Sorry about the bombing/ famine/ pestilence - we've sent you a celebrity as a goodwill gesture'
But let's start with the 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare: In Bed With Madonna - in which director Alex Keshishian led us by the nose on a backstage-and-beyond look-see of the Blonde Ambition tour in what was then acclaimed as "one of the most candid glimpses into a pop star's life and personality ever produced".
These days the film that was once seen as a watershed in the level of access the public were given to a celebrity appears, in the words of the writer Marina Hyde, "like a piece of infinitely reserved Victoriana".
Hyde has recently published the astute and hilariously acerbic Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy (Random House).
It's based on her blogs on celebrity culture for The Guardian and it's required reading for anyone who has ever suspected there may be life outside the pages of Hello and OK magazines. Of course, Madonna herself may have hastened the onset of Truth or Dare's quaintness with her 1992 coffee-table book Sex, an arty foray into soft porn, which not only took the notion of vanity publishing to new extremes, but served as a bondage and S&M primer for the suburbs.
Paging through Sex's lurid pages so unnerved columnist Julie Burchill that years later, on the occasion of Madonna's 50th birthday in April last year, she was to share with readers of the Observer details of that awful experience. Sensitive readers may wish to avert their eyes at this point.
"I've never to my knowledge shown Madonna my vagina, for instance, but she's certainly shown me - and countless others - hers, in that vile book, Sex," Burchill thundered. "Visions of that greasy muff, which one could easily have fried an egg on without benefit of oil, haunt me till this very day. But if a 'civilian' goes around showing their genitals, they're arrested!"
Burchill was making the point that - for all their whining about being very private people, just trying to live their lives, trying to be the sensitive and creative souls they are, but being stalked and hounded by the press, paparazzi and sad, besotted fans at every turn - it is, in fact, we, the public, who are stalked by the celebrities.
And, reading Hyde's book, I am now convinced of this more than ever. As she puts it, "People have seen Paris Hilton perform fellatio in night vision. Internet-enabled fans are never more than two clicks away from a Britney Spears up-skirt shot."
Paris, Britney. Britney, Paris. For a while it seemed as if there was no escaping these two. They were everywhere, their antics filling the tabloids. Sex tapes. Commando incidents. Ill-advised partners and stupid boyfriends. Public breakdowns. Run-ins with the law. Videorazzi encounters. Public drunkenness. Shaved heads. Driving under the influence. Custody battles (children AND pets). And, of course, rehab and reform.
A new biography, Britney: Inside the Dream (Harper Collins) by Steve Dennis, suggests that, at the ripe age of 27, a new, more mature Britney has emerged from the detritus of the "personal struggles" and, after cleaning up at the MTV Awards last year, is back on top of her game and is once more the US's pop princess.
As for Paris, well, it was during her spell in the Century Regional Detention Facility outside Los Angeles that the heiress somehow came to her senses; like so many others who had fallen before her, but had nevertheless picked themselves up and struggled on to even giddier heights, Paris was to emerge with a determination to do good in the world - starting with Rwanda.
Within 24 hours of her release, she was telling Larry King all about it. "There is so much need in that area. And I feel, like, if I go, it will bring more attention to what people can do to help. I know there's a lot of good I can do just by getting involved and bringing attention to these issues."
She never quite got to Rwanda, of course. But she did at least get to South Africa - if only because boyfriend Benji Madden's band, Good Charlotte, performed at the My Coke festival in Johannesburg in March last year. And so, there she was, bringing the world's attention to a Pretoria orphanage, where she hugged kids and autographed photographs of herself in a bikini.
Africa. It holds these people in extraordinary thrall. And therein lies the danger of the 21st-century celebrity. There was once a time when these people knew their place. But no more.
As Hyde puts it, "the entertainment industry was an industry that made entertainment. Its workforce was required to do quaint things like show up to movie sets, or make music, or go to wild parties. Today, that brief has expanded slightly. It now includes proselytising for alien religions, attempting to negotiate with the Taliban, getting photographed in a manner that basically constitutes an unsolicited gynaecology examination, and being brought in to fix the Iraqi refugee crisis."
Entertainers, she argues, are now vastly exceeding their mandate.
"You'd be amazed how soon it is after earning $15-million a movie that you realise that, actually, all you ever wanted to be was a public intellectual."
Two seemingly connected events appear to stand out as milestones in the development of the caring, sharing celebrity.
The first was Live Aid in 1985, in which a moderately successful rock star, Bob Geldof, leader of the new-wave band The Boomtown Rats, turned London's Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium into begging bowls for starving Ethiopians and told the world, "Yes, we can make a difference!" And how. Africans would now know when it was Christmas.
The second was the adoption in July 2005 of a six-month-old Ethiopian girl from an Addis Ababa orphanage by film star Angelina Jolie. True, it was Jolie's second adoption - the first being a Cambodian orphan in 2002 - but it was the one that appeared to have started a trend.
Or, at least, it was the one that provoked Madonna into picking up her own orphans in a rash of apparent "copycat" behaviour. In October 10 2006, she filed adoption papers for the Malawian orphan David Banda Mwale. Last month she was granted the right to adopt a second Malawian orphan, Chifundo "Mercy" James.
And thus the framework within which celebrities approach the problems of Africa and the developing world. At one end of the scale is the consciousness-raising efforts of gigs like Live Aid and its successor 20 years later, Live 8; at the other, missions to the darkened interior to remove their babies.
And what lies between the two extremes? Certainly, there is goodwill.
But then there are also UN goodwill ambassadors, and here Hyde is particularly scathing: "They change so much: primarily the definition of goodwill. The skill-set requirements of this rapidly proliferating modern role remain shadowy, but it seems to have been created as a way to say 'sorry about the bombing/famine/pestilence - we've sent you a celebrity as a goodwill gesture'." Or perhaps it was created out of a belief that the only way to emphasise the utter desperation of a people is to suggest they'd be glad to see Geri Halliwell.
"Naturally, naturally, the erstwhile Spice Girl is a goodwill ambassador, with special responsibility for the Aids epidemic and maternal healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. Never say we don't put our best people on this stuff."
There is, Hyde writes, a new scramble for Africa as various celebrities claim moral ownership of parts of the continent. "It's the new New Imperialism."
She suggests assigning the roles of Bismarck, Rhodes and Livingstone to various celebrities - but assuring that a plum one went to Jolie, if only because her adoption of orphans has sparked a run of sorts on the continent. ("In fact," Hyde writes, "we probably shouldn't rule out the theory that Angelina is simply adopting or biologically spawning children as backup for the inevitable moment when she realises she has no available flesh left on which to tattoo such thought-provoking statements as the 'What Nourishes Me Also Destroys Me' that sits above her bikini line, or the 'Know Your Rights' that bestrides her neck. Her young charges could provide a kind of epidermal spillover area on which these important philosophies could be expanded.")
There is also the fact that Jolie and partner Brad Pitt managed to shut down Namibia entirely when they chose it as the birthplace of their first biological child. Brangelina's adventures in the dry country - and those of their security detail - were well documented in this newspaper.
The Namibians were very grateful for all the attention. They'd finally made it into the tabloids.
It was too much for Madonna. She needed to annex some territory herself.
In return for their babies, she has given Malawi Kabbalah - the Pepsi response to the Coke that is scientology, as Hyde described the religion.
Madonna's publicist has told the media, "There are no religious lessons being taught to the children of Malawi."
But Kabbalah Centre co-director Michael Berg had a different story for the press. "We will be training local Malawian teachers to offer a curriculum based on the principles of Spirituality for Kids (SFK), the sect's children's programme, formulated to address the specific challenges in Africa.
"We will be building the Kabbalah Community Orphan Care Centre, which will be a place where children can come to eat, learn, read and play in a safe, nurturing environment. This will be the headquarters of our activities in Africa and the location where children will be taught the principles of the SFK curriculum."
It gets a little more ludicrous. To launch her Raising Malawi foundation, Madge secured the lawns of the UN headquarters in New York for a celebrity-benefit party - which conveniently doubled as a PR bash for Gucci, specifically to promote their new Manhattan flagship store.
Tom Cruise told reporters, "I'm here because it's a fascinating cause and a great label."
The complimentary goody bag handed out to guests included a Gucci bag valued at $800 - the per capita GDP of Malawi at the time.
"So," Hyde writes, "at least the hosts provided their own punchline."
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