Star-gazer's cause célèbre: An interview with journalist Marina Hyde

MARINA Hyde is getting stuck into her favourite topic, the one that makes her perpetually amused and horrified, usually at the same time.

My role is pretty much to wind her up and let her go. She is unstoppable, hilariously so, on the hoary old chestnut that is celebrity. She may write about it every week in a national newspaper and now has a book on the subject under her belt, but still she motors on in this quiet caf near her Notting Hill flat. At least it would be quiet if Hyde hadn't just exploded through the door, a whippet with pink hair, pink nails, and a mouth that can't keep up with her mind.

"I like celebrities," she says as I open and close my mouth like a guppy, struggling to hook on to a pause so I can slip in a question. "I like it when they turn out in nice dresses. I just don't like them to be in charge of the aid movement. I find it hilarious when Paris Hilton takes a ferret on the red carpet. That's what celebrity is about. But when she wanted to go to Rwanda, I had a bit of a problem with it. In the end she didn't get around to going because she was too, like, busy with other stuff. And look, I yield to no one in my admiration for Sharon Stone's body of work but I just wonder if she is the right person to sort out the Middle East."

If you read Hyde's journalism on celebrity – fierce, philosophical, laugh-out-loud funny – you'll recognise this voice immediately. She is one of those rare writers who are the same in person as they are on the page, which means damn good fun. Ironically, in a world saturated with celebrities doing outlandish things like getting out of cars, sweating, and more worryingly, as we discover in her book, attempting to negotiate with the Taliban (that would be Jude Law, "the star of Alfie, Sleuth, and a critically under-appreciated nanny-humping scandal"), Hyde remains a voice in the wilderness.

She picks a different path through the detritus, satirising celebrity with her gallows humour and moral purpose. As she tells me, with a grin, "I always think it's better to tell jokes while you're warning of the apocalypse."

Her book is called Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World And Why We Need An Exit Strategy, and it's a brilliant read, a surreal whistle-stop tour through the rogues' gallery of 21st century celebrities and all their gross hypocrisies. Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Bono, Tom Cruise – they all get a roasting. In fact Hyde, whose first taste of journalism was temping on the showbiz desk at The Sun, takes no prisoners: "This is your world," she writes. "Try not to choke on it. The saddest part is that you weren't even in a coma for that period, so future generations are going to regard you as complicit."

I can't resist asking who she deems the worst culprits. She begins at the top, with the A-list. "Madonna. The adoption trade. A lot of celebrities seem to have equated saving one child with saving Africa. I think it's actually part of a really disgusting new colonialism the way they all bag a country." Hyde particularly objects to her, and others, using the promoting of their books, albums and films to further their cause of choice, in this case Kabbalah or "The Little System Of Bullshit That Could". Scientology, meanwhile, is "the religion with science right up there in the title".

"I bang on about this," admits Hyde. "Celebrity endorsement is advertising without regulation. When Madonna says, while promoting her children's books, that Kabbalah water cures everything from Guy Ritchie's verrucas to cancer, those interviews should be treated as adverts and she should be censored and told to never say it again, ever. I actually think you should go to prison for saying that."

Then there is Cruise's infiltration into Ground Zero after 9/11, where he set up tents to treat firefighters who had inhaled smoke with a Scientology purification programme, and Sharon Stone's recommended cure for lymph cancer: stop drinking coffee. "Afterwards, they always say they have been 'misunderstood'," says Hyde. "But these things are on the news wires. When Sharon Stone gave her joint press conference with Shimon Peres – and every time you say those words a bit inside of you should die – there were 20 cameras there." It is because Hyde only uses quotes and stories that have had a mainstream public airing, often at press conferences, that there has been no issue "lawyering" the book. Her sources are the celebrities themselves.

Next up, Geri Halliwell, Angelina Jolie and their UN forays. "I find the idea that we send Geri to Washington to meet with congressman just… well, can we please put our best people on this? This is sub-saharan maternal healthcare. This is not something for Ginger Spice. She is so thick! I'm looking for an analytical brain in my public intellectuals, not someone who talks about seeing hope in children's eyes." As for Jolie, Hyde says: "She got part of the UN human rights declaration tattooed on her neck and effectively closed Namibia's borders to have her baby. I never have to listen to her again."

She also turns her gaze on the US congressional committees that regularly call celebrities to testify. In 1985, a committee tabling a hearing on "the plight of the family farmer" called Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek, and Sally Field. They weren't farm wives, but they had played them in films.

"Then you get the Backstreet Boys on open-top mining," she goes on. "One member of the committee actually refused to attend that one." Unbelievably, it gets worse. "They called... a muppet," says Hyde, a smile threatening to invade her mock-serious expression. "They called Elmo, the worst muppet. The Jar Jar Binks of Sesame Street. And no one refused to attend that committee. They all listened to what Elmo had to say."

How did we get here? Hyde says in the past 10 years the amount of uncritical celebrity coverage has skyrocketed and at the same time these uber-egos, obsessed with being seen to have gravitas, have infiltrated every sphere of life. "In the old days, movements would have their own organic celebrities, people like Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi," says Hyde. "By the time it's Sylvester Stallone on Burma you're thinking please, can Aung San Suu Kyi have a word?"

Hyde mainly blames the prurient media, particularly the glut of celebrity weeklies, but she is equally disparaging of people who deem celebrity facile and shallow.

"In the early days, American communist papers said 'we'll never cover sport because it's like an opiate'. It's nonsense. There has been an explosion in celebrity culture and if you just say those people are morons, I'm not going to pay any attention to their preoccupations, it's snobbish and you're missing out on a serious part of early 21st century culture.

"It's like sleepwalking into a really bad situation. Wake up people. It's Planet Of The Apes." v

Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World And Why We Need An Exit Strategy is published April 5, Harvill Secker, 11.99