Celebrities are the 21st century saints and sinners, but what does that say about us?

With a month left until Christmas, the nights are far from silent. Instead, a perfect storm is brewing. The country’s gift lists, TV schedules, book shelves, and albums sales are dominated by one thing: celebrity.

Tonight Susan Boyle, West Lothian’s reluctant global superstar, will perform on the X Factor, before we find out whether John and Edward, aka Jedward, make it through another round despite Simon Cowell’s howls of derision. Tomorrow Boyle releases her debut album, already the biggest pre-ordered CD on Amazon. All week, millions will tune in to watch former glamour model Katie Price eat grub worms in I’m A Celebrity... and then read all about it again in the next day’s papers.

You can’t avoid the tidal wave of celebrity “stories”. Gordon Ramsay insults an Australian TV presenter, Paris Hilton gets in trouble with the police. Sharon Osbourne takes a dig at Boyle. Jordan and Peter split up. Peter’s dating Alexandra Burke. Sharon apologises. Dannii insults Simon. Dannii hates Cheryl. A race row on Strictly. Dannii loves Cheryl.

So dizzying, demanding, and pervasive are these events that even the TV-phobic, internet refuseniks, and paper naysayers will hear about them.

But before this storm hits it is perhaps timely to indulge in a more traditional pre-Christmas pursuit, one of self-reflection. What exactly does this now-ritual over-consumption on celebrity culture say about us, the society that creates and consumes it?

According to a new documentary, the prognosis is unflattering. Starsuckers was written and directed by Chris Atkins, whose previous film was the celebrated Blair-baiting Taking Liberties. His new film, currently showing at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, furrows its brow at our obsession with celebrities and looks at its pernicious effects.

“In making the film I read a lot of books about celebrity culture and they all start by saying ‘it cannot get any worse that it is now’,” he said. “And you look at when it was published, and it was 2003. It was apocalyptic then and it is getting worse. It is toxic, really toxic.”

What our love of watching Jordan torture herself shows is not a failure to move on from being a medieval mob gathering to watch freak shows, argues Atkins. Celebrity culture, he said, brings out our deluded inner Neanderthal.

“We’ve still got caveman instincts,” he said. “We have this mechanism that is still in our brains from millions of years ago that whenever we see a face a lot we assume they are a leader, and learn from them.

“I know Paris Hilton is not in my social group, but the irrational part of my brain thinks she is because we see her all the time. So when the leaders or famous people within our social group fall from grace we learn from it and get pleasure. It means we are closer to the top. So when Paris Hilton gets arrested, I take pleasure from that. Because of the way the media has tricked our brains that she is part of our social group, that ancient mechanism in our head still clicks and makes us feel smug.”

Starsuckers also argues that a society’s values being to warp the more it allows celebrity into areas such as the news. Atkins recalls with a sigh Gordon Smart from The Sun talking about breaking the Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce story “as though he broke Watergate”.

There were examples last week of celebrity culture taking on a gravitas usually reserved for seismic events.

When Oprah Winfrey announced she would cease her talk show in 2011, many headlines, including the BBC, asked if it was the “end of an era”, suggesting that epochs were now marked by chat shows, rather than the ebb and flow of political, social, and philosophical movements.

To show how desperate newspapers are to propagate celebrity culture, Atkins spread completely false stories about celebrities such as Avril Lavigne and Guy Ritchie to tabloid newspapers. The film shows that many made it into the papers completely unchecked. One, about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching fire on a faulty fuse, spread around the world after appearing in The Mirror.

“And celebrity journalists are the most successful and most powerful in the media business,” he said. “Celebrity journalism has taken over so many other parts of journalism.” He points to Dominic Mohan, former showbiz editor of The Sun, recently becoming its editor. “A showbiz desk is the worst possible place for a journalist; it is all about making money and making people laugh and nothing about the truth. And Mohan is now running The Sun, the most powerful paper in the UK. It can swing elections, or so we’re told. And that is the problem.”

So, to sum up then, a proliferation of Boyle CDs and Ant and Dec biographies tells us that society is like an unthinking caveman with skewed, downgraded values.

Raymond Tallis does not stop there. The noted polymath who can count the strings of writer, philosopher, and physician on his bow, spoke at Cheltenham Literature Festival on celebrity culture. He worried then, as he does now, that a fascination with Jedward shows us to be a shallow, “collectively empty” and ultimately distracted and neglectful society.

“If you are focusing your attention on these empty, second-order, and very unreal things you are not looking at the things that really matter,” he said. “It means we are not dealing with the problems of the world and missing the opportunities for enrichment that come from true art, a pre-occupation with the mystery of the world, and a fascination with science. People are distracted in all directions from the truly worthwhile.”

Like every non-celebrity author, Tallis casts a sad eye over the best-seller lists, regularly dominated by celebrity memoirs or what Tallis described as “the ultimate expression of shallowness: the ghost-written supposed memoir by someone who doesn’t have much to remember”.

It is not just the book world that has celebrity as its magnetic north. Celebrity has infected all cultural corners, like duckweed. “It is very worrying,” said Tallis. Four of the top 10 albums on Amazon are from singers born through the reality TV machine.

Ironic for the time of year, this Christmas glut of celebrity culture suggests we are in fact a godless society, according to William Crawley, a broadcaster and religious blogger for the BBC. After watching the intensity that followed Michael Jackson’s death in June, he blogged about how celebrity culture has replaced religion. It sparked hundreds of comments agreeing wholeheartedly.

Crawley compared how in medieval times cults would form around figures people wanted to become saints. Followers learned their stories off by heart, spread the word about them, and petitioned the church to canonise them. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” he said. Jackson and Princess Diana are now being treated like “secular saints”.

Without realising it, our obsession with celebrity is sneaking in some serious philosophical grappling. Take Jade Goody, for example. Behind the seemingly idle workplace gossip about her rise to fame on Big Brother, fall from grace in the race row with Shilpa Shetty, and eventual death from cancer, Crawley sees the unlikely figure of Aristotle.

“Celebrity culture creates a common ground where you can discuss what constitutes a good life,” he said. “That’s what Aristotle asked. They are engaging with that question, if not consciously. After Jade Goody died, the public were prepared to be quite complicated in their response to that story.”

Crawley isn’t the only one to find redemptive glimmers in celebrity culture. PR guru Max Clifford believes celebrity is ultimately a great release.

He said: “At the moment out there it is doom and gloom: recession, young lads dying in Afghanistan. And then John and Edward. Over the last few weeks we have had something to argue about that borders on the ridiculous. Don’t we need something to laugh at? Celebrity in some way can help with that.”

Ultimately, everyone seems agreed there is little one can do to stem the tide. Tallis asks himself if there any space outside celebrity culture where one can debate it without being contaminated by it? He sighs and realises there isn’t. “Maybe we should just go into the desert and lament,” he concludes.

Despite the venom of his film, Atkins’ advice is simply to “not get too angry”. Celebrity culture feeds on society’s rage, apparently. “When you slag off Paris Hilton you just make her celebrity bigger,” he said. “It is like monsters from Dr Who: the more you send rockets at it the bigger it gets. The best thing is not to talk about them.”