"Cannes Heat" or "Make Hay while The Sun shines"

"Do you know who I am? No, I didn't think so"

Where Oliver Francis gets starstruck, tries to fight back, and finds himself flat on his back in the gutter of his own ego.

You are standing at the end of a red carpet stretching up the steps to the towering façade of the Cinema Palais in Cannes. It's Festival week. Behind and to the sides of you are banks of people crowding over railings, their cameras in hand, expressions of expectation etched on their faces. Maybe they're expecting to catch a glimpse of Nicole Kidman who's here this week, defiantly Cruise-less; or maybe handsome Ewan McGregor and Uma Thurman. If it's directors you're interested in, how about Francis Ford Coppola, Baz Luhrman or Joel Coen? Lining the way ahead are rows of paparazzi and television camera men, and beyond them, standing sentry on the steps are gold-braided gendarmes. Dressed in black tie, with the glamorous couple you've come with, you step forward and make your way up towards the grand entrance. The flashes from the paparazzi sparkle away like fireflies desperate to pair off. Above you and to your right is a giant video wall beaming out the scene to the crowd of public that has gathered in the square by the Palais. Suddenly you see on it a close-up shot of yourself and the couple next to you... it holds as you move on up the steps... the three of you turn to look back down the steps - you pause for a moment and smile... the paparazzi bulbs flash again... you finally enter the cinema.

Two hours later you re-emerge, and proceed back down the red carpet and along the Cannes sea-front. Packs of paparazzi follow, shuffling backwards in front of you, pleading for photo-opportunities. The three of you stop obligingly. You group together and smile. You walk on. Ten yards later, more cameramen - this time a larger pack - group together across the pavement, snap away, and call for your attention. You smile, you stop for a moment. Then on again... more photographers, you march through. You can't stop for everyone. You feel like a star. Baby, you are a star! A paparazzo approaches you and hands you a business card. The spell is broken. You are a nobody. This is just the way they do it in Cannes. The camera-men are just there to make a few francs out of the pictures they sell to the people they've photographed: festival delegates who want to feel special. And all you have to do for the red carpet treatment is queue up for a few minutes that morning with a delegate pass for a ticket. It isn't even that the film is Hollywood. It definitely isn't. Is a Catalan art-house film, and it isn't very good. You are nobody special, you are not a star. Repeat that to yourself. Don't let it go to your head.

I had been at the 54th Cannes International Film Festival for just two days when all this happened to me, and I was only there trying to drum up some interest in a script I'd written. I was expecting to see a bit of glamour, and the previous evening I had been the other side of the barricades, craning up at the giant monitor, searching for those famous face amongst the streams of glammed-up quasi-celebs. But it goes without saying I'm not famous either. (Just in case any of you were stroking your chins at my name and thinking, 'Oh, Francis, what was it that he's well known for.') But than when some bloke called Stuart is famous just for getting chucked out of a house inhabited by a bunch of other people who we'll forget in a year, I could have just momentarily slipped your mind. No, scrub that last comment. The really sad thing is that I can actually remember the names of last year's Big Brother contestants.

But this is a literary website, isn't it? What have Big Brother and Cannes got to do with books (other than the fact that some lowest common denominator TV show has undermined the identity of one of twentieth century literature's most potent totalitarians)? What it has to do with books is that they're not safe - it's coming for them. In fact, it's already there, slowly infiltrating like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If everyone is going to be famous for fifteen minutes, and you're a writer, YOU'RE NEXT.

Sound great doesn't it. Well, no, not really. But before I get any further, I should define my terms. I'm not talking about well-known authors, well-known for being authors, well known for writing. They have existed since somebody, reluctant to credit a bunch of wandering poets (I suspect for contractual reasons), made up someone called Homer. And some have even been celebs in their own right - Shelley, Dickens, and Wilde to name but a few. But of course one of Wilde's great regrets was that he used his genius