Is fame a curse? Connie Fisher with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Photograph: Gareth Davies/Getty Images
Yet another talent show starts this weekend, BBC1's Any Dream Will Do. It's Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Barrowman and Zoe Tyler again, this time hoping to find some lad with a big voice and bigger personality to play Joseph in a forthcoming production of the hoary old Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Starry-eyed hopefuls and their mums will put themselves through the agonising process of the auditions, heats and shortlisting - and for what? Well, the chance of fame, I suppose. But fame is a curse, as Connie Fisher, the winner of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria, is finding.
First she had to face flak over her absence of professional status, and now she's under fire for using a click track - a common West End device - to support her voice, which, unsurprisingly, is showing the strain of eight performances of a week.
I'm surprised that people who put themselves up for this kind of programme - and I include Pop Idol, Fame Academy and all the other talent shows - haven't yet cottoned on to the fact that this process isn't about making them famous. It's about something much bigger than that: ratings.
Contestants sign a Faustian pact. They get a bit of exposure that might, just might, give them more than the Warholian 15 minutes of fame, and in return they give up their soul to the media. While they're progressing through the stages of the talent show, their every tear, wobbly-voice moment and hissy fit is recorded and broadcast to a slavering nation. During the audition phase, the no-hopers have their terrible warblings offered up as comedy to the audience. Even better if they are possessed of appalling stage mums who rage at the judges after Little Darling is booted off. Darius secured his place in history with his hilariously awful rendition of Hit Me Baby One More Time - surely not quite what he had in mind as his claim to fame.
The runners-up vanish into obscurity if they're lucky (where is Helena Blackman, who came second to Connie, now?). The winners are then bounced into endless interviews and behind-the-scenes programmes - and that's just the authorised stuff. Their private lives are turned over by the tabloids and then, as surely as night follows day, at some point a paparazzi snaps them looking tired and emotional in a club and the focus becomes unwelcome and ugly.
Eventually they vanish, only to resurface in an ITV documentary showing them pottering aimlessly around their rather nice flat sorting out their girlfriend's clean knickers, as Gareth Gates did rather pathetically before Christmas.
If that's fame, you can keep it. Good luck to the Joseph wannabes - they're going to need it.
