Last night a friend of Cream attended the FT ArcelorMittal Boldness in Business Awards in the smart Sloane Square area of London. For the uninitiated, these awards aim to ‘recognise and reward the calculated risk-takers who stand out for their vision and leadership’. This is all very admirable, and a panel of the finest financial and business minds have no doubt debated long and hard to decide the winners of the six different categories.

Some of the winners were not immediately obvious (Groupon as best newcomer, with Zynga on the shortlist? They've been around for years!), and Facebook is only now apparently recognised as an entrepreneurial company.

All of this might sound like me being churlish, but the real peculiarity of the evening was Apple winning the ‘Drivers of Change’ award. The technology firm emerged from a peculiar shortlist that included Amazon (really? They changed the way we shop a decade ago), Facebook (possibly, but you could argue that it was hardly the first social network)  and Volkswagen (perhaps they just wanted some proper drivers in the shortlist).

So Apple is named the FT’s Driver of Change for 2011 – and who is present to accept the award? Steve Jobs? Nope, off sick. Tim Cook? Obviously busy with the iPad2. Instead, Stephen Fry appears to accept the award on Apple’s behalf.

This in itself wouldn’t be strange, until you look at Fry’s long association with the brand.

It’s a cheap journalistic trick to talk about the number of Google search results you can achieve to prove a point, but I’m a cheap journalist so I’ve got no problem with that. Google ‘Stephen Fry Apple’ and you get 863,000 results, the top three of which are all articles about Apple products from Stephenfry.com.  The remaining first page results are articles or videos by Fry appearing on other sites that extol the virtues of Apple, its products, its operating systems and anything else bearing the fruity label.

Now Mr Fry is a well known user of Twitter. He has an army of devoted followers who hang on his every tweet, and the very idea of Twitter is that people are able to share their thoughts, their fears and their favourite things. But the amount by which Fry feels compelled to proselytize Apple and its various creations is unusual amongst celebrity endorsements, even when they're being paid! You would never see David Beckham enthusiastically promoting Gillette beyond his normal contractual obligations, or Dannii Minogue banging on about Marks and Spencer’s underwear at every opportunity.

Conspiracy theorists might well think that Stephen Fry is on the Apple payroll, and if he is, good luck to him. If he isn’t? I only hope he gets a decent Christmas present from Steve Jobs as a thank you for all the effort he goes to.

A well known celebrity promoting your products for free? That must be the earned media paradigm.