Now that fame has become a strangely democratic state of being, in the sense that anyone with access to a reality TV show audition, or who catches the eye of a C-list celebrity on the dance floor of Boujis can be on tomorrow's front pages, one might have thought that our expectations of celebrities would have slipped a bit. But it's reassuring to know that, although the wedding of the brother of someone who was once in a pop group and a woman who was in a pop group compiled of reality TV show rejects - Andy Scott-Lee and Michelle Heaton - might be described as "The Wedding of the Year", we do still have our standards.
Yes, Big Brother et al might now make it look as if any old potato-faced random can be described as "sexy" if the journalist is given enough space to fill in Heat magazine, but we still like to see our celebs work for our adoration.
If anything, the standards have been raised, because now that anyone can be famous we need to see them work that little bit harder to prove there is a reason for them, rather than us, to be on the Paul O'Grady Show. With wearying predictability, the easiest - in fact, it seems, the only - path for a female celebrity to take is to lose weight.
It is always interesting how long it takes between a young woman becoming famous and her decision to forgo the carbs. Increasingly, the answer seems to be "not very". Recent photographs of Lily Allen are a case in point. When she became unexpectedly, ridiculously famous this summer, she was cute, round-cheeked and girlish. Now she looks decidedly leaner, with visible cheekbones. Because of Allen's carefully cultivated boo-yah-in-yer-face persona, this transformation is reminiscent of the far more extreme one carried out by Amy Winehouse. When I interviewed Winehouse in the summer of 2003 she was mouthy, unapologetic and undeniably curvy; by 2005 every tendon in her legs was on show when she was photographed looking lonely and miserable on a night out in London.
Kate Lawler is another classic example, going from her sporty, healthy appearance when she entered the Big Brother house in 2002 to, just one year later, the proud owner of a chest jagged with visible bones.
Then there's Myleene Klass, most recently seen eating alligator tails in the jungle. Photographs of her when she first became famous in 2001 are almost unrecognisable compared with the tiny figure with visible hipbones she presents today, giving her what that great appreciator of the female form, Tony Parsons, described earlier this week with an audible purr as "that wonderful exotic look" (as opposed, one presumes, to white women, whom he once winningly described as "big brood mares with dyed hair and sagging tits").
This is not to underestimate the "pressure" (the convenient euphemism for "adolescent bullying") to which the media subjects any young woman in the public eye.
The fact that the sylph-like Catherine Zeta-Jones is often described as "curvy" merely because she happens to have those odd things called "breasts" tells you everything you need to know about the standards for female bodies today. That Charlotte Church's refusal to stop eating is seen as some kind of remarkable feat worth commenting on every time she appears in the press (ie every day) is further proof.
But to watch a young woman achieve the success she has presumably longed for, only then to torturously reconfigure her body, is an oddly depressing sight. It's like watching a teenage girl entirely change her personality when she gets together with her first boyfriend, trying to be the person she thinks he wants her to be. You silly girl, you want to cry. He liked how you were before, so why are you now pretending that you like My Chemical Romance when really you're more of a Snow Patrol kinda lady?
As the ongoing presence of Elizabeth Hurley and Nicole Ritchie prove, such is the veneration of thin today that a woman really can become famous just for having a flat stomach. All of the aforementioned young women became famous despite the extraordinary handicap of having been born with an anatomically correct body. Nevertheless, they still believed, and maybe they're right, that in order to stay in the public eye there had to be a little less of them for the public to see.
Cat Deeley is an interesting case because she has shown there is a new element of potential pressure for a British celebrity in the public eye, and it is one we can describe as The American Problem. Deeley has become a success in the US, hosting So You Think You Can Dance, a reality TV show that is the inevitable offspring of a coupling between Pop Idol and Strictly Come Dancing, succeeding where Robbie Williams and Eamonn Holmes humiliatingly failed. But when I happened to be sitting opposite her at a fashion show in New York last September, I did not even recognise her until the end, and I am someone who spent a disturbingly large part of my early 20s watching Deeley on some TV programme or another. Instead, with her tawny hair, legs the colour of peanut butter and visible elbow joints, she looked exactly like the American starlets who flanked her in the front row.
There is no question that the standard of what constitutes being acceptably slim is much tougher in the US than the UK, as evidenced by the number of increasingly bony figures gracing America's celebrity gossip pages. I once saw a photo of Nicole Ritchie in a bikini in an American magazine, ribs like xylophone keys and thighs so concave you could see the person behind her through them. "Beach Body" shrieked the headline, presumably without irony.
But the case of Deeley is even more dispiriting because here is that rare thing - a British success in the States - who immediately gave herself the American glossed-up makeover. And you know, in a country where Nicole Ritchie is still seen as a fashion icon instead of a poster girl for hospitalisation, it probably was necessary. Eamonn and Robbie, if only you'd known.
