WHO would want to be a celebrity these days? What with all the wealth, sex, booze and drugs, it's a wonder they can get anyone to apply at all.

Prominent TV presenters are sacked amid a word-storm of publicity. Onetime weather-girls spill the lurid beans. An alleged plot to kidnap singer and footballer's wife Victoria Beckham is unveiled thanks to a Sunday tabloid, just in time to chime with the weekend's headlines.

A faithful royal butler, once a "rock" to Diana, Princess of Wales, has the case against him dropped thanks to the last-minute intervention of the Queen, who had apparently only just recovered from a fit of forgetfulness.

And on the television night after night, would-be celebrities are put through assorted humiliations or deprivations, all in the hope of becoming a pimple on fame's capacious bum, where they can shine for a moment, before being sat on.

It's all a puzzle, really. And as my roping together of these disparate stories suggests, it is easy amid the blizzard to mistake the important and the trivial. Take the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You. This strikes me as a shame and a mini scandal in its own right. This man never set himself up as a moral figure. No, he just read other people's words rather smartly and developed a reputation for being more cutting than an up-ended drawer of knives.

What he did in his own life should have remained his own business, but instead he was flattened by certain newspapers who didn't really care if he stayed or went - just so long as their circulation was buoyed for a day or two.

To set the Queen's intervention in the Paul Burrell case alongside such high-calorie tittle-tattle might seem demeaning to Her Majesty. Yet the Royal Family has cashed in on the cult of celebrity, while at the same time pretending to be magisterially above it all.

Amid the celebrity-style gossip of what might have been said in court had the Burrell case proceeded, some astonishing questions arise from the discredited prosecution. And here's the biggest one. When certain Labour MPs tried to table a motion indirectly critical of the Queen, this was blocked by the Commons authorities on the grounds that the sovereign cannot be criticised in Parliament. Elected MPs were constitutionally prevented from being mildly critical of an un-elected monarch. How upside down is that?

A tsunami of publicity has swept Paul Burrell off his shiny-shoed feet and now he has become fleetingly notorious, courted until the interest fades.

Mr Burrell's story was bought up by the Daily Mirror, apparently for £300,000, and ITV, who are said to have chipped in a further £100,000. Both the Daily Mail and News International are reported to have offered rather more. So expect to see the dirt flying, as the excluded newspapers turn against the former royal butler.

There is something fitting about all this. Diana it was who stepped from royalty to celebrity, dragging the Royal Family behind her. And now her most loyal servant is, however briefly, exposed to the same moment-chasing notoriety.

We seem increasingly in thrall to celebrity, dazzled by what in many cases doesn't really exist. The big joke about I'm A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here was that none of the chosen contestants were celebrities at all. Those of us who take our cynicism neat had a good old chuckle about that. Then the programme was, mystifyingly, a huge success - and disappearing celebrities such as Tony Blackburn and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson suddenly found themselves gilded again and thrust back on to the roundabout for a few more spins.

Updated: 11:06 Thursday, November 07, 2002