On holiday, in my Manhattan hotel room, I sat in a stupor on the bed as my husband-to-be tried in vain to interest me in the city outside. The Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s, whatever — I couldn’t have cared less. All I wanted was to not miss this episode of The Hills, one I’d never seen before, showing right then on American television. And then another episode — and then another. That’s when it hit me. I was a trash-TV addict.

The Hills is a polished reality soap about the life of Lauren Conrad, a “real” girl in her early twenties, who lives in stunning LA homes with her girlfriends, studies fashion, and parties. Why am I interested?

My own life has been anything but the glossy life of a fashionista girl. At 19, I had no concept of fresh flowers on a granite worktop, like every Hills condo seems to feature, or what it is like to be asked on a date by a tanned hunk with whitened teeth. Ten years on, I’ve just got married to an adorable, clever, glasses-wearing Englishman who hates sunbathing and can’t drive my Peugeot 206, let alone an SUV. I was brought up in a cobwebby, bourgeois, intellectual, feminist home by two Oxford academics who didn’t like pop music, and watched television only occasionally.

I thought I was alone in my embarrassing secret obsession, the only 30-year-old whose shameful passion was to sit on the sofa carb-loading while watching vacuous Californian 19-year-olds swan around. The only university graduate whose equally well-educated husband despaired of her addiction to junk TV. How wrong I was. As soon as I started asking around about the phenomenon, I was inundated with messages from intelligent, middle-class, professional women just like me. “When I began a PhD, my tea breaks were spent watching The Hills,” reminisces one 28-year-old publishing executive. A twentysomething urban planner admits: “I can name all the characters in Laguna Beach and Newport Harbor. I read proper novels and newspapers, I can talk about the political state of Iraq, but I watch this vacuous rubbish and, moreover, I love it.”

And what’s more, our addiction is set to get worse, with a whole load of shiny new shows about to flood our screens. My favourite Hills character, Whitney, has landed her own MTV spin-off series, The City, and 90210, the Noughties update of the 1990s classic, starts in January, promising snobby cliques galore. And then there’s Gossip Girl, with its grown-up glamazon teens, Laguna Beach and Newport Harbor. And Project Runway, Make Me a Supermodel, The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency and the Next Top Model franchise. And it’s all the most addictive candyfloss TV, like, ever.

So how did this happen? Perhaps a canny realisation on the part of the producers: although the shows appear to be aimed at adolescents, their creators know the older market is the one to tap. About 13.5m adults in Britain — more than half the country’s pay-TV audience — have watched America’s Next Top Model on Living. In Britain, we enjoy feeling superior for having more meaningful lives than these programmes’ stars, yet we also secretly wish we were living this mythical, glossy American lifestyle: driving with the top down, sunbathing by the pool, being made homecoming queen. And it does not translate: MTV’s British copy of The Hills, Living on the Edge, which is set in rainy Cheshire, can’t escape a naff provincialism, its self-conscious heroines lacking the confident charisma of their American counterparts.

Doesn’t the Hills madness run deeper than a simple desire to be Lauren, however? According to the psychologist Oliver James, the author of Affluenza, “most successful women of your age are incredibly perfectionist. You’re constantly trying to vacuum up more evidence of how you’re not as good as other people”. As adults, we spend our outward lives behaving nicely and professionally with colleagues and friends, being rational in a masculine working world. And yet, on the inside, we are still bubbling with insecurity about our attractiveness, friendships and relationships. This unholy trinity of popularity, beauty and bitchiness finds an outlet in programmes such as The Hills.

Above all, women like to look at beautiful women’s bodies. According to James, we get more emotional “reward” from comparing ourselves to a woman more, rather than less, attractive than us. The fact is, we thirtysomethings have grown up during the biggest consumerist binge in the history of the world, with ideals of youth and beauty and affluence rammed down our throats.

That’s the depressing way of seeing it. The other way, the Hills way, is to wave a languid manicured hand and drawl: “Whatever!” Trash TV is morally impoverished, I am well aware. So be it. The City and 90210 are about to hit the UK, and I and millions of others will carry on waiting for each new Hills hit until Lauren reaches, like, her fifties, or something.

Ultimately, the only person who can shed any light on the Hills mystique has to be Lauren herself. I e-mailed her and asked her how real her life on television is. She replied: “I am not an actress at all. I am awful at it. The show is all us. No scripts.” Los Angeles, she says, is a great place. “I love living here. The one thing I always do is use sunscreen.” Even her e-mails are breezy and easy. My friends and I live such a different life from hers — one of bad hair days, waiting for trains, and neuroses — that I can’t begin to imagine what she would make of us. But she doesn’t have to figure it out. And, for now, I’m not going to try to decipher it all, either. I’m just going sit and eat biscuits and watch her.

The City premieres on MTV One on February 15; 90210 will be shown on E4 in January

CRACK TV FOR BEGINNERS

CATCH:

The Hills A crack-addictive LA-Malibu reality show, in which dazzling, vacant-eyed glamazons catfight in another, better world. MTV One, from January 11

The City Whitney’s spin-off, in which she goes to work for Diane von Furstenberg. Set to be priceless. MTV One, from February 15

90210 Who could ever forget Brenda, Kelly, Donna, Brandon and Dylan, who, literally, like, made the 1990s and put the spoilt Beverly Hills postcode on the world map. Bring on the Noughties version. E4, from last week of January

Gossip Girl Beautiful people being really badly behaved in a morally corrupt Manhattan. Bliss. ITV2, Thursdays at 10pm

MISS:

The Fashionista Diaries A reality show about fashion interns vying for a job. Just not enough bitches. Fiver, Wednesdays at 8pm

Times recommends

• Are eldest children really a cut above?
• Peaches Geldof: censored
• Top 10 style-setting films of all time