Paparazzi mentality is dragging us all down

While on a golfing trip to St Andrews last weekend, he went out of his way to be nice to a group of over-excited female students and ended up splashed over the front pages of the tabloids in a series of less-than-flattering photos.

According to the breathless Daily Mail, Hugh had spent time "with girls less than half his age".

Blimey. The fact that he'd simply given them a lift and then talked to them about their courses and the standard of University accommodation is hidden in the depths of the story.

Thanks to camera-phones, even in a quiet corner of Fife it seems there is no hiding place for the modern celebrity. It's little wonder the most famous retreat behind locked gates and handle their image like plutonium fuel rods.

But sometimes they have to emerge into the public gaze and that is when trouble begins. From doing the shopping to trying to park a car, a famous face is now fair game for anyone who can work the camera function on their Nokia or Motorola.

Some celebrity magazines now even have pages devoted to contributions from fame-obsessed readers.

What makes them so bold when it comes to marching up to a complete stranger and snatching their image?

Undoubtedly the paparazzi are to blame for pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour.

It must take a very special type of person to become a professional celebrity photographer. Ten years after Diana died while being pursued by the paparazzi in Paris, for snappers to start chasing her son at night through the streets of London takes a certain brass neck that leaves most of us reeling.

Even if the Diana inquest decides they didn't cause her death, there is no doubt that the febrile antics of the paparazzi increased the climate of tension that made a mistake or an accident much more likely.

And yet a decade on, her son now faces the same pressure. In the days after the crash in the Pont D'Alma underpass, people spat at photographers in the street and it really seemed a consensus had been reached that enough was enough. Yet fast forward to today and in the current climate another Royal could all too easily be hounded to death by the paparazzi pack. And for what? No-one benefits from their antics and yet some suffer terribly.

Many of the iconic celebrity images of our time have been forced by the baying of the photographic hounds. From Britney to Amy Winehouse, their list of victims just grows longer and longer.

In London recently, I left a restaurant at the same time as a famous musician who was enduring a torrent of abuse from photographers as they snapped away.

Apparently this goading is a favourite trick to provoke an angry reaction from the celebrity thus making the resulting pictures more of a commodity - Picture Exclusive! Pop star flips! It is a filthy rotten business with no happy ending.

But for all this, we can't use that favourite excuse of simply blaming the media. We get the coverage we deserve and the sad fact is that the more outrageous the picture and headline, the more copies of a paper are sold.

Newspapers don't send their own photographers on celebrity goading assignments. Instead they hide behind sleazy agencies who make their money from what is essentially professional stalking. But they should all be forced to abide by the rules. Article 4 of the Press Complaints Commission's code of conduct states that the media "must not persist in pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist". In reality, that happens on a daily basis.

If the PCC can't offer protection then perhaps the only logical move is to alter our privacy laws to ensure that photography has to be justified in the public interest.

Until things change, we all have a part to play. But buying newspapers and magazines which trade on salacious paparazzi pictures simply perpetuates the system and encourages increasingly outrageous behaviour.

When that next leads to tragedy, breakdown or misery, we will only have ourselves to blame.

BBC gets cooking for Nigella show

THE BBC claims to have eradicated all fabrication and pretence from factual programming.

So all the nice middle-class people at a bus stop looking completely unfazed while Nigella Lawson slurped breakfast from a flask were genuine locals and not actors on location for her new cookery show.

Yeah, right.

Tate should crack on to city's roads

THE latest installation of contemporary art has just been unveiled at the Tate Modern in London - a 548 ft long crack running the length of the gallery floor.

If this catches on, perhaps we should expect a sudden rush of modern art aficionados to Edinburgh. Our network of pot-holed, cracked, split and badly patched roads could provide them with endless inspiration and stimulation.