Paul Thomas: Bald facts, naked truth and celebrity sex romps

When George Best was at the height of his powers, an acquaintance visited his hotel room to find the floor littered with empty champagne bottles and the finest British footballer of the last 50 years slithering around a king-size bed with a pair of eager young women.

"George, George, George," he intoned, shaking his head reproachfully.

"Where did it all go wrong?"

Best's subsequent self-destruction adds a sombre dimension to this perhaps apocryphal story but when it entered circulation several decades ago, the joke was on the acquaintance, the blinkered football fanatic who couldn't see the wood for the trees.

I thought of that story this week as I studied the grainy photos of cricketer Shane Warne cavorting porpoise-like with two models, an occupation that now seems to take in all forms of professional female exhibitionism.

Various media outlets described Warne's conduct as scandalous, despite the fact he's in the throes of divorce and to all intents and purposes footloose and fancy-free.

Even though many men's immediate private reaction would have been a surge of envy, the appropriate response, apparently, is head-shaking disapproval a la Best's acquaintance.

Why do teenage boys want to be rock stars? So that they'll be inundated with chicks.

Why do guys want to be rich and famous? When was the last time you saw a rich and famous bloke with a plain Jane on his arm?

What's the point of being a single superstar if you can't indulge in the occasional champagne-fuelled romp with models? Beats me.

Ultimately this affair tells us nothing about Warne that we didn't already know: he has an unruly libido, he craves sex symbol status and he either isn't bothered by exposure or is a truly lamentable judge of character, given that the women he romps with invariably spill the beans to the highest media bidder.

More to the point is what it tells us about the media.

The News of the World skated over the question of how it obtained the pictures but two clues were provided.

The first was in the lurid quotes ("He was talking dirty all the time; it was full-on, hardcore") supplied by the models, one of whom turns out to have spent her formative years on a Canterbury farm. We can now add Coralie Eichholtz's name to the honour roll of Kiwis doing us proud on the world stage.

The second was the message in bold type at the foot of every story on the NoW's website: Do you want to sell a story or picture? Call, text or email.

The tabloid press has always been distinguished by its unedifying combination of smut and sanctimoniousness.

It justifies the smut with the claim that it's exposing reprehensible behaviour ("Shane on You!"), an argument that's easier to mount when the sinner shrivelling in the harsh spotlight is a morals crusader who trumpets family values, as opposed to a roly-poly, unattached roué who obviously subscribes to Oscar Wilde's dictum that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

From time to time there are calls in Britain to rein in the tabloids on privacy grounds because of the havoc their sniggering exposes can wreak on victims' families.

It certainly won't happen while smut peddler-in-chief Rupert Murdoch is alive and kicking and capable of unleashing political hell with a single memo to his editors.

There's also, one senses, a public perception celebrities exploit their fame so promiscuously they've squandered entitlement to protection from the tabloid wolf-pack; it's up to them to keep their noses clean.

Thirdly, the mainstream media now effectively validates tabloid values and methods by treating these stings and entrapments as legitimate news stories and running with them.

But we shouldn't feel too sorry for the victims. Now there's no such thing as shame, the disgrace is short-lived and notoriety is just another lucrative variation on celebrity.

Mark Oaten, a 40-year-old married man and father of two, was a candidate in the British Liberal Democrat Party's recent leadership contest - until it emerged that he was involved in a liaison with a rent boy.

He's just pocketed close to $60,000 courtesy of one of Murdoch's respectable organs for telling his side of the story which is, in a nutshell, that the dalliances with a male prostitute were the result of a mid-life crisis precipitated by the realisation that he was going bald.

If the hair replacement industry is on the ball, it will make the most of this golden marketing opportunity. Could there be a starker contrast than that between the wretched Oaten, paying for his furtive walks on the wild side, and Martin Crowe, proud as a peacock with a crop of cultivated hair, stepping out with former Miss Universe Lorraine Downes?

Oaten's cautionary tale raises the alarming prospect of Shane Warne in the grip of a full-on (and no doubt hardcore) mid-life crisis. As one of his team-mates pointed out last year, the Sheik of Tweak now has a bald spot.

It's currently camouflaged by artful hair-styling reinforced with industrial quantities of gel but that is, at best, a holding operation.

Like rust, hair loss never sleeps. For God's sake, get that man a rug.