Dialogue: Hunger for celebrity gossip reveals the voyeur within

English is a great and glorious language, forever adapting and inventing to keep up with new developments. Yet it has occasional puzzling gaps.

One of these is the lack of a concise equivalent of schadenfreude, the enjoyment of another's misfortune. Tempting though it is to dismiss this as a peculiarly German characteristic, the fact is that we cannot claim the moral high ground here. We may not have the vocabulary, but we are entirely familiar with the phenomenon, because we wallow in it every day.

It masquerades as show business gossip, and there is no escape from it. Wherever we turn - newspapers, magazines, radio or television - we are bombarded by startlingly intimate details of the lives of people we do not know, but whose faces are so familiar that we evidently feel entitled to have their most private moments exposed to our scrutiny.

There seems to be an insatiable appetite for the personal secrets of celebrities. Things we would think twice about sharing with our best friends are regularly splashed across advertising posters at the corner dairy.

Nothing is too sordid or tragic for the front page of a women's magazine. Adultery, divorce, miscarriage, child abuse, drug addiction and violence are all grist to the mill of the magazine industry and the other media, too.

The executive director of the Magazine Publishers Association, John McClintock, was reported last week as saying that the public's undiminished appetite for celebrity news was now also being fed by television, radio and newspapers. The domain of the "hot whisper" and "inside info" was now open slather, he said.

This is bad news. It means that those of us who choose not to buy the gossip magazines - so distressingly referred to as books by their regular buyers - can no longer be sure of escaping the sideshow merely by averting our gaze from the display at the supermarket checkout.

Now we can't open a paper or even watch the news on television without being subjected to over-excited reports of some Hollywood star's marital problems. As if we cared.

Some people, of course, lead such impoverished lives that they have a real need to escape into the activities of the famous. But when their gold becomes tarnished - as it generally does, these being people, not gods - is any high purpose served by posting the details on every branch of the media?

Holding the dirty linen up for public inspection is appealing to our basest emotions, which, as civilised people, we should be able to curb.

It's the modern equivalent of witch trials, with hypocrisy as important an element now as it ever was in 17th-century Salem. Who among those eagerly lapping up the scandal is without blemish?

That much of this gossip-mongering is done with the full cooperation of the subjects is irrelevant. People who play "let's pretend" for a living are not the best judges of what is acceptable behaviour.

And however much they may initially enjoy - and need - the attention, there will always come a time when they have had enough. But not the media.

Even the death of the Princess of Wales was not enough to halt this process more than momentarily, and now Prince William is stepping into the inescapable spotlight.

What is really happening, of course, is that the controllers of the media are using the clay feet of our idols to make pots of money.

No one ever went bankrupt underestimating public taste, and so we have magazines dripping with salacious gossip and front-page newspaper reports about Tom and Nicole and Russell which push aside earthquakes and elections.

Worse, not only is precious television news time squandered on celebrity trivia, but we are being treated to a proliferation of programmes showing human nature at its most unedifying - squabbling neighbours, self-interest on tropical islands, marital fidelity deliberately put under pressure, home videos of painful accidents, even deaths, and criminal stupidity behind the steering wheel.

It's bad enough to read about these things in the court reports and elsewhere. To have them presented to us as entertainment is to give them a glory they do not deserve.

This is an insidious process, not so much the dumbing-down of society - though the brain scarcely gets into gear for most of this rubbish - as its juvenilisation.

The recognisable phases of childhood when toilet humour, slapstick and bad language are excitingly dangerous and attractive have become mainstream and standard fare for adults, to the extent that the notorious Toyota advertisement has been celebrated as clever and witty, and given awards.

We have come a long way since my dear old aunt's naughty childhood chant of "pee, pooh, belly, bum, drawers." Was it worth the journey?

* Pamela Wade is an Auckland writer.