There is a curious wedding day photograph of Sir Paul McCartney, taken by his daughter Mary. The new Lady M, Nancy Shevell, is captured in profile, pouting playfully, while Macca stares innocently into the camera, his left leg raised, his left hand giving a limp wave.

He looks for all the world like someone channelling the spirit of that pioneer of camp comedy Larry Grayson.

But then, when a camera is pointed at Macca, he can usually be guaranteed to come over all silly – pull a cheery face, purse his lips in mock surprise or hoist thumbs aloft. Summoning the younger man within, he convinces us: “It’s still fab being a Beatle.”

He has been doing this now for half a century. In so many things in pop music, the Beatles got there first, and John, Paul, George and Ringo were also among the first to experience the kind of fame which would have the shirt ripped off your back by an adoring stranger.

The Beatles seemed to cope with this fame rather better than the media whose task it was to report upon it. Scour YouTube and you will find interviews with the Fab Four conducted by Brylcreemed plum-in-the-mouth BBC types in the early 1960s, asking the most inane questions about the Beatles’ hair, the collars of their suits and, implicitly, the savagery of their music.

Some of those interviewers take a perverse pride in not knowing a thing about their interviewees, as if rock ‘n’ roll were so intellectually inferior that it would be beneath them to do their homework. The Beatles, to their immense credit, bat these questions back with a quick wit and an astonishing patience with the dimness of their interrogators.

To be fair, even the Beatles themselves may have believed in the early 1960s that this nonsense would go away soon and they’d need to get a proper job. When McCartney wrote When I’m Sixty Four, he surely did not envisage embarking on marriage for a third time at the age of 69, but it’s even less likely that he saw himself still playing music, in his dotage, for audiences just as keen as ever they were.

And so Macca grew up in the public eye, survived the madness of Beatlemania, married well with Linda, married badly with Heather, had the indignity of a very public post-mortem on the failure of that last marriage and (without benefit of pre-nup, you old romantic!) married again.

And the happy couple took their vows at Marylebone Register Office, not in some remote castle with armies of minders to keep media and public at bay. As an example of how to live with fame, and still retain your dignity, McCartney has done a perfect job.

The nature of fame has changed today. More have it bestowed upon them, and for flimsier reasons. And somewhere between the wannabes who would sell their granny for a picture spread in Heat, and the true superstars like McCartney, there is a host of celebrities ruthlessly parlaying their fame into hard cash and column inches. When a camera is pointed at them, they don’t goof around Macca, they stare down the lens and burnish their image. When they are interviewed, their publicists may declare entire subjects off-limits. (Incidentally, I was once ushered into McCartney’s presence, and no topic was declared forbidden)

There are now X Factor rejects who believe they should be paid for their “story”, and personalities with fame but no discernible talent who demand the right to approve every word written about them and every picture published. (This newspaper refuses to play ball. Certain glossy magazines cave in to the demands). Fame is sometimes a filthy business, and there really is one born every minute.

Reading his body language, perhaps those Chaplin-esque poses Macca strikes for the camera are really his acknowledgement that there is something vaguely ridiculous about the world continuing to be so interested in him. Perhaps he is saying: “Actually I’m just an ordinary bloke and this is all a bit silly.” If so, that is even more endearing.

Burning desire for celebrity

While we are on about X Factor, has the show gone so over-the-top that it is now beyond parody?

Every contestant is now obliged to weep and gibber like a nervous wreck. And the production values are so hysterical that special guest Cee Lo Green was given a build-up more appropriate to the coming of Armageddon than a chubby bloke singing a song.

How can X Factor possibly up the ante? Audiences fainting en masse with the emotion of it all? Contestants so overwrought they lose control of their bodily functions? People spontaneously combusting?

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