Why are we all so starstruck?

Who could have predicted that, with all that we know and dread in the mid-Nineties, we would turn out to be as starstruck as ever? Yet, more than in the first years of mass culture immediately before the First World War, more than during the Second World War when stardom fulfilled a patriotic role, more even than in the Sixties when to be a rock star, sports star, famous writer or figure of fashion was to father millions of imitators, this is the Age of the Celeb.

Just look at the magazine covers. Before its makeover, Sight and Sound was a director's vision of subtitled cinema. Now Hollywood boys are the usual - Keanu Reeves twice on the monthly's cover in its four years since relaunch. The new issue leads with that seminal cinematic figure, Lee Evans.

Radio Times, once the last redoubt of design-led taste, has hurtled down- market under its current editor. Naturally this means star covers, and this week's edition, plucking two faces from the dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice, promises within a "who's who on Jane Austen's marry-go- round".

"Who" has replaced "what" and "when" in Radio Times priorities. "You want the stars, we got 'em" is the pitch, and it matters not how rubbishy the prose as long as it treats of the famous. My all-time favourite tag- line from a Radio Times cover is "How it feels to be Martin Shaw!"

Time Out, once the noticeboard for metropolitan youth-politics, is now a wiseacre culture mag with only the occasional semi-nude (currently) to leaven the cover shots of rock and movie stars.

The day cannot come quick enough when every magazine and colour supplement feature the same star promoting the same latest outing. Maybe only then the editors will step back and think further than mere fame.

In the meantime, the fast track to instant recognition is still television. The one great thing - and it is great - about telefame is that there are no rules. If you'd told me 10 years ago that Lily Savage would be doing the rounds of peak-time compering and quiz panels in 1995, I'd have told you to dream on. If a mid-Eighties comedy set in teleland had projected a multi-millionaire star composed of the elements everybody now knows as Chris Evans, you'd have accused the show of gross caricature.

But for every unrepeatable celeb, there is a studioful of Selina Scott clones, of latterday Simon Dees, of sons-of-Tony Bilbow. Children's BBC breeds an annual squeaky-clean man-boy for sending into the mainstream to host light entertainment: Philip Scofield, Andy Crane, Andi Peters, and next year, no doubt, Toby Anstis will be co-presenting How Do They Do That?

Even the theatre establishment is not immune. Lately, the National has taken to marketing its productions with glossy monochrome portraits of its star players: Gambon, Rigg, Dench, Howard. The notion of "company" has taken a back seat.

Now the Royal Shakespeare Company is following suit, trailing its revival of John Osborne's A Patriot for Me with a shot of its lead actor, James Wilby (they have to be joking).

Well, of course showbiz is never going to be a template of democracy, nor post-Thatcher publishing a rest home for still life and landscape artists. I don't propose that we return to the make-it-new Sixties when nostalgia hadn't been invented yet, revival was a dirty word and anyone over 30 was not to be trusted. But we shouldn't embrace the opposite extreme, the notion that we can only face work that offers the reassurance of familiarity. It's a trivial, infantile culture we're settling for if the attraction of any dramatic work can only be the participation of someone we've seen before.