PRINCESS Diana was the greatest footballer the world has ever seen and George Best was the people's princess.

Oh, and John Peel was a married archangel with five children. Oops! I've got that a bit wrong. But please make allowances for this lapse as I'm a bit upset with all the grief that's been flying around.

Let's make sure there's no further misunderstanding: George Best was an extremely talented footballer and I am full of admiration for his genius. I actually saw him play - unlike many who have joined the current Tears Fest - at Old Trafford and against Leeds United at Elland Road in the glory days of the early 1970s. There were legends in those days: Allan Clarke, Billy Bremner, Johnny Giles and Eddie Gray.

But can't we stand the truth any more? I mean George Best was a very great footballer - so let me praise him as Mark Antony praised the dead Caesar. George Best should be honoured for his footballing prowess, but for goodness sake, he hadn't kicked a ball seriously for 30 years. The current outbreak of mass grief is media-generated sentimentality. It is insincere. Sentimentality is, as DH Lawrence said, "working off on yourself feelings you don't actually have".

Let's go in for a bit of honest comparison. Think of a sportsman who, in his own field, was every bit as good as George Best and who did as much and more than Best ever did for club and country. The sportsman I have in mind is not dead yet - thank the Lord - but he will do very well as my example. I'm talking about Freddie Trueman. Fred took 309 wickets in only 67 Tests and was a star performer for Yorkshire for 20 years.

Thank you Fred and may you live forever! But you can be sure of one thing: if Fred went tomorrow, at last departing this mortal field in indifferent light, news of the fall of his wicket would not take up the first 15 minutes on the BBC's main Six O'Clock News and turn newspapers into a Schmaltzfest for days on end. Where did Fred go wrong then? I suppose it was because he wasn't an alcoholic and a wife-beater. And he wouldn't have made a picture shoot for Hello! magazine.

So why does the trashier end of the media - I mean rubbish TV, the red-top tabloids and the gormless celeb magazines - go in for this glossy canonisation of some of the famously deceased and not others? It's glamour, sex and debauchery which debases their taste. Unfortunately, these things foul the taste of the public too. The terrible and depressing truth is that we have turned our backs on the things that can truly sustain us: things like decency, a proper set of values, moral and cultural signposts and landmarks that used to be guides to living.

Who now in the empire of the trash media sets any store by the old distinction between right and wrong, virtue and vice? In the amoral celeb culture there is no longer notoriety, only fame. And so our entertainments and even our streets are evidence of the decay of public life. The truth is that, no less than morality, feelings and emotions have to be taught and learnt. When we haven't learnt to feel properly, we have only the loathsome tide of emotion which has swilled over the nation these last few days. Any excuse to throw a teddy bear and put a bunch of flowers at the bottom of someone else's drive. Next time I preach at someone's funeral, I shall know just what to say: "He was as pissed as a genius".

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.