Haven’t you heard? Alec Baldwin called his daughter a pig! Yes, really. And David Hasselhoff, he got drunk, fell on the floor and tried to eat a burger! And Lindsay Lohan, she’s the worst – she went to a club in Hollywood and, like, really partied! And Paris Hilton, she got 45 days in prison for driving with a suspended licence. OK, so it’s not exactly armageddon, but judging from the media hysteria surrounding the exposure of stars in so-called morally compromising situations you might be forgiven for thinking that we’re on the verge of a mass celebrity meltdown.

TV networks and gossip websites, newspaper columnists and bloggers have this week all been simultaneously outraged by celebrity scandals gleaned from that most contemporary of media sources – “leaked footage”. In each case however, to put it bluntly, nothing happens. Instead, mundane moments of human indulgence are captured on tape, audio and video, and spun into monstrous calamity. Thus Baldwin’s angry voicemail message to his 11-year-old daughter Ireland, in which he calls her “thoughtless”, “rude” and, yes, a “pig”, becomes a signifier of venomous parental impropriety.

Same for poor ole Hasselhoff, filmed topless and inebriated, and slumped on the carpet, head hung low, hovering over a frankly delicious-looking burger and mumbling inanities to his clearly embarrassed daughter. While grainy images of Lindsay Lohan at a Hollywood club, living it up like clubgoers everywhere, naturally demonstrate her megalomaniacal desire to drag the world’s media in and out of her blatantly disingenuous relationship with rehab.

This, of course, would normally be just another eye-rolling symptom of media hyperbole. Yet the effects of this new po-faced morality, this giddy, hateful Schadenfreude, seem to be spreading beyond the tabloid pages and gossip sites and into real-world attitudes. Hence, as a direct result of booze’n’burger-gate, Hasselhoff has been denied visiting rights to his children during his divorce proceedings with Pamela Bach. Similarly, Baldwin’s custody rights over his daughter were suspended after the release of the pig tape. While a whole slew of celebrity clamp-downs, including the unreasonably harsh sentence given to Paris Hilton, seem to suggest a national mood fired up by sanctimonious, clip-fuelled celeb-baiting.

The greatest irony, of course, is the presumption that somehow today’s celebrities are out of control. In fact, the opposite is true. Today’s celebrities are minor-league hedonists. The only thing that’s out of control is the proliferation of cheap and portable recording technology and the number of celebrity-obsessed media outlets that are prepared to show anything that’s been captured.

Imagine how the history of the classic Hollywood star system might have turned out if camcorders, YouTube and Google Video had been around from the beginning. Imagine the public reaction to footage of that beloved icon John Wayne, drunk on tequila and yelling at his second wife, Esperanza Baur (as she testified during their divorce), “You’re nothing but a motherf***ing streetwalker!” Or grainy shots of Robert Mitchum putting his, er, member into a hotdog roll, as was once alleged, and offering it up ironically to gay partygoers in Hollywood.

Or, worse still, imagine how the entire 20th-century world’s concept of the Tinseltown dream factory might have been altered had some quick-thinking partygoer managed to whip out a digital camera in a San Francisco hotel room in September 1921. There he could have filmed the millionaire comedy icon Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and two movie directors savagely raping the actress Virginia Rappe, which caused her death. But hey, Alec Baldwin called his daughter a pig! And David Hasselhoff was drunk in charge of a burger! So we should send them down!

Ultimately, what this new phase of celeb-bashing indicates is that the relationship between the fan and the famous is based not on worship but on envy and disgust. The mass democratisation of star and celebrity information has made our contemporary icons ugly, tainted with the familiar and the whiff of the banal. We preferred them as distant monsters with magical powers, privately residing in glamorous hotel rooms. But now that they’re with us, all too human, we hate them with a passion. We really do.

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