Television - Andrew Billen is fascinated and horrified by the lives of modern celebs

In my day job, I'm a celebrity interviewer. The first part of Rupert Smith's merciless Celebrity: the rise and fall (18 August, 9.15pm, Channel 4) so nearly made me want to resign my commission that I had to remind myself I'd actually interviewed very few of its subjects. Sometimes, it must be admitted, the reasons for their omission have been more pragmatic than principled. While it would be amusing to interview Jordan - the model who enlarged her chest until she had "breasts like a dead heat in a Zeppelin race", as the Mirror's Piers Morgan said - it would be rather less amusing to work on a paper that would pay for the privilege of doing so, such as his.

This two-part documentary was not concerned with the Picassos and Amises who attain celebrity by merit. It stuck its teeth into the "famous for being famous", the reductio ad absurdum of this class being Karl Power, the unemployed labourer from Hull who once managed to infiltrate a Manchester United team photograph and, coincidentally, the day before this programme's transmission, walked out to bat at Headingley. Karl's fame is of the sort that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, yet, when he crashed This Morning, Fern Britton delightedly how-do-you-doed him as if he were a top booking.

Karl's star will surely soon fade. It is taking, it must be said, considerably longer than predicted for the shine to leave Lady Victoria Hervey, to whom the programme's belligerent interviewer, permanently posted on the wrong side of the red rope at premiere parties, put the unanswerable question: "What do you actually do?" Gail Porter achieved greatness when she had a naked image of herself projected on to the Palace of Westminster. But the same point is made by anyone who has stripped her way to the cover of a middle-shelf men's magazine: the medium is the message.

The programme took as read that most people want to be famous these days, and that increasing numbers will be - albeit for briefer and briefer Warholian periods. Its contribution was to promise that most of them would, or should, then hate it. The price, in terms of loss of privacy, hardly needed to be spelt out, and the programme scarcely bothered. It was much more interested in the self-willed trivialisation of personality, the lies you have to tell the press (Madonna's insistence that she was not pregnant when she was; Guy Ritchie's roughing up of his distinctly posh roots) and the class system that operates within celebrity. Piers Morgan got close to the nub of the difficulties between Amanda Holden and Les Dennis when he said that she was a C-list celeb and he was D. Fame's best counsel for the defence was Goldie, who said it left "a warm feeling in your nuts". Unfortunately, this thug-icon's membership is in itself proof that the celebrity club is unlikely to be worth the admission fee.

In fame's direction, obviously, madness lies. But the watering holes along the way are their own outposts of hell. You would have to like free champagne very much to put up with the mindless parties that celebrity now demands you attend two or three times a week. Imagine the small talk with Vinnie Jones on one side and Melinda Messenger on the other. No wonder invitees take infantile consolation from the goody bags they leave with. No wonder, too, that so many of this programme's interviewees revealed high levels of self-loathing. What was surprising, and rather refreshing, was the vehemence of the programme's own hatred of its subject. I was expecting something witty, playful and ineffectual, like Clive James's series Fame in the 20th Century. Its bitterness had more than a little to do with the foul-mouthed contributions of its chief commentator, Paul Ross - a nice man, I had always understood, sanguine about his status as the brother of the more famous Jonathan, but here clearly livid about something. Following damaging footage of Courtney Love having a Hollywood tantrum because no one wanted her autograph - and then, disconsolate, walking out into the night when Russell Crowe took another blonde home with him - Ross offered tough love, at best: "Stop your fucking moaning. You don't know you're born."

Try not to miss the second half on 25 August, Celebrity: the fall. It interviews those fast sliding down the greasy pole and those who have long since fallen off: Timmy Mallett, still "a little surprised things went quiet after Wackaday"; Terry Christian, who found, too late, that people really did hate The Word; and Boy George, who wouldn't say no to a season at Butlins. At the bottom, stumbling along Sunset Boulevard, is the Sixties singer Joan Turner, now an alcoholic bag lady, still hoping to break into voice-overs for Disney cartoons.

By insisting that celebrity is so addictive that all its former members want their 15 minutes back, the show prosecutes its case more fiercely than fairness demands. After all, some stars do get over themselves: Mark Lester's early fame in Oliver! brought him no nearer to self-destruction than an osteopathy practice in Bristol. But, like last month's Brass Eye on the tabloid exploitation of paedophilia, Celebrity knows it has a gigantic target in its sights. I'm glad it wallops it hard.

Andrew Billen is chief interviewer on the London Evening Standard

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