Starsuckers Review

Celebrity culture hasn't just invaded the lives of 'Heat'-stricken soap stars flopping between bar and rehab with the paparazzi on their tails. According to Chris Atkins' mischievous and eloquently angry investigation into the causes and cost of our obsession with fame, it's colonised our consciousness, remoulded the media and sold us a series of impossible dreams. Atkins' thesis: this new, non news-based form of 'news' operates as a sly form of social control, and in five fascinating lessons he deconstructs the celebrity-industrial complex to reveal who's doing to what to who, and why.

Lesson one explains how the media gets kids young and sells them the notion that fame is a worthwhile and empowering goal. Lesson two proposes that reality TV keeps contestants and viewers hooked on fame by generating a series of addictive "near win experiences". Lesson three examines the social and biological purposes which these hard-wired urges serve: why we can never get too close to the stars. Lesson four looks at the extent to which our obsession with celebrity has robbed journalism of its integrity and purpose. Lesson five explains that PR and corporate spin don't merely set the media's agenda, they've wormed their way in to the heart of global affairs. Which enables entertainment conglomerates to catch kids young and sell them the notion that fame is a worthwhile and empowering goal.

It's Atkins' stunts that generated controversy in the run up to Starsuckers' release: as part of an experiment into the extent of the British media's willingness to run anything on its feted celebrities, Atkins and his team sold a series of entirely fabricated stories to the tabloids: Amy Winehouse set fire to her own hair at a party; Guy Ritchie poked himself in the eye juggling cutlery at a restaurant; Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud likes reading about quantum physics. Each of these stories was run, unchecked, by a British newspaper. Within days they were being repeated round the world.