I scratched my temple in frustration and tried to get my head round the argument. Raising my coffee cup with my free hand I ran over the past conversation in my head and my hastily taken notes but there was just nothing for it: "I'm sorry, I'm lost," I said. "You'll just have to explain it to me again".

My companion shrugged, somewhat exhausted by my ignorance and took a second to recollect his points as he sipped on a cooling cappuccino. It was an idea that required some strength of lung to put across, especially in a crowded place such as where we sat. But strength of lung was something my tweed clad companion seemed to have in spades and following a brief pause to point to his empty cup (which I felt obliged to pay for refilling) he agreed to reiterate the hypothesis which had strained both my thoughts and my fingers to the point of submission. "OK", he began, "It goes like this…"

"In order to understand what I am saying you have to accept the following baseline statistics, and when I say baseline I mean basic, this is kids stuff based on the simplest of investigations I carried out using little more than a Geography text book but the reasoning holds sound. There are variances sure but this is what I had to work with." I nodded gently, scrutinising his every word I readied myself and my pen for marking the main points of his idea on the back of my napkin. Taking a deep breath he began anew:

"The average person, negating factors for gender, war, political strife, disease and such now lives for, on average, 77 years. This is a global average and hence is not the most reliable for the Western World as we know it but I think in this case it will do. This breaks down as 1,686,300 minutes, or in Andy Warhol's terminology 112,420 blocks of 15 minutes in which one can become famous. In other words there are 112,420 opportunities in our lifetime, according to Warhol, in which we may be known by a large number of people who would ordinarily never have met us and out of all these chances only one of them will come to pass. This is his utopia, which I accept is not the real world as we know it but we have a simple probability formula that we can apply here to show why it will never come to pass. Any Maths textbook tells us that the chance of an event actually coming to pass is equal to the number of possible favourable outcomes divided by the total number of possible outcomes. In this case we take the number of possible outcomes which is 1 because there is only one goal we are interested in - being famous for 15 minutes and we divide that by the number of possible times we have for this condition to occur which in this case is 112,420. This gives us a statistical result of .000000895. This means that in the real world of us mortals we have a less than one in a million chance of seeing our name in lights, heck by those odds it's a miracle you get read in the obituaries. But here comes the scary part which shows why Warhol was really wrong:

Being the consummate sy-co-phant (he pronounced it that way sy-co-phant) Warhol never envisioned a world without celebrities, he loved them and devoted masses of his time to studying them so how does his theory apply to them? Well it doesn't, at all. Do you think every person with a histrionic personality disorder is going to step down from the public eye when their time is up? Not bloody likely I think, so here's the rub: In a world where talent becomes irrelevant to fame (and it is going that way what with all these IT Girls and Real TV Shows) what we should get is an equal distribution of time for all right? No what we get is vampirism.

Taking the given that anyone, for any reason can be famous for fifteen minutes at any stage in their lives take a look at the odds, still one in a million right and you would expect them to vary with this new socialist dispersal of positive regard wouldn't you but no. It's still the "one in a million" myth the famous caste would like to perpetuate (fuelled by something of a fictional "Talent Quotient" which keeps people famous by making others believe you deserve your standing on the basis of a certain indefinable something) and it is with good cause this myth is perpetuated. Here's the vampirism thing. Think about this the next time you watch a movie, listen to a CD or read a book. Whose fame are you perpetuating by paying attention to their work? And at what cost is it to your own?

Taking the average listening time for an album as being 45 minutes (barring repeating tracks) this is three potential blocks out of your life when you yourself could have been preparing for your time in the limelight. Whenever you watch a film (and most are about 2 hours long) that's 8 potential blocks out of your life you could have been doing something towards your time. And it goes on like this. Here's another scary fact. Some of these people have been famous for long periods of time based on their career. Most long-term celebrities can claim to having been in the public eye for about twenty years apiece (I'm taking this as a line in the sand weeding out fads and fashions - the mark of the "pro" if you will); that works out at the combined probabilities of 700,799 people could have been famous but were not. Nearly three quarters of a million people never knew they had something to offer this world or spent their days watching TV or reading Hello Magazine. People who will never be remembered in history so we can have glossy magazines and bland 3 minute pop singles played ad nauseum on commercial radio, do you see what I'm getting at here?

Celebrities in their greed are sucking the life from each one of us. They sap our energies with their mediocrity and prevent us being the truly wonderful things we are by perpetuating their own blandness in whatever medium will have them. When next you hear of an anorexic girl physically dying to look like a model don't pity her, she's just another victim of emotional rape by market forces trying to flog clothes by using wasted anaemic husks bereft of depth or anything other than a pathological need for acceptance. The only way to break the cycle of indoctrination is in the repression or (if it comes to it) the genocide of the idol class so we can let people get on with being themselves.

People are only dumb to this conditioning because they are forever in awe of celebrities, they feel inferior to the famous so they fail to see the fake from the genuine and end up using the famous as benchmarks for their own behaviours. This is the essence of it all, what the statistics show us is that we are essentially just sheep to the media and the commerce behind it. Three quarters of a million people ignored for the sake of one Madonna or a Joan Collins or a Cher, how many celebrities are there in the world now? And each one taking from us what, in a utopia, should be ours."

I recoiled slightly at the vehemence of his last words but I felt something before unseen sink into my understanding of what my guest was saying. Still there was the matter of the statistical analysis and it's reliability that I felt I had to take issue with but as soon as I went to open my mouth to question my guest when a voice came from over my shoulder interrupting me and breaking a silence in the place that I had not noticed until now.

"I get it", said the voice "don't any of you?"

I looked over my shoulder at the staring eyes of those assembled in the café all around our table and even some out on the street. How long they had been listening in to us I had no idea but by the looks of those assembled it seemed they had been there quite a while. Most were nodding in ascent with my guest and but some seemed confused as to the content of what he was saying. People began to filter in from outside the café murmuring amongst themselves and all wanting hear again the ideas of my companion.

"Say it again", a voice came from the back of the room, "Only louder this time so we all can hear".

With a broad, slightly impish smile my guest pointed to his mug and my own for refilling before standing up on his chair and beginning his argument anew to a rapt audience.

"You see", he began loudly, "Andy Warhol's idea that everyone in the world would be famous for fifteen minutes is pure rubbish…"