I have travelled halfway around the world to see Kylie's bum. It seems a worthwhile enterprise, coming all this way, across nine time zones in an economy seat, all for a squiz at her derriere. This is the spectacle of travel.

It's a school reunion of sorts. Kylie and I went to high school together in the early '80s in suburban Melbourne. She was a year ahead. It was a time of feathered hair and Miami Vice pastels. Cyndi Lauper sang Girls Just Want To Have Fun and Kylie, in her mechanic's overalls, was soon to be Ramsay Street's girl-next-door.

Then she married Scott and my teenage heart was broken.

Now she's a pop princess with a fortune pinned at $84 million. She has an Order of the British Empire, her own line of knickers, a perfume label and soon she'll play sold-out shows in Sydney and Melbourne on her KylieX2008 world tour.

And all these years later I stand at a queue's end in a cold wind on Marylebone Road, behind a Scotswoman "down from Glasgow to see what all the fuss is about", with a Malaysian couple in front and two Italians. We're outside Madame Tussauds, waiting to see Posh and Becks, Brad Pitt, Princess Diana and the curves of Kylie's bum.

It's a tourist ritual that seems as old as London itself, like eating jellied eels, tea at the Ritz, pints of warm bitter, or the changing of the guard. It dates back at least to the early 1700s, when Mrs Salmon's Fleet Street toyshop sold Punch dolls and had an upstairs collection of 140 wax figures and a shop sign that read "The Wax Work".

And still crowds gather. Madame Tussauds, the most famous of all waxworks, is the city's second most popular fee-charging attraction, with 2.39 million visitors annually. Only London Eye sees more through its turnstiles (3.3 million), with the Tower of London (2.3 million), Westminster Abbey (1.23 million) and St Paul's Cathedral (940,000) rounding out the top five. The cult of celebrity remains big business. I'm paying £25 ($58) to see the latest incarnation of our Kylie, who - with the Queen - is the only person at Madame Tussauds to be created four times.

I'm curious about the attraction of the museum, opened here in central London in 1884, and how a centuries-old art has become an international franchise in an online age of gratification. It prospers still as popular entertainment, albeit as old-fashioned as Elizabeth I, who after her death was carried as a wax effigy in a funeral procession, then put on show at Westminster Abbey.

Lift doors open and paparazzi cameras flash and snap. Spotlights swirl. Kylie's Better The Devil You Know plays loud on high rotation. I step into a glittering world of show-biz fame, of Beyonce and Madonna, J-Lo and Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Amy Winehouse, of Britney before her meltdown - a who's who of the glossy pages of celebrity trash mags.

It feels bizarre and unnerving, walking among life-like replicas of the fabulously famous, standing beside Jamie Oliver with his apron, grinning like a cocksure London lad. It's all smoke and mirrors, of course, theatrical bluff and trickery, but stand still long enough and you're part of the show, part of the crowd.

Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography suggests such sideshow alleys of deception have always been part of the city's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde personality, where character and identity can be suddenly and dramatically obscured in "swirling wreaths of fog".

A staff member takes £6.99 portraits of visitors pushing Andy's wheelchair from the television series Little Britain. I ask instead of the whereabouts of David and Victoria Beckham. "They've been temporarily removed," he says. "Posh Spice is having a new haircut."

Our Kylie holds centre stage above an up-lit dance floor, perched on a glittering crescent moon and under spinning mirror balls. She wears a red-sequinned cocktail dress and gold tiara, and beams a brilliant smile. If she recognises me from school days, then she's certainly not saying so.

In other galleries I meet John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Whoopi Goldberg, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and a young and slim Elvis. I put my hand on the shoulder of Sylvester Stallone. Marilyn stands nearby on a subway vent, her dress billowing up in a re-creation of the famous scene from The Seven Year Itch.

"Each figure takes a team of 20 sculptors about four months to make," a Tussauds spokeswoman says. "Most come to see stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman but famous names from the world of politics and history are equally popular."

In the hall of world leaders the main attraction seems to be Saddam Hussein. He's more popular among sightseers than Bill Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, Churchill or even Hitler. The Beatles even run second fiddle to Iraq's late despot.

John Howard is largely ignored nearby. He is small with bushy eyebrows and a combed-over bald patch, portrayed from a 1997 sitting. His left hand is in his pocket and he looks relaxed and comfortable, despite standing alongside Vladimir Putin and Jiang Zemin, the former president of China, with Fidel Castro to his left.

Official word is that Kevin Rudd has no plans to be made in wax. Well, not until he next visits London.

Madame Tussauds, Marylebone Road, London, is a short walk from Baker Street tube station. It's open daily but not Christmas Day. KylieX2008 is staged at Sydney's Acer Arena on December 14, 16 and 17 and at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena on December 19, 20 and 22.

-Dugald Jellie