Where one leads, others lazily follow. This is nowhere truer than when it applies to the British press in its curious obsession with actors – and here I mean the male ones – possessed of what I have seen described as ‘the phwoar factor’.

Which rag was it, I wonder, that first decided Aidan Turner, star of the BBC’s remake of Poldark, was starting to set women’s pulses racing across the nation?

Or did it decide? The likelihood is that some publicist dreamed up the whole ‘sex symbol’ business and left the pack instinct of the press to do the rest.

Anyway, within hours of the first episode our newspapers were full of the semi-stripped action hero. Even the (supposedly) sedate organs that I read were in on the act.

In The Times there was a toe-curlingly embarrassing piece owning up to a male crush by the avowedly heterosexual Robert Crampton, whose journalism becomes curiouser by the day.

The Daily Telegraph, in its new dumbed down style, was of course not to be left out. Still at least the Turner pictures and stories supplied relief from endless guff about Judi Dench and Helen Mirren (and thanks here to various readers who have told me I was right a year ago to rename the Torygraph the Daily Mirren).

Turner is the latest in a long line of supposed male heart-throbs drooled over by the press in recent years. I say ‘supposed’ because few people of my acquaintance, so they tell me, find anything very stimulating about them.

The list includes Daniel Craig as the micro-swimsuited James Bond and Colin Firth taking the plunge in Pride and Prejudice (“Ooh Mr Darcy!”). It used to include Tom Daly, but we know what happened there.

The odd thing is we were always being told by women not to ‘objectivise’ them. Why are they being encouraged to think it is OK to objectivise men?