The Rise of the Celebrity Class

6.25pm, BBC2

Apparently, just being rich isn't enough for some folk. Personally, if I were weighed down with enough £5 notes to paper the great Wall of China, I'm 100 per cent certain that my life would be a blissful, serene paradise. Not so your current generation of celebs, though.

No, they are all desperate to do something socially meaningful, to give society a helping hand, to - as almost all of them mutter - "put something back".

All the fast cars and beautiful women in the world don't make Jay Kay of Jamiroquai happy unless he does at least one gig a year where all the cash goes to charity. Blur's Alex James (with Jay Kay, right) felt such a strong need to contribute that he got behind the fund-raising campaign for the Beagle space probe. Oasis just loved trying to help out Tony Blair by popping along to his champagne soirées at Number 10.

It has been a patchy series of documentaries so far - too many glossy talking heads and nowhere near enough genuine insight - but The Rise of the Celebrity Class hits pay-dirt with this look at the way the famous interact with charities.

You see, celebs talk a good game about passionate support for heartfelt causes, but the question the show keeps coming back to is this: does all this high-profile charity work have altruistic motives or is it simply for their benefit?

Lord Puttnam might not think it matters (he persuasively argues that so long as a well gets built in a famine-hit area, who cares if a pop star sells a few more records on the back of the good publicity?), but the idea that charity is just another part of the PR machine does leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

It helps explain why the mental-health charity Mind struggles for celeb support, though. Fax after fax is sent out to agents, only to get a gloomily tiny response. Out of the 40-odd celebs Mind contacts, only two (Graham Norton and former swimmer Sharron Davies) agree to help them out.

"People don't want to be associated with a mental-health charity," a Mind staffer grumbles, "They're afraid the public will think they have mental-health problems themselves."