In the beginning, you see, there were only the stars. There were the music hall stars, then there were the radio stars, then you had the movie stars, and after came pop and rock stars. Eventually a whole industry grew up around them to tell us all about them, about their likes and their dislikes, their lives and their loves, and to document, wherever possible, their every waking moment.



It got to be so that, eventually, there was more media to comment upon them than there were of stars themselves - just not enough to go round - so the media industry turned towards the environment that nurtured the stars, see if it couldn't catch them on the way up, as it were, help'em along a little, maybe. And tell us all about howe things were going with them in the meantime.

Let's talk about how this affected rock and roll, for example. I can personally remember when just about every rock writer, in an effort to get famous by being the writer who discovered the Next Big Thing, would be writing enthusiastically about supposedly fantastic groups that no one else on the planet had ever heard of. The more obscure they were, the better. If they hadn't made an album, that was good. If they hadn't actually gigged yet, that was better. This would typically last for roughly one week per band, which meant that readers were regaled on a weekly basis with enthusiastic and detailed overviews of bands we'd never heard of and, after that one week, would never hear of again.

Which didn't hurt us any. We just stopped reading the music press. But the implications for up-and-coming bands, the genuine ones, the ones that could of made it if they'd just been left alone, was a whole lot more serious.

It got to be, you see, that in paying such close attention to the environment that nurtured stars, the press destroyed that environment, and so stopped any new stars from coming into being.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that, roughly speaking, if you shine a light on a sub-atomic particle, reason being you want to know where it is at some particular time, due to its extreme tinyness it gets affected by the beam of light you're shining at it, and that beam of light shoves it over a bit from where it was before you shone the beam of light at it. If you want to know where it was before you shone that beam of light at it, you're kind of screwed, because you have no way of looking at it without shining that light at it, which means in turn that....etc.etc.

Similarly, in paying such close attention to the environment that stars were created in, namely, obscurity, the media so altered that environment that it couldn't produce stars anymore, which meant in turn that...etc.etc.

So, we now had a situation in which not only were there not enough stars to go round for the media to feature, we now had a situation in which it was impossible for stars to be able to mature and develop their potential and thus come into being. In the same way that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle suggests that by observing the behaviour of sub-atomic particles we alter it, in trying too hard to spot nascent stars we stop them from ever forming. Stardom needs obscurity to find its feet in, you need to develop out of the spotlight if you're ever going to be good enough to be in it.

This left the media in a total spot. They needed stars to write about and feature so they could pay for food for the table, the roofs over their heads etc. so, in the absence of any real stars, or any up-and-coming stars, stars had to be invented.

Hence Reality TV shows. Hence Pop Idol. Hence Big Brother, and most of all, hence Chantelle.

She didn't exist as a celebrity, so the media had to invent her.

Oh look; - they did!