Drink - Victoria Moore suffers a dose of celebrity overload

Is something quite interesting happening in barland? As little as a year ago, hard on the tail of each new bar opening came a cascade of panting press releases and assorted gimmickry (matches, "membership cards", cocktail menus designed to get the deskbound journalist salivating like a rabid dog). Mainly, though, it was the releases that made me snigger. Robbie Williams is a member of Posho Bar! Last night, customers near to the window of Posho Bar were able, if they leaned slightly, to see Caprice getting out of a car on the other side of the road! Only last week, the second cousin twice removed by marriage of a girl who once picked the balls on the Lottery show bought a mineral water and drank it in Posho Bar! What if the barmaid is the mum of someone famous?

Now it is the dot-commers, with their hot-air high budgets, who send ridiculous quantities of ever more ludicrous knick-knacks (darts, klaxons, blow-up football chairs). The PRs for members bars (so-called because of some ridiculous system that requires you to pass before a vetting committee and become a member before being allowed to drink there) have gone very quiet. Unnervingly quiet. Have they suddenly decided that celebrities are a bad thing?

So I decided to break my own rules and go to the launch of a bar to find out what their new game is. Virtually everything about this bar precisely matched the old blueprint, right down to the soft furnishings, fancy-pants location (South Kensington), Thai fishcake canapes and flutes of champagne. The people there were just as unimpressed, but much scruffier than I had expected (no great quantities of snakeskin or blonde highlights here) and not remotely interested in talking to anyone except the people with whom they had arrived, which led me to believe that they were all journalists, too.

This turned out to be the case. We settled in quite happily, eating and drinking everything we could lay our hands on and chatting in our customary, insular, manner. Then a man in a pink shirt loomed over my shoulder and threatened to open up a conversation. At first, on account of his breathlessly deployed Henry Higgins-tutored accent, I assumed him to be foreign. But he said he was raised in Herefordshire, or Hertfordshire - I forget which. He turned out to be the owner of the bar.

I immediately subjected him to interrogation about his prospective clientele. This got him in a terrible lather. At first, he tried to pretend that celebrities simply didn't come into it. This was a local bar, he maintained, for local people. He didn't hold up well under questioning. Apart from the reality that you have to be pretty well wodged-up to live in South Ken, he was clearly expecting a lot of his mates to come on down, too. And, before long, he was confessing that successful people (and he assumed inclusion in this category) tend to find themselves on the same social level. So yes, he said, many of his friends were celebrities, but also restaurateurs and armed robbers. "Armed robbers?" I asked, several times, scarcely able to imagine this perfumed pink shirt at ease among the hard men. He insisted so. Perhaps he was joking.

It's all spin, of course. And there had been a celebrity party on another night. But the new line is that celebrities aren't pedestal celebrities, they're "friends". And the definition of celebrity is growing ever thinner. Even the It Girls are growing sick of being hangers-on; and while people might raise an eyebrow and slip down to a bar because they heard that Joely Richardson had been there a couple of times, they're definitely not going to admit to it any more. Who wants to find out that Brad Pitt is just a metre away as they slobber and snooze over their second bottle of wine, anyway?

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