If ever there were a lesson in the cruel nature of fame, then last weekend was it. On Friday, more people tuned into Big Brother to discover whether Darren, Craig or Anna would walk away with the cash than watched the Olympics opening ceremony. Then on Sunday, we woke up to the news that Paula Yates had been found dead in her London apartment, having taken her own life by accident or design. There's a curious symmetry to the two events; Big Brother was all about 11 people wanting to be famous, and Paula Yates's death was a sobering lesson in what can happen when that wish comes true.
We are fascinated by fame as at no other time in history. There are magazines, television programmes, tabloid columns and endless websites devoted to nothing other than celebrating celebrity. A machine has been created in which publicists, paparazzi, papers and the public are interlocking wheels.
In a way, Big Brother was the apotheosis of the fame machine, with 11 completely unknown people put through an artificial process which resulted in them being famous just a short time later. The manipulation of both their desire to be celebrities and our fascination with fame itself was swift, efficient - and cynical.
I turned on the programme once in the early weeks, only to marvel at the inanity of what they talked about and to wonder just how footage of people reading, smoking, sleeping and sun-bathing could ever make good television. Yet as the weeks crept on, I began to be interested despite myself. I rarely watched the programme, but I still wanted to know about Nasty Nick's dastardly doings and what Tom said about Anna. Because of the hype, I felt I was missing out if I didn't know. By the time the final programme rolled out last Friday, I was on the edge of my seat like millions of others in Britain and Ireland. It wasn't that the level of conversation in the Big Brother house had improved at all. In fact it was at an all-time low as Anna and Craig sat on the sofa and stared straight ahead in a way that made paint drying look dynamic by comparison.
No, it was the sight of the machine in action which made the final programme compulsive viewing. Grown men and women screamed and threw themselves against crash barriers in an attempt to get a kiss or even just a glance from someone who just nine weeks ago was completely unknown. A hyperactive Davina McCall told us that the final election had galvanised over seven million people to vote, which is more than an Irish general election ever managed.
I went to a party after the programme ended and had numerous conversations about the show, all of which started with the words "Of course, I never really watched it, but . . . " Without fail, everyone was interested by the level of fame acquired by those shockingly ordinary people, who were probably the only people left in the civilised world who didn't know how famous they had become, locked away in their Habitat hutch.
Big Brother was no longer just a television programme, but, for a short time at least, part of the zeitgeist. One can only assume that the contestants were pleased to discover just how famous they had become. After all, the real reason they were there was to achieve some level of fame. Sure, there was the £70,000 prize fund, but nobody volunteers their very existence as television fodder without also wanting a certain degree of notoriety.
Many of the contestants publicly acknowledged that they were hoping for television jobs or recording contracts after the show, and those who left in the early weeks took full advantage of offers to appear on chat shows, in the tabloids and on advertisements. Yet one wonders whether they really realise what they have signed away and just how impossible to control the publicity machine is.
Certainly, it made a meal of Paula Yates's life. In the early days, when she was presenting The Tube and then The Big Breakfast, I though she was the coolest thing, with her ribbons and peroxide hair, her ridiculously named children and her shaggy-haired husband - who was Irish: the excitement!
She was loud-mouthed and a bit difficult and above all she seemed to love being famous - she was having fun with it and not being too po-faced, just like we thought we'd be if we were famous too. At some point, though, that love of being famous must have turned into a need to be famous and she seemed to start playing her life to the gallery.
When she booked herself into rehab following the death of her lover Michael Hutchence, she posed for photos on the front lawn of the Priory. Things that others would have kept quiet about - discovering Hughie Green of Opportunity Knocks was her real father, or having an affair with a fellow patient from rehab - were discussed in interviews.
The details of her life, her drug problems, her suicide attempts, her failed love affairs and even, tragically, the details of her death, were either offered up voluntarily or dug out by the press, who alternately fawned over Paula or turned on her for daring to do things differently.
Yet there's no point blaming the media, when, like the late Princess Diana before her, she seemed to invent and re-invent herself for the public eye. In truth, there's nothing to be gained by apportioning blame for such a death where the real victims are the children left without a mother.
Yet it made me think about a society in which fame is so sought-after, and it made me wonder how much responsibility we have to the figures we have helped create.
Gossip is nothing new, but increasingly gossip is not about people we know, but about people we've never met. And we're fed just enough information about them to encourage us to think we do. In this way, the publicity machine ensures that we're close enough to be interested in the famous, but far enough away not to care too much.
In return for sharing some details of their lives and allowing us to project some notion of celebrity on them, those who stick their heads above the parapet reap the rewards of fame, material and otherwise. Sometimes it all works rather well. But then the commercial need that prompts the famous to share their private lives with us becomes an emotional need, and the lines between the public and private self become blurred.
In this country, at this time, we should surely be wary of taking well-known figures at face value, and start wondering just who made them think they were that much more special and inviolable than the rest of us. Like Big Brother, we may be watching them, but who's watching us?