Close-Up of ‘Fame’ and the Famous : Television: The BBC documentary--in an array of seductive newsreel, movie and TV clips--oversimplifies the history of celebrity-hood.

She smiles, she claps, she flips letters. Last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing alphabet maiden Vanna White to seek damages for a futuristic ad featuring a robotic “Wheel of Fortune”-like game show hostess is judicial goofiness in the extreme.

It appears to grant a new entitlement to famous persons. Their names and faces have traditionally been theirs alone to commercially exploit, but the White ruling appears to have extended that proprietorship to include even the images of celebrities when they are merely being parodied. Imagine the potential sideshow spinoffs: Will comics who profit from twitting White in their monologues now have to pay up too? Had Dana Carvey better cut it out or risk being sued by George Bush?

The White decision underlines the unexplained infinity of fame at its apex. Why did bobby-soxers swoon over a young, scrawny Frank Sinatra and their children much later go limp over the Beatles? Why do hundreds of groupies troop to the Oscars and Emmys for quick ogles of their dream celebrities? What is the attraction, and what do they do with the autographs they collect? Hold them next to their hearts? Tape them to their underwear? What is this strange attachment to the famous, the need to see them, read and hear everything about them, perfume ourselves with them and somehow bask in their glow?

Typified by the movies-to-White House career of Ronald Reagan, why is celebrity as transferable as a transient riding the rails? Why does fame sometimes flourish posthumously? Why has Graceland become a Memphis Vatican for celebrity-hood, as if Elvis had been God’s regent on Earth instead of a rock ‘n’ roll singer?

And why the lingering cult of Vanna? Lots and lots of whys.

But Australian-born auteur Clive James is not in a questioning mode for “Fame in the 20th Century,” a BBC documentary series airing from 9-11 tonight through Thursday on KCET Channel 28 and from 8-10 p.m. on KPBS Channel 15 and KVCR Channel 24.

Written and narrated by James (a fine critic, prodigious writer and popular TV celeb himself in Britain), credit “Fame in the 20th Century” with being that rare program able to keep a straight face while uniting Mick Jagger and Moammar Kadafi on a single stage. With James’ wickedly witty narration intersecting a vast array of seductive newsreel, movie and TV clips, “Fame in the 20th Century” is also grand fun, the way “That’s Entertainment!” and its sequel made MGM’s archives grand fun.

Like a hologram, though, “Fame in the 20th Century” is flimsier than what meets the eye. It is thin and facile, a spinning Rolodex of the century’s names above the title ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to the self-constructed Madonna, using eight hours of celebrity profiles to tell you that being famous makes you famous.

Approaching his subject chronologically, James tonight sees the United States as giving fame its mother’s milk in this century and credits that epic hunter Teddy Roosevelt with pioneering the photo op. We witness too the bricks and mortar of propaganda that glummed together Mussolini, watch the juxtaposition of almighty Hitler with Hollywood’s almighty Tarzan, while hearing James announce, “This is where the dreams of omnipotence belonged--in dreamland.”

But it’s no news that World War II was fought. It’s no news that Mussolini, Hitler and Churchill were famous, that Stalin, even more than Maxim Gorky, “was the most famous man in the Soviet Union.” It’s no news that getting elected President increased Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition, that visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War “made Jane Fonda more famous than ever,” that fame got John Lennon killed, that Woody Allen made a movie about the dark side of fame (“Stardust Memories”) more than a decade before the dark side eclipsed him in real life.

James has a tendency to oversimplify, finding it ironic about the demise of Hitler, for example, that “a man who had never grown up shared a fate with millions of children who had never grown up either.” And he is sometimes guilty of the blunt overstatement. About Michael Jackson’s remaking into a semi-Caucasian: “He made it look as if all the famous black people from Jack Johnson to Bill Cosby had boxed, sung, composed, danced, written, run, jumped, marched, fought and died in vain.”

Yet James is also slyly wise, noting in regard to public cynicism that “the sneaky suspicion that Mother Teresa might really be after a recording contract started with Nixon.” And even when stating the obvious, he is often so amusing that you forgive him. But not the failings of this documentary.

“We all need to know the name of at least one person who can sing the way we can’t,” James says. “And that might as well be Pavarotti.” Meanwhile, “Fame in the 20th Century” croons like Crosby.