Ground Floor: Owing to having made a number of trips to the dentist in the last couple of weeks, I am totally up to date with the comings and goings in Celebrityland. Thanks to OK! I now know that glamour model Jordan had a "secret nervous breakdown"; Hello! kindly informed me that supermodel Heidi Klum visited Victoria's Secret recently; and Heat magazine had a world exclusive interview with Chantelle and Preston. (I have, of course, heard of Chantelle and Preston, despite not having watched Celebrity Big Brother, but I skipped over the interview.)

I've also examined Cameron Diaz's zits, seen Sarah Jessica Parker's sweaty armpit and recoiled in horror at a vast array of fashion disasters which the Z-listers know will get them onto the glossy pages of the weekly celebrity mags.

Any waiting room worth its salt these days is packed with a panoply of full-colour gossip magazines which have long since replaced National Geographic and Reader's Digest as reading material for patients.

I never quite know how I feel about the OK! and Hello! waiting room binge. It's like eating an entire tube of Pringles. At first the taste is great, then you begin to feel nauseous and finally you force yourself to finish them because - well, because they're there. But you really don't feel good about yourself afterwards.

Competition among the gossip magazines is ever more intense these days as new titles seem to pop up with increasing regularity, promising us more "in-depth" interviews and "secret sorrows" than ever before.

Previously, people were happy with sighing over the showcase homes (while smugly telling themselves that the curse of Hello! meant that the loved-up inhabitants were probably heading for the divorce courts even as the ink on the pages dried). But now readers are demanding more and more shots of celebrities at their worst and the magazines are falling over backwards to oblige.

And so far the magazines are still pulling in the punter and, therefore, pulling in the advertising which keeps them going.

However it's not all sweetness and light behind the scenes and it has recently become a case of handbags at dawn between Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of advertising company WPP, and Richard Desmond, the media baron (whose companies include OK! magazine as well as Express Newspapers) as they exchanged writs at London's high court.

Sorrell - one of the most powerful men in advertising with more than 300 of the Fortune 500 companies as his clients - founded WPP in 1986 and had previously worked with the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi after obtaining an MBA from Harvard.

Richard Desmond was once described as a "sort of honest Robert Maxwell" who left school in his early teens and made his fortune with a variety of soft-porn publications before his private company bought Express Newspapers. He is, in the parlance, a self-made man.

The dispute between the two is, naturally enough, about money. Northern and Shell, Desmond's company, is suing a subsidiary of Sorrell's WPP for $5.5 million (€4.6 million) arising out of the launch of the US version of OK! magazine last year.

The company was apparently to have bought advertising space for OK! in the US media and, according to Northern and Shell, WPP undertook that its own clients would place a minimum of 15 pages of advertising in each issue of the magazine. In return Northern and Shell would embark on a $10 million ad campaign to promote OK! in the US. Both sides are now claiming that the other failed to honour its side of the bargain.

WPP has denied that there were any guarantees in relation to advertising space and has pointed out that WPP itself had filed, the previous day, a $10 million claim against Northern and Shell for failing to pay its own ad bill. To the unconcerned bystander this is obviously a row that has got out of hand and, as with all moguls, they've called in the lawyers who will probably end up costing the companies concerned nearly as much as the disputed amounts in the first place. Testosterone is expensive after all.

Northern and Shell has been in the courts before but its last high profile case was against another celebrity magazine. That was when it joined Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in suing Hello! and Hola! for publishing unauthorised photos of the couple's wedding. OK! had bought exclusive rights to the pictures for £1 million. Eventually the courts rejected the claim by OK! that Hello! had unlawfully interfered with trade by publishing the photos, although Northern and Shell insisted that the court had "fully vindicated" Zeta-Jones and Douglas in their action. (It apparently cost them about £3 million in fees and they were awarded £14,500 in compensation.)

Stories of advertising writs aren't as consumer friendly as pictures of Cameron's zits or Britney's trailer-trash tracksuit. But when Desmond and Sorrell go head to head in the courtroom, there'll be a few sweaty armpits in the process. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for the public at large, we won't get to see them in the pages of the glossies.