Are you a fulfilled human being? Or, were you OK before I asked, but now you’re starting to wonder? Well, uncap your pen and take this simple test with me.

First, after watching last night’s Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love (BBC Two), ask yourself if you thought the idea of cyberspace was cool, the province of millionaire Californians, and so somehow “the future”. If, like most of us, you answered yes, but found yourself somewhat sobered by the opening shots of Carolyn’s chubby fingers typing alone in her suburban American bedroom, the windows darkened by taped-up sheets, and her four children neglected next door, please move on to the next section.

Now, I’m sorry to have to ask, but have you ever had an erotic fantasy about a Thunderbirds puppet? For that is the sum of a virtual-reality world called Second Life, which has allegedly acquired four million new “residents” in the past three years, including Carolyn, who spent more time in her Second Life than in her first. So far, so very Keanu in The Matrix, but oh, how very second rate was Second Life. Each new resident chooses an animated puppet to represent their virtual self, except that these creatures, or avatars, were laughably Thunderbirds are go! Their heads waggled comically, jaws gaping out of sync with their speech, and their arms jolted up and down in time with their knees. Carolyn claimed “the possibilities are endless”, but only if everyone wants to be like Victoria Beckham on a slow day. All these avatars do is paw each other in uncon-summatable schoolboy crushes.

This leads, naturally, on to an even more personal question: would you prefer a life of one-handed typing, to human contact? You may have good reason for answering yes. Take Carolyn, a trapped and depressed housewife, who, presumably since milkmen don’t deliver these days, and travelling salesmen have been usurped by Amazon, found it difficult to have an old-fashioned affair. But what of Elliot, the single man from London and her Second Life lover? OK, so alarm bells were ringing from the moment the camera panned on to his human form: the strange tic in his right eye; and the way he described the look of his puppet – “I just wear jeans and weapons, right now I’m wearing a sword and two Uzis” – as somehow a reflection of his real manhood.

But if Carolyn had cause for escapism, why was Elliot spending 9 to 14 hours a day in narcissistic manipulation of his own ridiculously endowed puppet? Of course Elliot ended it all pretty quick once Carolyn started talking about leaving her family to come visit him in London. Here’s an instant message for you Carolyn – he’s not in a relationship with you, it’s about the love between him and his avatar! Some of the saddest moments of this film were of Carolyn and Elliot’s real-life weekend together: in cruel parody of their online selves they were mute and lumpen. Elliot’s attempt at small talk on a romantic picnic (“Those are Welsh olives”), bookended by awkward silence.

And to complete the test, do you have a mental age of nine? For all its oversexualisation, Second Life is also pitifully unadult in its sensibilities. Carolyn’s children, in a cybercycle of abuse, were abandoned to seek their isolation online on their own computers. When one broke away from the screen to ask Mum why her “computer is more important than me”, she gave some explanation about how what she was doing was like “playing with Barbie”. Elliot was presumably her Action Man. The boys’ fantasy Dungeons and Dragons also comes to mind. Their emotional lives were just as stunted: Carolyn’s justification for her actions? “If it feels good, it must be good, so I’m just going to keep doing it.”

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you are probably on Second Life, if “second” is accurate for those who have no life in the first place. But don’t feel too bad – it’s perfectly possibly to lack all self-respect and never go near a computer, just like Carolyn’s husband Lee. This essentially good man stayed put (on the sofa), no matter how brazenly his wife cuckolded him. When she returned from her trip to London, his big speech to win her back was to quote the halfwit Forrest Gump, saying: “No matter what happens to her, she’ll always have me.” She shot him a look of pure contempt. Lee – get real.

Out of the box

—The Summits series on BBC Four is a real find: this is history for novelists. As told by the Cambridge Professor David Reynolds in the first episode last night, Neville Chamberlain’s failure to secure peace in 1938 was less to do with several generations of geopolitical upheaval across Europe and more because of a tiresome dinner Neville endured with his boastful brother Austin. And where have they been hiding this professor? Not only is he a brilliant storyteller, but he is also willing to make like Mr Benn and act the part of major historical figures. For some, a climax where the professor played the parts of Adolf and Neville having a dingdong of an argument was too am-dram for serious documentary. Not me. I saw his owlish specs glinting with excitement, his willingness to go to any lengths to fire it in us, and I thought: a TV star is born.

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