DURING THE week, we were told the perm is back and that the height of fashion is now Anita Dobson's bubbling barnet from Eastenders in 1986 ("Happy Christmas, Angie" etc). We were also told that the concept of the gym - the lone 1980s phenomenon that never went away - has finally worn out its threadbare treadmill and ground to a juddering halt. Good. The gym, frankly, was rubbish anyway, says someone who in the 1990s almost died of tedium on a rowing machine, in an attempt to make amends for the lung-collapsing Britpop "life" style.

Apparently everyone else agrees. New gym membership numbers across the country have plummeted, according to accountancy firm Deloitte (almost an anagram of Dolittle, right enough). It recently announced that 54,000 fewer people became new gym members in 2007 than in the 18 months preceding it, with memberships falling by almost 10%. The smirk may soon slide forever from the exquisitely-groomed face of Duncan Bannatyne, as the gym goes the way the package holiday has - offering a deeply old-fashioned, adventure-free experience to those permanently stuck in a rut.

Worse than this, the gym has long been synonymous with the corporate: human being as a piston-shaped extension to a merciless clinical machine; a fitness automaton without oxygen, without going anywhere and without learning anything new.

In the meantime, everything else is suddenly gathering pace. The early 2000s phenomenon of pilates is still extending its sinewy arm while TV-inspired fitness now rules, and jumps all the way from triathlons, marathons, ballroom dancing and ice-skating to the almighty global newcomer (if you can afford it) - the personal trainer. And, if you can afford even more, you can eschew movement altogether to have all your fitness problems surgically removed, for a mere £50,000.

For the rest of us, however, it seems that more than anything else, we've embraced the home gym instead or perhaps a single piece of equipment, for example, that you might keep, as I do, underneath the couch. In this case, an Abdo Glider, £29.95 (rolls along the floor like a giant rollerskate, uses "resistance", is a bit like doing press-ups), which was purchased online and delivered to the house because a trip to buy one on Oxford Street in London takes most of an entire day, by bus and tube, and therefore considerably contributes to the urban stress levels the exercise routine is supposed to "bust."

After 20 years of attempting to find a genuinely sustainable exercise ruse, this is the only one that's lasted - for seven years! This is because it's swift, minimally dull and because I can use the thing inside the house, while watching Richard And Judy, for half an hour a day (weekends off). Madonna-esque levels of fitness have mysteriously failed to materialise but then again, it does appear the pop diva's once-enviable limbs have now turned into a highly alarming vision of a gourmet walnut selection fighting for attention inside a pair of American tan tights.

Other celebs, meanwhile, are also abandoning the gym and embracing curious new trends instead, like the recent kettle-balls phenomenon, pioneered by Geri Still Mad' Halliwell. This uses weighty balls featuring handles which, er, look like those commonly found on kettles.

Because we're all so paranoid about our hideous physical imperfections and can't bear the peering eyes of those we deem somehow "better", we now let our heads turn into purple pumpkins and our backsides into low-slung medicine balls as we stagger off the dreaded treadmill. Which brings me to the latest phenomenon - VirtualGym TV (unveiled two weeks ago), which is an online bank of full-length professional health and fitness training sessions you can leap along to at home.

Each session, naturally, is conducted by "an industry leading fitness instructor" (much like GMTV-endorsed Nicki Waterman) and offers you a "virtual personal trainer tailored to your individual needs, level of ability and psychological condition". And all, of course, for a membership fee that is "a fraction" of the real thing.

"Effectively," trumpets VirtualGym TV's managing director Richard Davis, "members are receiving a personalised programme from trainers who have worked with the likes of Robbie Williams and Gordon Ramsay that would previously have been beyond the budget of all but the super-rich. This service represents the future of personal fitness."

Considering everything else we now do, Richard Davis is probably right. And if he is, Duncan Bannatyne, before the end of the week, will own 51% of the company.

We've finally become, it seems, the housebound Pod People science fiction always told us we would. Our houses may remain Earth-bound, but everything else is beamed into our homes via satellite.

The time has already arrived at which we need never leave home again. We're working from home in our home office. We're drinking at home in our home pub (the living room). We're playing "tennis" at home, on the Wii. We can now have the contents of the record store, library, cinema, supermarket, newsagent, every department store and everything else, in fact, apart from your actual home, delivered to your home.

It's no wonder, and inevitable, that we've now gone down the road of being able to access a virtual gym: sweating it out in front of the PC, possibly hooked up to a 10-foot TV screen, now permanently cut off from the pesky public that we're increasingly suspicious of with increasingly good reason (as the news never fails to remind us).

Despite this, no doubt, 60% of us will still be clinically obese by 2050 and we'll continue to blame perhaps now ironically, our intoxicating relationship with our ever-more beloved, ever-more progressive, 21st-century screens.