IT WAS the early eighties and I was at journalism college in Newcastle, the city where The Tube was filmed. Through friends of friends, some of us managed to wangle press passes to go along

to the studio, watch the

programme being recorded, and get to meet the presenters and performers backstage.

So far, so eighties. But the weirdest thing about the experience was that being in the same room as the likes of U2 did not have as much impact on me as being in the same room as the hugely pregnant,

baby-doll-frocked, devastatingly sarcastic peroxide blonde holding court in front of a large mirror.

There were so many contradictions in that one small woman that I found it difficult to take my eyes off her. Paula Yates was more rock star than any rock star could possibly be and yet she had achieved fame only through the much-ridiculed route of hooking up with a rock star before making a name for herself in her own right.

Muriel Gray probably put it best when she wrote in a moving appreciation of her fellow presenter this week: ''At a time when television's version of womanhood was either brainy and plain, or pretty and dumb, she broke the mould, by being precisely what she wanted

to be.''

And the thing about Paula Yates was, whatever you thought of her, you couldn't take your eyes off her. She was one of those people who demand to be looked at, the cute little girl in a spangly, flouncy party frock twirling away in front of the admiring adults, saying: ''Look at me, look at me.''

The little girl grows up, has her breasts enlarged, and twirls away in front of the cameras in low-cut flouncy frocks. Suddenly she's not so much cute as embarrassing as she strives to be noticed and appreciated by ever more desperate means.

We obliged by devouring all the pictures and all the shocking revelations of Paula Yates's sad

life, but many of us who had sneered at her antics over the years

felt slightly ashamed when we heard of her death. Ashamed for looking and ashamed for revelling in someone's pain.

It's an uncomfortable feeling because most of us will know someone who spends all their time trying to be the centre of attention. They are generally the one person in your circle of friends who everyone puts up with because they are good entertainment value, but this is inevitably coupled with the downside of having to help them through every crisis that crops up with alarming frequency in their rollercoaster lives.

They never miss a chance to make a drama out of a crisis and for a while this is quite exciting for anyone caught up in the drama, but then the novelty begins to wear off and it's just a pain in the backside when they are phoning in the early hours of the morning recounting the latest episode of the saga in unstoppable detail.

Soon you get to the stage of avoiding the calls and then you start avoiding the person. It's a bit of a wrench because you keep remembering back to when the good bits of their over-the-top personality used to outweigh the bad bits, but the rest of your friends have also started the old avoidance tactics, so you feel it makes for an easier life in the long run.

And this is when the guilt sets in. You know that they are slightly wearing to be with because they live life on the edge, and because they live on the edge there is a constant threat that they will fall over it. How will you feel then, knowing you have dropped them?

There is an element of that with Paula Yates - at tabloid's length removed, of course. For a while, we thought she provided good entertainment value and then gradually she became an embarrassment. Now the worst possible scenario has come true and there is a slightly guilty tinge to our shock over her death.

And even though most of us will think of her death as a tragic end to a life blighted by a series of tragedies, we cannot help but think the legacy for her daughters is even more tragic - and then feel guilty for thinking it.

The only comfort is the ''I told you so'' factor which always follows the death of a celebrity who has led a troubled existence through the pages of newspapers and magazines.

''The signs were all there,'' we mutter knowingly, safe in the knowledge that there was nothing we could have done about their premature deaths.

Although at the time of writing, the exact cause of death has not been established, all the self-destructive acts which followed the death of Paula Yates's lover, Michael Hutchence, are duly listed in reports of her death - in a spooky reminder of all the warning signals that were trotted out belatedly after Hutchence's death.

For a while there, back in the early eighties, she looked like a woman who could have anything she wanted. I hope there was some stage when she thought so, too.