Mark Frith: Some like it hot...

Two weeks ago, I took part in an on-stage discussion at an entertainment industry festival. As is often the case with these things, a few days before I was due to speak, I got a visit from the organisers, who wanted to prepare me for the experience.

"We'll start off," one of them said with a smirk, "by asking you if you feel bad that you're solely to blame for the whole celebrity craze."

I smiled back at them. This wasn't the first time I'd been blamed for the faults of an entire industry but it was certainly the most blatant.

Related articles

• More Media news
• Search the news archive for more stories

Celebrities. There is no group on God's earth more infuriating, ego-driven and downright ridiculous. And the fact that they even exist is all my fault, apparently. People I've never met think I need help – help in breaking free. It's as though they think I should go through some sort of rehabilitation treatment, something that will de-program me of my interest in showbiz culture. I can see it now: me in a room, possibly a church hall, sitting in a circle with my new friends, nervously getting to my feet to speak my introduction: "My name is Mark. And I'm a celebrity magazine editor..."

Or rather, I was. Last February, I quit my job as editor of Heat magazine after eight years in charge. In that time I'd had Jonathan Ross scream down the phone at me, been chatted up by Geri Halliwell (she told me I would be "good father material" and I have been dining out on it ever since) and was nearly run over by Jude Law's car. I wanted to put all those stories into a book (and I have – called The Celeb Diaries, it's out this week) but I also wanted to get the hell out of there. Because, as I've become increasingly aware over the past couple of years, I am held responsible for the cult of celebrity and that maybe it's something I should no longer be proud of.

What attracted me to Heat were the people we were writing about. These were funny, larger-than-life characters and the way they hooked up, fell out, interacted, clicked or didn't click was endlessly fascinating.

When I was editing Smash Hits in the early Nineties, we'd wait months for interesting pop stars to come along. If no one interesting released anything for a couple of months you were buggered – you still had to bring out a magazine every two weeks. We were forced to help create our own stars – either taking failing pop groups and promoting the hell out of them until people bought their records (Take That being a prime example) or by getting new groups to go on a Smash Hits-promoted tour where they'd get the exposure that would lead to people buying their records (Boyzone were the most high-profile beneficiary of this). That's how desperate we were. We would do anything to make these people famous.

With Heat, there was no need to discover famous people; they were everywhere – and new ones were being created all the time. Britain's media culture has an incredible ability to confer celebrity overnight. The most famous example of this – still – is Elizabeth Hurley. Completely unknown on a Monday morning, by the following Friday evening she was the most famous person in the land, all because she had attended her boyfriend's film premiere wearing a dress held together by safety pins.

Then, in 2000, reality TV arrived in earnest on British TV, and it soon became apparent that practically anybody could become famous. And they didn't have to do a thing – they didn't have to sing, or act, or present; they could just be.

The turning point, the entertainment phenomenon that ushered in this new golden age of celebrity, was Big Brother. When the show launched in July 2000, it was marketed by Channel 4 as a kind of weird psychological experiment. Viewers were told that a group of people were to be put in a house in east London, that the door would be locked for several weeks, and that they wouldn't know whether it was night or day. It sounded strange, edgy and wilfully uncommercial. On Day Two, several of the contestants decided to run around the house naked except for loads of paint they'd daubed on their bodies. On Day 22, two of the contestants, strangers when they had entered the house three weeks previously, snogged in front of one of the house's many cameras. Suddenly, this was no mere psychological experiment; this was popular entertainment, 21st century-style.

Two weeks after that on-air snog, I was in the Heat offices, just hours before the magazine had to leave for the printers, staring at the cover we'd just finished designing for the next issue. On it was one Randy Andy, Big Brother snogger (or snoggee, I can't quite remember the details), and I was having what could be described as a crisis of confidence. "But he's not famous," I was saying to anyone who would listen. "He's not a celebrity! Is he? I mean, I know he's on television, but does that make him a celebrity?"

The Randy Andy cover sold in serious numbers – and was the first of more than 100 Heat covers to feature stars of reality TV shows as the main image. The high sales and the gradual acceptance that anyone well-known (regardless of talent) could be a celebrity changed Heat's fortunes overnight.

Heat had launched in February of the previous year as a unisex entertainment magazine, in the mould of American mega-sellers like Entertainment Weekly. The magazine was fantastic: wordy, well-written and well-informed. But its sales were modest. While the magazine was concentrating its coverage on the Star Wars prequels, production companies were preparing shows that would revolutionise television. When they launched, we took a gamble, devoting pages to this new breed of "stars". It paid off hugely. What was set to become one of biggest flops in the history of magazines became a massive success story – and Big Brother was just the beginning.

Thanks to reality TV, soon real people and celebrities were meeting, falling for each other, falling out, getting on or rubbing each other up the wrong way in TV houses and jungle encampments. And – brilliantly – they were doing it all on our screens 24 hours a day. They were there for us whenever we needed them in our lives, doing what we wanted them to do, whenever we wanted them to do it. Soon, we'd even be able to choose who would become pop stars, or who wouldn't.

Heat became the in-house magazine for the Class of 2000 and beyond – anyone who appeared on shows like these would be interviewed, photographed and psychoanalysed in the magazine's pages. We obsessed about them. We wanted to know everything about them: their boyfriends, their families, their friends and their diets. Everything. Our sales rocketed, from 60,000 a week in April 2000 to north of half a million in 2003, and kept on rising.

But it wasn't just Heat that was growing. Because newspapers were losing sales as fast we were gaining them, they, too, began covering the world of celebrities far more than before. Real news took a back seat, celebrity news took up more and more space. Book publishers, too, sat up and took notice. If Jordan and Kerry and Jade can shift magazines and newspapers, they figured, maybe they could sell books, too?

Jordan's first autobiography sold more than 1 million copies. Immediately, she was signed up for more books, both autobiography and fiction. Kerry Katona, once a member of the pop band Atomic Kitten, by now famous-for-being-famous, ended up with a similar deal and published both novels and memoirs. An autobiography by Jade Goody – the star, but not the winner, of Big Brother 3 – sold by the lorryload. There was perfume, clothing ranges, magazine columns. Celebrity was big business. Some of these new TV-created celebs began to get properly rich; a few became sickeningly rich, and the celebrity world kept on expanding. The sums increased, these newly rich stars needed agents and publicists and stylists. More people, more money. Celebrity had become one of the biggest industries in Britain.

Television had been quick to notice the effect these new celebrities were having on audiences. TV needs to attract the cool, high-spending 18-35 age bracket. Channels are in a pitched battle with magazines and newspapers for the premium advertising of products that appeal to them. The explosion in celebrity TV took it far beyond the minority-interest channels. Big Brother was followed by Survivor, which was followed by Pop Idol, which was followed by I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. Soon, every TV show that needed freshening up did so with a little celebrity help. By 2004, Come Dancing (the most retro TV format in the book) was relaunched in style when the BBC had the smart idea of teaming up professional dancers with household names. The result was a worldwide hit.

Whether Heat did or didn't invent celebrity culture, we certainly became its in-house journal. And that was always my plan. It was also my plan – after spending years doing exactly what showbusiness agents and PRs wanted – that the magazine would have the upper hand for once. When I edited Sky magazine, I'd spend hours engaged in pride-swallowing phone calls with LA publicists – I'd make polite conversation, ask them how they were, how their pets were, how it was all going with their new macrobiotic diet before finally plucking up the courage to say, "So, how about that Jennifer Aniston interview then?" and be turned down flat. I didn't like waiting in line, I wanted to run the editorial that we wanted to run and they maybe didn't want us to run. Say what you like about Heat, but we certainly did that; the relationship between us and the publicists was frequently rocky. Victory was hard-fought, but victory it certainly was. Let's call it 2-1 after extra time.

But gradually the celebrity world stopped being so much fun. Every time you switched on MTV they were glorifying the latest showbiz casualty by handing them their own fly-on-the-wall show, and we were suddenly seeing things many of us just didn't want to see. This wasn't the romance of the first kiss or the development of a friendship like in those early reality TV shows – this was mental illness and substance abuse and dysfunction. Then came Britney and Amy, stars of their own never-ending fly-on-the-wall documentaries from hell, on a blog, or newspaper front page, or magazine cover near you. Hell to watch, far worse to be starring in. No fun at all.

As time went on, I began to feel complicit in all of this while, according to some sectors of the media, it was my fault that Amy Winehouse was stumbling around at four in the morning, covered in blood. Britney Spears was troubled because of all those paparazzi, and those paparazzi were there because of celebrity-magazine editors like me. When surveys showed that the nation's schoolchildren didn't want to be nuclear physicists, or school teachers, or Olympic athletes, but wanted to lead the decadent life of a celebrity, having no talent but earning loads of money, that was my fault, too.

People may read this and think: that's all very well, but you did start this. The Britneys and Amys of this world are the way they are because of you. There we'll have to agree to disagree. As much as Heat liked to position itself as the be-all-and-end-all of celebrity, these things would have happened without us. And they didn't stop when I left. This thing is bigger than all of us. And dark though it may be, the celebrity world is bigger than ever. It will be seen as the defining obsession of the next decade, too.

Writing my book was a wonderful trip down memory lane. As well as telling all about the famous names I'd encountered – or who'd confronted me at parties – I loved revisiting past issues I had stored away at home. One day I found a cover featuring Darius, who had been recently rejected from ITV's Popstars. His dreams were shattered, he said, but he was smiling in the photos, loving his new-found fame and having the time of his life. The world of celebrity needs more Dariuses. I hope it finds them – and quickly.

'The Celeb Diaries' by Mark Frith is out now (Ebury Press, £14.99); to purchase it at £13.49 (with free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

21st-century icons: Heat's famous five

Victoria Beckham

The high-profile engagement – and even higher profile marriage – of Victoria Adams to David Beckham were key moments in the development of the celebrity culture we see now. Celebrity magazines, newspapers and TV shows followed every development in Posh's life, whether it was problems in the couple's marriage (after Rebecca Loos alleged an affair with husband David in 2004) or a new haircut. In the past two years Victoria Beckham has opted for a quieter, more domesticated life with only the occasional foray into the public domain, to promote her fashion range or watch her husband play for LA Galaxy. Until, that was, the Spice Girls reformed and played a high-profile tour late last year, earning each member of the band approximately £10m each.

Jade Goody

A former dental assistant, Goody came to prominence during the third series of Big Brother. In the early weeks of the show she was stroppy, tearful and able to produce a seemingly endless stream of

dense remarks. But her charm eventually won people over, she made it to the final show and it was Goody's story that magazine readers wanted to know about. She earned £1m from buy-ups and deals in her first year after Big Brother and revisited the house in controversial circumstances in early 2007. Now facing a high-profile cancer battle, Goody is back in the news again.

Jennifer Aniston

Ten years ago Jennifer Aniston was the biggest female star on US TV, now – to the readers of Heat – she's probably better known for her relationships than her acting. After a fairy-tale romance and wedding, Aniston and Brad Pitt split up at the beginning of 2005. Pitt had spent much of the previous year making Mr & Mrs Smith with Angelina Jolie and rumours circulated that she was the reason for them ending their marriage. Aniston became the biggest celebrity magazine cover star of the year as she attempted to deal with the break-up. In rare candid moments, it was clear that the split had caused her great emotional stress – but this made her even more fascinating to magazine readers.

Jordan

Jordan – real name Katie Price – took up glamour modelling in her teens and became a tabloid favourite in the early Noughties thanks to a series of high-profile relationships (a Gladiator, then a pop star, then Premiership footballer Dwight Yorke), a feud with Victoria Beckham and the occasional drunken night out. Deciding she'd got herself stuck in a career rut, Jordan took part in the third series of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here in 2004. There, on screen for all to see, she met, and fell in love with, ex-pop star Peter Andre. This was a chance for people to see "the real Jordan" and they liked what they saw: she was funny, self-deprecating and smart. Huge book sales followed, as did marriage to Andre in a mega-bucks OK! magazine deal. She is now one of the most famous women in Britain.

Kerry Katona

Of all Heat's stars, Katona's life is probably the most drama-packed. After a troubled childhood Katona joined the girl band Atomic Kitten but left before their biggest hit, "Whole Again". Katona seemed to have one of the happiest marriages in show biz with former Westlife singer Brian McFadden, but when he left her and the couple's two children for the Australian singer Delta Goodrem in late 2004, her life took a turn for the worse. Over the last four years Kerry's problems – drug abuse, a bi-polar disorder – have been played out in her regular OK! exclusives and columns. Marriage to ex-cabbie Mark Croft produced another two children. She is never far away from tabloid front-page drama. Two weeks ago Katona was declared bankrupt.