Stan Hey: She's a star, but not necessarily a pri-Madonna

The notion that stars might be normal, once held to be a virtue, has long since been abandoned

The noise that has been going on all day has, I think, finally stopped. A high-pitched drilling sound started at breakfast time and has only just abated now, in the mid-afternoon. To keep some of the whine out I've had to have the shed door closed on a warm, sunny day, and I have found myself cursing my otherwise lovely neighbour who is having his garden "landscaped". "Stop!" I've shouted at wooden walls. "Stop!"

Drills. Spin. They have something in common. You can't hear yourself think for their loud and relentless revolutions. The recent series of stories that are said to reflect upon the Government's news management (ie the way the Government may seek to influence public opinion through journalists) have come together, collided with each other, taken on a collective mass that defies their individual weightlessness, and have now broken free, to soar above the planet's surface, from where they bombard us with the noise of drills.

Inside the shed, with the door closed, I switched on the radio to listen to live coverage of the PM's new briefing conference which, from now on, will partly replace the infamous lobby briefings. The idea is that we will all be able to see both government and journalists at work, and Mr Blair will speak directly to us, without his words being mediated by (as Groucho Marx might have put it) the third party of the fourth estate. No more spin. No more drills.

The first question went to my old and deeply respected friend Andrew Marr. It was about "trust", there being a new poll showing that the public didn't trust the Government. But the sound began again in my head, because – used in the way Marr used it – "trust" was really media spin for "spin". It was a way of parcelling up the Corry e-mails, the Chairman Clarke assault, the Queen Mum phone-calls, the Cherie "gaffe", the Blunkett "joke" and all the other stuff, and being able to ask a portmanteau question about them, without using a word everyone knew the public was fed up with hearing.

Some, particularly on the inside left, have decided that much of this is a plot by the right-wing media to discredit a liberalish government on grounds other than policy. That is, after all, what happened to Bill Clinton. The right-wing journalist and propagandist David Brock, in his recent confession, Blinded By The Right, details how, at the behest of men such as the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaif, he more or less manufactured anti-Clinton scandals. One of these, Troopergate, led indirectly, via Paula Jones, to the entrapment of Clinton over his liaison with Monica Lewinsky.

But this was not purely an American affair. The journalist Joe Klein's new book on the Clinton presidency, The Natural, touches on the aftermath of the suicide of Clinton's friend and aide, Vince Foster. "Foster's death," says Klein, "reinforced the fantasy of a lethal immorality about the Clintons (at least among the more deluded sensationalists in the press, who spread the notion that Foster had been murdered)." One of the leading "deluded sensationalists" was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Washington correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, and currently their man in Europe. It was in a British broadsheet, then, that the maddest stories were given respectability. Is it possible that Britain's fabulously partisan press learned the lesson of the Clinton years – keep fishin' and you never know what you might not find, or even provoke?

This week, one influential columnist on the left speculated that the "spin" stories were being ramped up by Europhobic newspapers, who see the destruction of Tony Blair's reputation as the best way of winning or averting a referendum on joining the euro. And you can see his point. Another related version of this argument has these newspapers trying to fill the void in opposition left by a policyless Conservative Party. And again it's true that some right-wing commentators give the impression that they believe that Blair came to power as the result of a coup d'état, and not on the back of two democratic elections.

But whatever the motivation, there could be no media frenzy if it just involved the Mail, the Telegraph and, occasionally, The Sun. They can't do it on their own. And it is also true that John Major got much the same treatment, with his achievements blanked and the unremarkable sexual exploits of his ministers projected like a gigantic set of horns, to sit on the poor man's brows whenever he appeared. I remember Andrew Marr then saying, quite rightly, that we – the media – should not do again what had been done to Major.

It's not bias, it's the herd. And what a herd. Cherie Blair was the big story two days ago, yet no one asked the PM about her comments yesterday. Why? Because they knew that, so absurd was the synthetic outrage of some of them, they would have looked like complete fools had they raised the subject with her husband. But why were most of the other questions so poor, so spin-obsessed, so press-centred?

It is not really permitted to say this, but David Blunkett wasn't far off being right. Our political journalism is, sometimes, bonkers. It is created in an incestuous atmosphere that makes Ozark family structures look positively extravert. They all work out of the same corridor, eat at the same restaurants, meet the same people and snap at the same prey. And their word – "this is a big story in Westminster" – goes with bulletin editors, home news editors and any other kind of editor.

Politicians have connived at this. This government, which so many of us wanted to be so different, thought it had to do politics the same, realpolitik way as their predecessors – only better. So they, too, had their badmouthing, their off-the-record assassinations, constitutional manipulations and – all too often – pointless evasions. The Charlie Whelan, Derek Draper years were a self-inflicted disaster for a project that simply should have been better.

But even so the coverage of recent stories (what Wagnerians might call the Spin Cycle) has gone beyond anything the Government can be said to have provoked and has, of itself, become a political problem. Not only that, but it's a problem that journalists seem unable to confront. How can broadcasters interrogate newspaper journalists about their priorities, when those priorities have been shared? Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun is bowled soft balls by presenters who then rip the throats out of MPs. In debates between politicians and the media, the media always wins, because the media writes the stories. It claims simply to be the messenger, while at the same time possessing its own agendas.

We need a media debate, and we need one badly. Over the last few years we have seen the growth and extension of media power, and the consequences of unparalleled media competition. Yet the media itself will not permit an open discussion about its practices and its biases. There are no longer any TV programmes, for instance, that take a regular look at British journalism.

And the drill's started again. Like most readers, viewers and listeners, I'm getting up now to shut it out.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com

There has always seemed to have been a scarcely-hidden prefix "Pri" to Madonna's name from the moment she became a hugely-bankable recording star and intermittently successful Hollywood screen actress. Straddling two such ego-driven industries would be a tough act even for the Dalai Lama, whose life story is, incidentally, almost certain to end up on celluloid one day, played by a shaven-headed Richard Gere.

So when the theatre manager William Ingrey, in whose Wyndham's Theatre Madonna is currently starring in the play Up For Grabs, abruptly resigned, citing "the constraints put upon me to satisfy the needs of the present production", the American star was immediately the prime suspect for his departure. Well, in the eyes of the British tabloid into whose embrace Mr Ingrey has apparently run.

We can all play the game of joining up the dots on this one, using a background knowledge of the Hollywood world gleaned from gossip columns, and that insightful look behind the facade of the rock business, Spinal Tap. These sources tell us that anyone working in either of these fields, let alone both, is going to be a full-on, 24/7, overbearing, constantly demanding son of a bitch, a bastard who has lost all touch with reality.

Take Hollywood. We all know about the wildly excessive demands made by the film stars and the power they wield. They want a private Winnebago (it's a posh caravan) on the set; a personal trainer and a private fleet of bodyguards; access to the finest wines, and possibly the hardest drugs, known to humanity; and a limousine and a Lear-jet on 24-hour standby in case the star wants to go somewhere on a whim. If any of these demands are refused, the star goes to the money-men and gets the director and producer canned.

Much the same will be demanded by the denizens of the rock jungle when they are on tour. The dressing rooms have to be a mixture of Fortnum & Mason's and the Reeperbahn to satisfy the needs of the band and its entourage. The slightest error – a crust left uncut on a sandwich, absinthe of the wrong brand – and boom, the tour's off, with the promoters and managers left instantly bankrupt. That's what we have come to expect – and almost desire – from those we place into the nether world of celebrity. The notion that stars might be normal, once held to be a virtue in the early days of rock and film fandom, has long since been abandoned.

Yet the film actors and music stars that I've encountered at various times in my career have been reassuringly level-headed. There was one American actor I worked with who was so dedicated to his profession that he was prepared to go and live in a cave in the centre of China for three months in order to secure a part in a very low-budget, art-house film. He'd have been lucky to have got a rickshaw, let alone a Winnebago.

I've also travelled in a limousine with one of the biggest groups from America, and found that the five young men who made up the band were highly intelligent, literate, socially aware individuals. They didn't trash the seats, or inhale industrial quantities of cocaine, or pass the Jack Daniels around. Nor did they complain about their hotel being next to an airport.

So whenever I hear these stories I tend to take a charitable – if you will, naive – view of them. I don't know Madonna, and have not seen the play in question because I couldn't find anything under "Wild Horses" in the Yellow Pages to get me there. But I'm a fan of most of her music and of some of her screen work. I didn't buy the Sex book, sealed in a metallic material like a condom, but I did have a look at one bought by a friend of mine. It didn't raise my eyebrows, let alone anything else.

But she's undoubtedly a star, and the fact that she's taken the risk to go on to the stage and, according to the critics, exposed the limitations of her acting, just makes her a trouper in my estimation. She's certainly paid off in terms of box-office, because Wyndhams Theatre is packed every night.

So I'm trying to work out what might have made Mr Ingrey angry. The dressing rooms at most London theatres are cramped, dingy and stuffy, so Mrs.Ritchie might have asked for an air-conditioning unit to be installed. And we all know how impossible it is to get a taxi after the theatre, so perhaps she's insisted on having one waiting outside.

If she has somehow asked for the audience to be culturally "screened", as well as having them pass through airline-style security scanners, Mr Ingrey may have a reasonable ground for complaint. Putting Hollywood stars such as Kathleen Turner, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman on the London stage has always brought in the "gawpers" and those with the greasy chins and hidden cameras. It's a professional risk taken by both actor and manager, so they should both just lump it.

Stanhey@aol.co