And our survey said...

Byline: Dawn Collinson

WHILE the broadsheets are irate over Iran and the tabloids clamour for snaps of Becks' new haircut, the survey teams have been quietly working overtime.

Pollsters landed two very different but enlightening sets of results on media desks this week.

The first, and the one which garnered most column inches, came by way of 2007 Body Idol and Female Body Idol. No1 in the chart of women other women would most like to look like was newlywed Elizabeth Hurley - over 40 and reportedly recently "let go" by high street fashion chain Monsoon.

More bafflingly, though, Victoria Beckham - whose apparently unenhanced yet nevertheless bizarrely global boobs are now seriously out of proportion with her skinny frame - came in second, while Kate Moss and Keira Knightley, who both make an ironing board look curvaceous, ranked fifth and tenth.

But then this was the same poll which decreed that 97% of British women think being a size 12 is fat.

How can that possibly be? Have we honestly all been so swept along on a tide of size 0 nonsense that we really believe that to be true now? I don't buy that for one minute.

Equally, I wasn't convinced by the statistic that a fifth of women say they can't sit at their desk "without work colleagues suggesting they slim down".

No more, "take a letter, Miss Jones" and plenty of "shift your butt, Porky".

What I could believe was that the majority of women preferred fatter friends, because deep down we all know that's the reality (even though we'd rarely admit it).

It's the law of the jungle, girls. If you're a little hyena on the prowl, you don't take a gazelle for company do you? No, if you've any sense, you take a great big warthog.

Hence, no surprise, 9% of women admitted they didn't want mates who were slimmerthan them. Which must, at least, be small comfort to all those gigantic size 12s (like me) out there. Now filed under "fat but very popular".

But my favourite part of the survey was the clever dressing section where 95% of women named Trinny Woodall, Susannah Constantine, Nigella Lawson, Coleen McLouqhlin and Davina McCall as shrewd slimline dressers.

What rubbish. Trinny looks slim because she's a bag of bones, Susannah doesn't look slim at all, Nigella looks slim because she's usually obscured by a slow cooker, Coleen is slim, and Davina looks slim when she's not pregnant because that's hardly ever.

The Body Idol poll, predictably, was dominated by actors, models and singers (and a couple of WAGs). Not so the other results which concerned professions people would most like to live with.

Women overwhelmingly voted builders as their ideal housemates, thereby demonstrating a practicality andthriftiness.

Men, on the other hand, chose nurses. Which presumably proves what women have long suspected - they are permanently ailing with man flu, and watch too many Carry On films.