Philip Hensher: The curse of celebrification

It makes the heart sink to see the celebrity uniform being attempted by, of all people, cricketers

It was reported that, in his ears, Mr Pietersen wore two pink diamonds worth £50,000. He scoffed at the suggestion in a post-match interview, without actually denying it; he might have thought, at that moment, that there were more interesting things he ought to have been asked about.

On top of that, his hair was dyed with a single slightly yellow stripe; not, to be honest, a particularly successful look for Mr Pietersen.

The word "skunk" has been mentioned. I'm sure it was expensively and professionally applied, but to be blunt, by yesterday afternoon, it looked much as if it had been done by his sister in his spare room.

All in all, he looked quite a sight; these new and (for cricketers) unaccustomed celebrity accoutrements seemed to sit on Mr Pietersen's honest, rubbery features like an ugly sister going to the ball. I don't want to insult Mr Pietersen, but it does make the heart sink to see the celebrity uniform being attempted by, of all people, cricketers.

There are signs that Celebrity, in the worst sense of the word, is waiting patiently to swallow up the England team. Mr Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff is signed up to write his autobiography. It's not the first one; after I had expressed some rather lecherous opinions about Mr Flintoff, my long-suffering boyfriend went to the trouble of buying me a glossy coffee-table book about him, published a year or two back. It's full of Mr Flintoff's career, opinions, and - the main point - photographs of our new hero in action.

It's the sort of thing you might expect from a David Beckham, a Gavin Henson or even a Johnny Wilkinson. Along with lots of photographs of Mr Flintoff in action, there are plenty of slightly hilariously moody shots of him scowling in some designer clothes, moodily pouting on the porch of his old club, and so on.

The most amusing one is that obligatory one of the hero of the volume strolling down a tropical beach with his adoring fiancée Rachel. She has made a considerable effort, with ironed hair and a crop top: he looks splendidly embarrassed, and appears to be wearing some rolled-up grey Farah slacks and a shirt which might as well come from M&S. Good old Freddie: I'm sure, in the same position, every sensible one of us would feel and look exactly the same.

The fact is that, in the forthcoming celebrification of England's cricket team, the makeover men have their work cut out. In the rest of the sporting world, the duty to look the part has long been taken for granted.

France's notoriously glamorous rugby team pose every year for a surprisingly rude calendar. Sports stars from every discipline are always being snapped up to model fashion, or sell watches, or perfume (a particularly strange one, that, when you remember the Great Smell of Wintergreen of your youth).

Even the Williams sisters, fine athletes as they are, don't seem immune from being stuffed into a cocktail frock and sent down the catwalk. And, as the career of Anna Kournikova shows, your career as a Celebrity can streak way ahead of your record in your chosen sport.

There was a brief and bizarre fashion, in the early Eighties, for wearing cricketing sweaters out on the town, but looking yesterday from one end of the England team to the other, it is quite difficult to conceive any of them as slipping easily into the pages of Heat magazine. If it weren't for Kevin Pietersen, Matthew Hoggard's homage to Farrah Fawcett Majors would comfortably take the prize for most misconceived barnet. Your imagination would have to work quite hard to imagine Steve Harmison's face next to a singing starlet. Let's face it: it's not going to happen.

And a very good thing, too. All these half-hearted attempts to turn these splendid men into glamorous celebrities - and I haven't even mentioned Simon Jones's gruesome appearance as a nude centrefold in a ladies' magazine earlier this year - are going to be failures. But that doesn't in the least diminish them. Rather, it embarrassingly confirms the narrowness of our notions of excellence.

The PR industry is only just beginning to get its teeth into these admirable men, but its attempts, and, indeed, the unconvincing gestures of some cricketers themselves, will overlook the fact that they embody some of the most convincing rebuttals of the horrible celebrity ethos. You can't turn them into "celebrities", because, conspicuously, the best way to admire them is for the practice of their art, and they have nothing to do with the celebrity code.

They obviously value talent over appearance; they conduct their game in a spirit of respect for their opponents; they give the strong impression of embarrassment at the first signs of any adulation; and personal displays of egotism at the expense of their team-mates are clearly not tolerated. And you bet your bottom dollar that they laugh at Kevin Pietersen's hairdo as much as anyone else.