Leading article: Fame academy

Perhaps the show proves so compelling because it shines such a subversive light on the upside-down notion of celebrity in modern Britain. The "celebrities" were a motley cast of Z-listers trying to reinvent themselves, while the game's easy winner was the unknown Chantelle, a "fake celebrity" now, bizarrely a "celebrity" in her own right. As the puzzled American housemate Dennis Rodman said, in Britain you don't need to have done anything to be famous. In one other respect, however, CBB succeeded spectacularly where electoral politics failed: in exposing what lies behind the threadbare rhetoric of George Galloway.