I remember the first time I noticed that someone like us could become very famous. It was in 1973 and I was sitting on the carpet in front of a two-bar fire in a living room outside Glasgow. My brothers were lolling on the sofa in various states of mutually assured destruction, when an old man’s face appeared on the television screen to say there was something special coming up. ‘All the way from Scotland,’ he said. ‘From the wee port of Rothesay. A little girl with a giant voice: Lena Zavaroni.’

There had of course been famous people before. In our house we knew all about Mohammed Ali and David Bowie. My brothers could name a hundred football players who used to kick about in playgrounds and now earned £100 a week. But this little girl was from a family just like ours: descendants of immigrants who had come to Scotland a few generations back, who lived around housing estates and chip shops and pubs. When Lena Zavaroni sang my brothers started laughing and I believe they were laughing with recognition. This thirteen-year-old girl was like one of our Glasgow aunties or grannies: she had a whole working-class culture in her presentation, and right away we could see beneath the show’s veneer and glitter and recognise a girl from one of our towns who just wanted to be famous. And she was famous: she won the show five weeks in a row and was in every newspaper. We couldn’t have known then – and neither could she, poor love – that within ten years she’d be writing private letters saying, ‘I have lost myself’, ‘I am in a black hole’, and that she would be dead by the age of 34, killed by complications and annihilations associated with anorexia nervosa. Her hunger for fame went physical, and over the years I came to see her as a patron saint of British celebrity.

The British public now finds it much more satisfying to be reassured than to be astonished

When I watch TV now I often think of her, and others pretty much like her – they are the ghosts in the machine. Light entertainment, when it comes to talent, is a modern form of gladiatorial combat, a form which would come to build its Coliseum in the shape of Big Brother, a talent show in which your character is your talent and where bad traits are identified by the public and punished with eviction and humiliation. We seem to have travelled quite a long way from the little girl with the big voice, but not really: the real centre of the story of British celebrity is never actually the star, it is the public. The rise of celebrity in Britain is actually the rise of a populist ethos.