I want to be famous

If you were watching TV sometime in the mid-1980s, you might remember a little girl who won a competition. She was on a show called Saturday Superstore and sang a song called It's 'Orrible Being In Love When You're 8½. You'll remember it if you saw it, and if you were a child and had eyes you'll have seen it, because there was nothing else to watch on Saturday mornings, except TV-AM and racing from Doncaster.

The reason it made such an impression was that she seemed at the time anomalous, an apparently normal eight-year-old with a bizarre desire – to sing on television. There were abnormal eight-year-olds like Bonnie Langford, who looked as if they ran on batteries and talked about "the business" and did the splits while being interviewed by adult talkshow hosts. There were child movie stars like Michael J Fox. But Claire Usher was none of these. After winning the contest, her song was released and she appeared on Top Of The Pops, where they put her in a school scarf and what looked like her mother's high heels, just in case you missed the point: that a child "pop star", a child caught up in the processes of fame, could only properly be presented as burlesque.

It's taken for granted these days that children aren't what they were. They're fatter, taller, louder. They are, thanks to the creation of the tween advertising market, more sharply aware of self-image. (They always had one; it just wasn't shaped by focus groups at Topshop.) Above all, they are subject to the corrupting influence of celebrity culture.

Last year, a survey found that the top three career aspirations for five- to 11-year-olds in Britain were sports star, pop star and actor, compared with teacher, banker and doctor 25 years ago. The number of child performance licences, issued by councils to pupils who miss three or more days of school per half-year to perform, increased, in five years, by 80%. At Stagecoach, the performing arts school franchise, student numbers leapt from 12,000 in 1999 to 36,000 today. As Rachel, a character in the TV show Glee, says, "Nowadays being anonymous is worse than being poor." That the show is mocking her doesn't undermine its belief in the statement.

It's partly just fashion: when children wanted to be doctors it wasn't because they were genuinely more interested in the function of the spleen than they are now; you go where the respect is and the respect has gone to some weird places. Sometime in the last decade, the relationship between cause and effect collapsed and put everyone above a certain level of fame on a more or less equal footing. Once behind the velvet rope, talent show winner Leona Lewis, footballer Theo Walcott and reality star Kerry Katona were as likely to be lumped together and invited to Downing Street as Ann Widdecombe was to appear on Celebrity Fit Club. Fame qualifies you for everything, like being a toff once did, I suppose, except no one wanted them on the side of their lunchbox.

The assumption is that this celebrity culture degrades us and sets a bad example to the younger generation, who develop something called "unrealistic expectations". The way people talk about it, you'd think Jade Goody and the Cheeky Girls were responsible for a barrister shortage in this country, for legions of twentysomethings who, if they'd applied themselves at school instead of daydreaming about fame, could have grown up to be teachers, or civil servants, or the sorts of actors who went to Rada and never wanted to be famous, just wanted to act. People motivated by excellence, not money. People like us.

At least Simon Cowell has the decency to be obnoxious about it all. The way he wears his cashmere sweater, drives his Rolls-Royce, recoils in the face of people with no talent, all of it acknowledges that, on the whole, it is better to be rich and famous than to dig a ditch or work at Asda or even – have you ever tried reading a tort textbook? – be a barrister. Much of the fame-for-fame's-sake debate carries on as if fame, earned or otherwise, doesn't deliver concrete advantages: money, a sense of consequence, free stuff in the mail.

Rae Bland is 15 and waiting on a callback from Britain's Got Talent. She goes to a comprehensive in north London, has a nice singing voice and went to the audition with friends who accompanied her for moral support. After performing, she was asked if she wanted to be a singer when she was older and she said, "A singer or a surgeon" and the production assistant said, "Well, you'll earn a lot of money either way." Which, of course, she might and he was trying to be nice. On the other hand, an adult telling a teenager, "You'll earn a lot of money either way" – as a singer or a surgeon – looks from certain angles like everything that's wrong with the way things are now.

It was five years ago, when programmes like The X Factor and Big Brother were at their zenith, that David Sprigg, co-founder of Stagecoach, saw the biggest spike in student numbers. There was another surge around Billy Elliot, with boys wanting to be dancers. His schools try to correct the message put out by TV talent shows about instant fame, "because 99.9% of students will not suddenly appear on television. We tell them it's a crowded and unreliable profession." Instead they emphasise "self-development, confidence, communication skills". It must be working – only 5% of the students take up the school's offer of an agent. In most cases, says Fleur Manuel, Sprigg's colleague, those children who are marched to auditions have parents who want it more than they do.

Rae doesn't have the sort of narrative that flies on talent shows. Ideally she should have no other aspirations than to be a star. But she is a sensible girl with a sensible mum; she auditioned because it was there. If it didn't exist, she would not, she says, have gone to any lengths to pursue a singing career and if she doesn't go through to the next round she won't be devastated. With exquisite teenage sarcasm she says, "It's not like a lifelong dream or anything" although, as everyone knows, the first law of superstition is you are more likely to get something if you claim not to want it.

Which brings us to Susan Boyle, the latest Cinderella and defender of the Dream. It was interesting to watch Ant and Dec, who aren't used to getting a tough press, squirm at the Edinburgh TV festival last year when they were asked to justify the treatment of Boyle and also that weeping 10-year-old on Britain's Got Talent. "What would you do then?" said Dec. "Start censoring people because they won't be able to handle the fame and attention as well as you think they should?"

He continued: "People don't turn up with it written on T-shirts how sane they are. You can't tell by looking at somebody." Actually you can, and do; the way Boyle was presented when she walked on stage that first time, with cutaways to the judges' faces, was check-this-one-out-she's-mental.

The rationale is that Nobody Made Them Do It, which is true: no one is made to do anything in a free society where the only coercives are advertising, desperation, poor education, financial vulnerability, plain bad sense and the belief that fame will open up the world to us, even though everything suggests it diminishes the field of vision until other people do and see everything for you. Kids want to be famous in order to be grown up, when it is, in fact, a state of perpetual childishness.

But why be so negative? It could happen! It happened to Boyle. All you have to have is a little faith in the dream. Isn't it better to be positive than negative? Isn't this what Oprah has taught us?

"It's magical thinking," says Janice Peck, an academic at the University of Colorado who in her book The Age Of Oprah addresses the talkshow host's belief – and that of celebrity culture generally – that you can "constantly remake and transform" yourself, no matter the circumstance. "It's like kids who are poor and think if they work hard on their basketball skills maybe they'll get to be in the NBA. The percentage is so tiny, but there's still that allure because the alternatives look bleak and they are surrounded by social media in which everyone can be famous. It's not unreasonable to see why the kids say this."

Oprah's own story supports this, says Peck, at least in the way most people perceive it: "She was poor and living in sackcloth someplace and then became Oprah Winfrey and everything in between and the whole historical context, all the conditions that made it possible for her to succeed, disappear. The American dream is based on that notion of: if you just put your mind to it."

Celebrity memoirs tend to tack in this direction because it flatters the celebrity and is an easier story to tell, and to sell. In Winfrey's case, the historical context was the civil and women's rights movements, from which she benefited both in terms of her schooling and in her early days on TV in Baltimore, when women and ethnic minorities were for the first time being aggressively recruited. "It's not that she doesn't have abilities. But those openings are produced by movements. Millions of people fighting for things," says Peck. In this context, there is no such thing as the weak and the strong, only the positive and the negative.

Claire Usher is now Claire Usher-McMorrow. She is 32 and lives in Manchester, around the corner from the house she grew up in. Every so often she gets a call from Where Are They Now-type shows, which she declines to go on because "you end up looking like a right idiot". It amuses her, the tone they take: "As if, oh you're not really fulfilled, then, because you're not making records. I feel sorry for people who carry it on. It's a hard profession. The hardest thing is when people don't have any talent."

The only reason Usher made a record was because she went to St Winifred's, the primary school in Stockport where the choir had released two successful singles, one of which, There's No One Quite Like Grandma, went to number one. She was chosen to sing the school's new song and her mum sent the tape to the talent show. Winning was exciting, she says, but also no big deal. When, a year later, the show invited her to come back and hand over the trophy, she turned them down because she had a netball match (she was captain). She was not after publicity at all costs; her dad wouldn't let her be photographed with Samantha Fox, for reasons that mystified her at the time. "He said, 'I don't agree with the job that young girl has'."

It's a question of scale, she says. "The internet wasn't there. You can be catapulted very quickly now, thanks to YouTube and everything else. Once you're there, it's totally out of your control. Susan Boyle: absolutely out of her control."

Usher never made another record. She studied for a drama degree, then got into Riverdance, which seemed to her like the perfect level of fame – "You have the perks, we'd get into clubs and not have to queue, and not have any of the celebrity" – and eventually became a teacher. The thing she tells her pupils is the importance of excelling, at anything. "I'm Joe and I'm really good at… golf. Or I'm Sally and I'm really good at… singing. It builds their self-confidence and identity. If they want to practise very hard and try to make a living out of it, that's fine." And if her two-year-old daughter wanted to enter a talent competition? "I can't imagine – to put your child up there to be criticised. Ugh." She makes a noise like something soft subsiding. "I'd like her to be the world champion of tiddlywinks. Become good at something totally random."

Incidentally, there was another survey done, 18 months before the one that found children all want to be famous. The latter was commissioned to publicise a new TV show called Tarrant Lets The Kids Loose, in which three- to six-year-olds are filmed with hidden cameras. The former, which found that children in the same age range want to be old-fashioned things like vets and hairdressers and teachers and firefighters, was commissioned by the sensible-sounding Norwich & Peterborough Building Society. Which goes to show: children will still, generally, be whatever the adult asking them wants them to be.