She's not alone in her ambition: growing numbers of young people are desperate to become famous by any means. A recent survey by the interactive website www.thelab.tv found that of nearly 1,000 girls who took part, almost half saw Abi Titmuss as a role model and 33% Jordan. Anita Roddick was a role model for only 7% of girls, J K Rowling for 9% and Germaine Greer for 4%. Asked what they would rather be famous for, 89% chose being recognised and a celebrity; only 11% said they would prefer achievement with little recognition.

"Public recognition and celebrity have replaced more traditional marks of status," says the sociologist Angela McRobbie, a professor at London's Goldsmiths College. "A lot of this has to do with media visibility, and the popularity of TV programmes such as Fame Academy and Pop Idol, which make ordinary people extraordinary and give rise to the idea of a fast track to stardom."

Celebrity is the new social addiction, where wannabes go to alarming lengths to get their fix. "You make a sex tape and accidentally leak it to the internet — it's not as hard as you think," says Dave Read, the MD of Neon PR, who has developed the careers of wannabes for the past 20 years, including those of Jordan, Jodie Marsh and Abi Titmuss.

"The real change in recent years is that youngsters want to be famous for being famous. They don't feel they need to have a skill. People used to want to be pop stars and footballers, and before then nurses and doctors; now they just want to be famous, and if you say 'What for?' they don't care." Read's advice to these wannabes? Play the game well. The girls (they are usually girls) under his tutelage are told to prepare for the flak. "Nobody gets to the top by being called lovely, beautiful; it doesn't work like that. If you look at those who are successful in the tabloid business, day in, day out, they're called fat, ugly slappers, sluts... You have to have the skin of a rhinoceros."

Since 1999, when the first series of Big Brother was screened in the Netherlands and Heat magazine was launched here, our national appetite for "sleb" gossip has reached new proportions. Heat and its imitators Closer and Now sell a combined 1.5m copies a week. Their predecessors, Hello! and OK!, filled with reverential stories such as the recent "Zara Makes a Splash", have been left trailing. Reality-TV participants become stars, of a sort. A survey this year showed that Jade Goody, who became notorious in 2002 when she appeared naked on Big Brother shouting "My kebab's showing!" was more widely recognised than Jack Straw or Charles Kennedy. An issue of Heat with Jade on the cover reliably sells about 20% more than one without her. Editors love these D-list celebrities because they happily spill the beans. As Heat's editor, Mark Frith, says, "I could spend the next year trying to get an interview with Tom Cruise, but all he'd tell me is how great it was to work with his latest director. Jade, on the other hand, would tell me everything — about her body image, her relationship, her career, her hopes."

But Jade has no shortage of competitors. One hundred thousand people applied for a place in the Big Brother house for the most recent series. Websites such as www.beonscreen.com, which has 60,000 subscribers, direct wannabes to reality shows. PRs and agents train wannabes how to behave. "Competition is fierce on the red carpet nowadays," says Read. "You have to wear the right designers, be prepared to wear that silly, revealing outfit, come up with some novel ideas."

At the premiere of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Leicester Square this summer, Jasmine Lennard managed to provoke a row with the model Sophie Anderton by deliberately wearing a virtually identical dress. Sophie's bitchy comments — such as "I am a supermodel. She is not a supermodel yet" — made the gossip columns, generating publicity for the girls, the dress designer and the event. But in order to have a public row — or, for that matter, flash your knickers in public — you need to get into the high-profile parties in the first place. Guests who attract the wrong sort of attention are ruthlessly excluded. We asked if we could take our cast of wannabes to Mo*vida, a new bar in central London favoured by Scarlett Johansson, Pierce Brosnan and Robbie Williams. Lennard is a regular, but we were told the others featured "just don't have the image that we're looking for". Another party host Googled our would-be guests when she was told their names. She turned them down.

Wannabes are going to ever-greater lengths to be talked about. A Zimbabwean ex-nurse, Makosi Musambasi, became notorious in the recent series of Big Brother when her face was shown on live TV while she had sex with her fellow housemate Anthony in the hot tub — the house's most explicit broadcast yet. In retrospect, this was an unwise move: her former employers have refused to take her back and she has been served with a deportation order back to Zimbabwe.

Philip Edgar Jones, the producer of Big Brother at Endemol (the company that makes the show), has seen 50,000 wannabes audition in the past five years. He believes people want to be on the show because "They think, 'That could give me a better life. I could suddenly be famous and be going to showbiz parties and premieres.' " He says the phenomenon reflects a shift in society: "Families are fragmented, people move away from home. Celebrity is a substitute community." He also notices among the applicants a high proportion of girls who have been let down by their fathers, and young gay men about to come out — "It's a good way of doing it once and for all."

Despite the perception that fame will bring wealth and a life of leisure, for most minor celebrities the main compensation for their efforts will be attention from the public. Jade, the most famous Big Brother participant yet, is the only one to have earned over £1m, and her relatively low fees for an interview and photo shoot — about £5,000 — have helped, according to the PR expert Mark Borkowski. Behind the scenes — it's the agents, TV production companies and magazine owners who are making the real money. Few people would recognise John De Mol in the street, but as the head of Endemol he has become a billionaire.

For the wannabes themselves, it's a rocky road. If celebrity means success, not making it marks you out as a failure. And even if you make it, you can never be famous enough. As McRobbie says, "Not making the grade results in self-loathing, especially for girls; they are never beautiful enough, or, if they're beautiful, they're not successful enough or interesting enough."

Still, for people to be so interested in you that your cellulite, bad-hair days and flabby stomach become a topic of conversation is affirmation of a sort. If Jade can get it, maybe you can too.