Pendleton on The Great Sport Relief Bake Off is a recipe that makes me sick Alas, it seems the tide may be turning on this one. This is an age in which celebrity bestows a certain godliness upon its wearer. Being famous has become a virtue in its own right, the sight of a familiar name generating a warm, fuzzy pulse of recognition that can sell anything from books to plastic surgery. It is a culture perhaps best epitomised by the grotesque Piers Morgan, a character who appears to have leapt fully formed from the pages of a Martin Amis novel: a walking, chuntering satire on ourselves, trespassing on our time, cackling back at the world that continues to indulge him. But at the hem of fame's rich pageant awaits a different existence: the fight for relevance. There lives a teeming, tweeting community of quasi-notables, each scrapping and scrabbling for their own slice of the pie. This is the stratum that dominates television these days: Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Juice. Celebrity Panorama, in which H from Steps spends a month working undercover at the Department for Work & Pensions. Be honest: part of you idly wonders whether this could actually happen. One of the side-effects of London 2012 was to create an entire cadre of bejewelled athletes whose only means of capitalising on their eight minutes of global stardom was to populate shows like these. This phenomenon reached its surreal apogee on a special edition of Bargain Hunt, in which a Lincoln antique dealer reluctantly sold his Victorian riding crop to Team GB taekwondo fighter Lutalo Muhammad for £65 and a feel of his bronze medal. This actually did happen. The Great British Bake Off, of course, is a much bigger deal, and so attracted a rather more accomplished sort of athlete for its series of Sport Relief specials last week. On Monday, Michael Vaughan demonstrated that retirement has not seasoned his fielding ability, dropping an entire tray of biscuits on the floor. On Tuesday, Greg Rutherford's gingerbread soldiers were deemed, ironically, to be "not gingery enough." But it was Victoria Pendleton who stole the show on Wednesday, making it through 51 minutes of the hour-long programme without crying. For someone who has cried her way through interviews, Strictly Come Dancing, Olympic Games, and somehow even an autobiography, this was a feat to rank with anything she achieved on the track. She threw herself with typical gusto into her coffee and vanilla layer cake, churning the sponge with all her might, leaving nothing out there in the kitchen. Her brilliant caramelised sugar bicycle was the highlight of the series, and yet on the final bend somebody called Emma Freud leapt from her slipstream and pipped her to the win. "I'm never going to bake again," she said, shooting Freud the sort of poisonous glance she used to reserve for Anna Meares. This is the world we have created, then: where a great Olympic champion is reduced to making cake on television because her agent thought it might be a good idea. For Pendleton there was no shame in defeat, or indeed in participation. The gravity-dense cult of celebrity is something we have all helped to cultivate. Shame on us. Shame on us all.