DID you know that Stephen Fry enjoys watching Colombo after a long nap? That Jonathan Ross eats oven chips? Or that Lady Gaga doesn’t like bleaching her eyebrows because it makes her face burn?

You might assume that only sad super fans would know such details about these celebrities. There is, one might think, no reason to be interested in such mundane insights into the private lives of people we don’t know.

But thousands upon thousands of people do know these details because Fry, Ross and Gaga have posted these little nuggets of information to their millions of Twitter followers, actively picking up their phones or other such devices and taking a moment of their day to impart a brief, unsightly snapshot of their not-so gilded lives.

In the past month Twitter has let the world know that Alan Sugar follows Britain’s Got Talent after he tweeted: “Ronan could not have won, too many allegations and there would have been controversy,” and that Rio Ferdinand suffers from flatulence when he eats too much piri piri sauce after he eloquently tweeted to over a million followers: “Just eaten a whole piri piri chicken with rice....pure bones left on the plate…” followed by: “Wow....that piri piri sauce should come with a fart warning....its going off here!! British Gas!!”

For years now Facebook has been a forum for people to make announcements from the life changing to the banal. Just as Facebook has told me when my old school friends are expecting babies or have landed new jobs, it has also informed me when an acquaintance is still in bed at 1pm, has a splinter in their finger or is waiting for a workman to fix a broken boiler.

Social networking sites have simply made people accustomed to “over-sharing”. It speaks volumes about how normal this has become that so many celebrities are prepared to share in the same way and I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed by it. It’s one thing to want to know more about your heroes but, as the saying goes, you should never meet them. It is the illusion that they are special, a bit better than us, that gives them their aspirational status.

I want Stephen Fry to be sparkling with wit, spending leisurely afternoons recording audio tracks for classic literature in languid tones that hint at the Britain we all wish was there and evenings quaffing champagne with eccentric friends at the opera.

Although not a hero of mine, I’d like to think that Jonathan Ross might spend mealtimes dining on delicate, beautifully prepared food at cool Japanese restaurants rather than feasting on oven chips. And I’m shocked and frankly dismayed that Lord Sugar watches ITV. So what drives this compulsion to share with so many strangers that if you got them together they could fill multiple stadiums?

Perhaps it’s through a desire to relate to their followers by showing them just how normal they are. Maybe when George Michael reveals he is cooking a roast dinner or Simon Pegg tweets about how he is out walking with his dog “poo bag at the ready” they are telling us that they are just like us. Of course, what’s far more likely, but in my opinion the most difficult to accept, is that the many well-known people we imagine to have fabulous lives are actually just like us.

The thousands of famous people that take to Twitter may be just as bored, just as pleased by the simple things and are apparently just as unrestrained at self editing. It just wasn’t quite as obvious until they acquired iphones and joined social networking sites.

Gone are the days of the distant, understated mystique of the very famous. The illusion has been shattered.