FEARS about terrorism, crime, drugs, climate change and the like have apparently reached such proportions among our stressed-out population that around a quarter of people have regular paranoid thoughts – and the rest of us probably worry that we don’t.

In this lively look at the “paranoid”

state of Britain, the nature of the phenomenon and what it says about ourselves and society, both the media and government come in for criticism, and rightly so.

And yet government must be the guiltier party with its “1984” Big Brother proposals to make people wanting to buy a mobile phone have to show a passport and its plan to build a central database holding the date and time of every phone call and email.

Now that is scary.