Celebrities: The bigger they are, the harder they fall

It's an unwritten rule of the celebrity remit: many are called, few are chosen, and a small proportion of those must come unstuck in a suitably cataclysmic fashion. This year, some of the falls from grace were grand indeed. Some of them, however, were not grand but grotesque, too serious and sordid for a little smirk of schadenfreude to be seen on anyone's face.

It's an unwritten rule of the celebrity remit: many are called, few are chosen, and a small proportion of those must come unstuck in a suitably cataclysmic fashion. This year, some of the falls from grace were grand indeed. Some of them, however, were not grand but grotesque, too serious and sordid for a little smirk of schadenfreude to be seen on anyone's face.

But let's deal with the lightweights first, and relive some divine moments of celebrity belly-flop. We can tut knowingly at the fact that "It Girl" Victoria Hervey's hard-headed, entrepreneurial little pants shop actually turned out to be operating at a disorganised and dizzy loss.

We can marvel for the rest of our lives at the total show that Vanessa Feltz made of herself on Celebrity Big Brothel (sic). And we can raise our eyebrows I-told-you-so-ishly at the "bolt-from-the-blue revelation" that the marriage of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise wasn't quite what it seemed.

Public feeling was more mixed, though, at the dissolution of Kate Winslet's down-to-earth marriage to non-star Jim Threapleton, and the news of her romance with the so-much-more-suitable Sam Mendes. People rather liked young Kate's girl-of-the-people stance, and felt it a shame that the edifice had collapsed. But really, attempting to accept the glamour, the exposure, and the huge wealth, while remaining "an ordinary working mum" was always a ideal that was naïve to the point of self-delusion.

Talk of working mums, of course, would not be complete without a mention of Elizabeth Hurley. She's not the first lady to have thought that the Pill would protect her forever, nor is she the first one to find that when it lets her down, Daddy does too. So smirks all round at the discovery that one of the world's most beautiful women can be dumped just as unceremoniously as the rest of us.

Let's face it. Ms Hurley is not likely to find herself turning into the single-mother stereotype reviled by the very tabloids who have declared war against Bing Laden. But by the way she's behaved about the need to get her hands on the man's lolly, you could be forgiven for imagining that the hard-to-let council housing option, as well as the welfare-to-work interview, were firmly beckoning.

Why doesn't she just tell this man to stuff his DNA test and thank her good luck that she's in a position to give a child a great life by herself? Steve Bing is a fool to be so cavalier about his coming fatherhood, and for his child's sake it would be nice if he were at some point to realise this. Until that time, Ms Hurley is better off without him. And better off refraining from using the press as a conduit for her anger against the father of her child. It's much more fun for us this way, but it won't be much fun for baby Hurley-Bing when he or she is old enough to find out exactly how Liz and Stephen, and the western world, greeted his or her conception.

Still, for a few weeks at least, Mr Bing provided good sport as a cad to rival the jailhouse rotter Lord Archer. In the nick or out of it, Mr Archer is always good for a giggle. But when he's in the nick, the laughter feels so much less like the joke's on us, the public.

Up until the very moment he was sentenced, this crooked creep did not believe he would go to prison for his perjury, his bribery and his trickery. Jeff the lad had even, it later emerged, arranged to contact his new mistress, Nicola Kingdom, after the trial was over. Still, one cannot shake the feeling that even this will be nothing more than a temporary setback for Mr Archer.

I tend to the view that something more socially useful than a custodial sentence might have been appropriate for the old trickster, such as a million-pound fine and a large chunk of heavy-duty community service. After all, his time doing bird is likely to help Mr Archer achieve the almost impossible – it may actually serve to bolster the man's heroic self-image.

Mr Archer cannot be accused in his life of ever having under-estimated the gullibility, or over-estimated the literary taste, of the English nation. And we still have Archer: My Autobiography to come. God help us. One day we may be laughing on the other sides of our faces. At least we'll still be laughing at the man's sheer gall.

But what can we make of the tragic death of Stuart Lubbock, the young man who was sexually assaulted and drowned at the mansion of Michael Barrymore?

Up to a point, this story is a familiar one. An insecure man gains fame as a means of telling himself he has worth, but still he feels self-hatred. His self-hatred manifests itself in the form of addiction. Mr Barrymore is an alcoholic with the out-of-control, chaotic life that such an affliction, unchecked, usually brings. Again and again, we see this pattern played out in the lives of celebrities, and very often the story ends with their own self-destruction and death. In the case of Stuart Lubbock, though, it is an ordinary man, tugged for a couple of hours into the seductive orbit of celebrity, who dies, luridly and horribly.

Somehow, despite this travesty, Barrymore emerges with unseemly haste as a man who appears to believe that if he plays his cards right, he can still be loved by strangers. Maybe he can.

The terrible thing is that this public adoration should still matter to him above all else. What rock bottom depths does he have to sink to, before his own problems are placed in a reasonable perspective? There is no light entertainment to be had from such grotesquerie as this.

Even more ignominous is the imprisonment of Jonathan King, revealed as a paedophile who used his novelty-pop act to impress children into taking part in indecent acts with him. Again, there have been choruses of I-told-you-sos, not least from those forty-somethings who knew he was a wrong-un the first time they saw him on Top of the Pops.

There will be no privacy for Mr King when he takes his place on the sex-offenders' register. But in this case, public pillory can justly be viewed as the flip side of fame.