So, my gay boyfriend sent over one of his virtually trademarked, exclamation-point ridden emails, which usually speak of the dishiness of some cricket player or the latest drunken chavistic revelry. This urgent message, however, pointed me towards the latest from the lovely and talented Julie Burchill, whose pieces of prose often cause great envy on my part, for she is quite the scribe of lucidity:

When Oscar Wilde said that being natural is surely the biggest pose of all, he must have foreseen the current crop of big-screen luvvies, those po-faced, ‘fiercely private’ paparazzi-haters who have chosen to expose themselves on screens the size of churches – often naked – in return for vast amounts of money from paying strangers.

And then act outraged when they find people looking.

These attacks of the vapours invariably come across as about as justifiable as a stripper getting upset when people expect her to take her clothes off, and you can almost see why star-stalkers sincerely believe that they’re married to their favourite flesh-flashing star.

While ceaselessly lying to themselves and the public about how the process of acting – i.e. pretending to be someone else, by reciting words yet another someone else has written – is all about ‘honesty’, modern actors never dare to face the one stark, simple truth about the way they have chosen to make a living.

In fact, the pain actors willingly submit to, the bravery they display, the sacrifices they make – just for us – makes the civilian mind boggle with sheer molten awe. Why, they make nurses, firemen and volunteers in leper colonies – all of them ever, all rolled together – look like the Hilton sisters on a spring-break spree. So, why won’t we just stop looking at them?

Of course, when we do, and they cease to be box office, they move on to reality shows, finding yet another way of getting themselves in our faces. The sad, strange fact is that it is stars who stalk civilians far more often than civilians stalk stars. So who’s the weirdo here?

Yes, I do quite fancy this author. In fact, she’s motivated me to actually put pen to paper over the past few days. The above passage is excerpted from Julie Burchill and Chas Newkey-Burden’s upcoming book, Not In My Name: A Compendium Of Modern Hypocrisy, which will be available on Aug. 7 from Amazon.co.uk. As for any interested Yanks, the U.S. release date is set for sometime in 2009. Bloody hell.

In the meantime, you can read more of Burchill’s rantings on various topics at ThisIsLondon.co.uk.