inter-galactic boulder actually crash landing on Pickering are pretty small. Some newspapers have done their best to promote a faint ripple of panic, and Liberal Demo-crat MP Lembit Opik (a dead cert for Jeff Goldblum in the movie version) has done his best to whip us all up into more of a frenzy with his "the end of the world nigh" proclamations. But we are just not having it.

NT7 may have been given the first positive value rating on the so-called Palermo technical scale of threat, but that rating was only 0.06.

This basically means there is more chance of me scooping the Lottery tomorrow, scoring the winning goal for Leeds United against Man U in the next FA Cup final and marrying George Clooney after a whirlwind romance and a short, but vigorous, courtship.

All this doesn't mean that we as a country are not above a little hysteria now and again. Just look at our bonkers behaviour when it comes to Big Brother. Eight million of us are recovering from nine weeks of complete mental chaos that turned us into dribbling morons without a thought in our heads that didn't concern the comings and goings of a certain house on Channel 4.

Our whole lives hinged on whether a Geordie fireman would hose down the shower in his own inimitable way or whether a 21-year-old dental nurse would get her baps out on national television

These were the only topics of conversation permissible around the water cooler (or tap as we call it here) in the last couple of months, with the tone becoming increasingly frenzied until we all finally spontaneously combusted last Friday night.

So you see hysteria is not alien to us, but I'm afraid NT7 just isn't going to do it for us. We're not smart enough to realise Big Brother is complete crap, but we are smart enough to know that an asteroid is not going to stop us watching it in 2019.

Updated: 09:28 Tuesday, July 30, 2002