A recent survey* revealed that three out of five men say their biggest fear is going bald. It’s a foreboding that would make a normally rational man, such as, say, Russ Abbott, insert hair plugs into his scalp to make him look like some sort of weird man-Barbie.

It’s a fear so big that Graham Gooch is prepared to sign away his dignity in a Faustian pact with Advanced Hair Studios, forever appearing on the back pages of the News of the World like a sporty version of Dorian Gray. (He’s even got Shane Warne in on the act.)

It’s a terror so great that a musical superstar such as Sir Elton John, whose hair has been as thin as a Chernobyl technician’s since the mid1970s, convinced himself he could fool the world into thinking that he has a mane as lustrous as a teenage beauty queen. It is this kind of susceptibility to mass delusion that has led to the rise of the multi-million “trichological” industry.

What’s a trichologist? According to Wikipedia, it’s a medical hair and scalp expert, “often with no formal training”. In other words, someone who makes a living from some of the most vulnerable members of society: bald men. Remedies range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Hanging upside down for a couple of hours a day to let the resulting blood flow nourish your hair seems remotely plausible even if there is no scientific data to back it up. But rubbing curry on your head or smearing your dome in cow spit? How do you even collect cow spit?

Mankind is spoilt by modern technology. In the old days there was no such thing as the Belgravia Trichological Centre. There wasn’t a team of scientists working around the clock at the Laboratoire Garnier in Paris. There was only a bit of Brylcreem and the palm of your hand. Yes, that’s right, like the legendary Bobby Charlton.

Walk into any pub and ask somebody what phrase springs to mind when you mention the Manchester United legend. Now don’t forget this is a man who is England’s all-time top goal scorer, a World Cup winner and a European footballer of the year. Nine times out of 10 they’ll say “really bad combover”. That is the tragedy of male baldness. It subsumes everything about your personality until you can think of nothing else.

An actor friend of mine swears blind his hair loss cost him work. Bruce Willis has gone on record in interviews to say that Hollywood discriminates against slapheads. Yeah Bruce, that’s why you’re struggling to get good parts. It’s got nothing to do with The Whole Nine Yards or The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Even Tony Blair was said to have become consumed with the fear that voters would not want an Osram-head in charge. Maybe that accounts for the fact that he disappeared so suddenly from public life. It could also shed light on the Iraq fiasco. Maybe when he was shouting “Have you found them?” at cabinet meetings he was referring to his bald spots rather than WMDs.

It’s a male preoccupation that reaches to the highest echelons of society. People think the judiciary is resistant to change because it’s mostly made up of old right-wing men. That’s not it at all. It’s because judges are the only people who are allowed to wear wigs without raising the suspicion that they’re just trying to cover a receding hairline. If they modernise, they lose their wigs and everyone realises that underneath many are follicularly challenged duffers.

*I asked five men in a pub. One of them was asleep, but he looked like he was probably scared of baldness

— Christian O’Connell presents the breakfast show on Virgin Radio