There's no such thing as too much celebrity

Posh and Becks, Kate and Jim, Nicole and Tom ...

who cares? Everyone, says novelist and former showbiz hackette Claudia Pattison - we're all celebrity junkies now

EVEN by 007 standards, the level of security at Pierce Brosnan's Irish wedding last month was breathtaking.

Guests were submitted to body scans to ensure none was carrying a hidden camera, w hile staff at the reception venue, Ashford Castle in County Mayo, signed confidentiality contracts, barring them from breathing a word about the high-profile nuptials. To prevent even the most intrepid interloper gaining access, a huge net w as thrown across the river thatflows past the castle, as lookout boats patrolled the nearby lough. Even the happy couple's white Rolls- Royce had blacked-out windows.

There was, it must be said, an awful lot at stake,for Hello! magazine had paid a six-figure sum for exclusive coverage of the James Bond star's big day. Media demand for even the grainiest shot ahead of Hello!'s official w edding album was so great that a team of SAS-trained bodyguards, patrolling the estate, rooted out no less than 28 paparazzi concealed in trees and undergrowth. With the combined circulation of Hello!, OK!, Heat and Now currently topping 1.5 million, Britain, it seems, is fast becoming a nation of celebrity junkies. And it's not just the glossies ... in recent years, newspaper editors of both broadsheets and tabloids have woken up to the public's fascination with the minutiae of celebrities' lives. These days, coverage of the race for the Tory leadership, the refugee crisis and the latest rail chaos has to fight for front-page space with details of To m and Nicole's divorce settlement or K ate Winslet's latest diet, or marital breakdown.

So why are we so interested in the lavish lifestyles, lovely weddings and beautiful babies of the rich and famous? I suspect it's because they are so far removed from our ow n humdrum existence. Watching the human dramas unfold in the lives of the Beckhams, say, or the Cruise-Kidmans helps us forget our ow n problems, if only for a short while.

But not even I, as a showbiz journalist and former staff writer at OK!, fully understand the cult of celebrity - the strangeforce that m a kes Jordan famous for ... precisely nothing, as far as I can make out, or propels Big Brother's Paul and Helen onto the front pages day after day.

During my four years at OK!, I was a small cog in the wheel of the well oiled celebrity publicity machine and I must say, I alw ays found people's obsessive interest in the nuts and bolts of m y job mildly disturbing.

"Did they really stay up till 5am to approve the photos?" all my friends w anted to know after I covered the Beckham wedding. Well, yes, actually, they did. But who cares?

Quite a lot of people apparently. And they're not all silly schoolgirls or bored housewives with time on their hands - they're doctors, lawyers and teachers, people of varying ages and both sexes, all united in their insatiable appetite for celebrity trivia.

In some respects, working for OK!

was the most glamorous job in the w orld, offering as it did, entres into the weddings of the rich and famous, tte--ttes with stars in the comfort of their homes and regular Caribbean travel as I accompanied celebrities on holiday or honeymoon.

One day I might be drinking vintage Btard-Montrachet at the home of fleet-footed multimillionaire Michael Flatley as he show ed me his collection of antique flutes, the next I'd be skimming in a speedboat across Uganda's Lake Victoria with Elizabeth Hurley en route to a chimpanzee sanctuary - or discussing the pros and cons of dog ownership with Cher in her Malibu bedroom.

BUT like any job, it also had its downside - namely endless hanging around at photo shoots, frequent weekend w orking and continual smiling (a capacity to be cheerful and goodhumoured at all times is vital).

W hat's more, it has left me with an unfortunate tendency to ask inappropriate questions of relative strangers (a legacy of h aving to delve into the most sensitive areas of a celebrity's personal life within the confines of a one-hour interview). "I hear you got divorced recently. Was your husband unfaithful?" I once asked a woman I'd just been introduced to at a party. The w eddings were alw ays the toughest assignments, so I can truly empathise with the Hello! reporters assigned to cover Pierce Brosnan's nuptials. Believe it or not, it's not just a case of turning up, downing a few glasses of Veuve Clicquot and scribbling a few notes in shorthand.

Oh no, wedding reportage is a veritable artform - canaps must be catalogued, floral arrangements dissected, the wedding dress described in excruciating detail. And all the while you're feeling ridiculously underdressed in your high street frock while everyone else is clad head-to-toe in Prada. And there's a knock-on effect too - to this day, w henever I attend friends' w eddings, they're alw ays so horribly apologetic.

"We w ould've loved our little bridesmaids to be dressed as w oodland flow er fairies like Posh's," they'll say. "'But we had to make do with Laura Ashley," or "I know you're used to vintage K rug, but I'm afraid our budget only ran to Asti Spumante."

But I really can't complain.

Life on a celebrity magazine is often gruelling, but it's certainly never dull, and my experiences at OK! furnished me with a whole range of useful new skills. I learned to work under extreme pressure (right through the night if required).

Furthermore, the job did wonders for my pow ers of observation ... I can recognise a Favourbrook frock coat at 50 paces.

But most impressive of all, I now know that the word "lovely" has precisely 23 synonyms. And guess what? I can recite each and every one of them.

* Claudia Pattison's debut novel W ow!, set in the beautiful, lovely, gorgeous world of celebrity m agazines, is published on Friday.

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