THE Naughties will be remembered as a time of excess.      By Andrew Banks

It was when things got a little out of hand, when everything went macro – scrutinized in minute detail and dragged across the pages of magazines, TV screens and computer monitors. We downloaded and barely had time to process the information before our minds were hungry for the next juicy morsel.

Our “lean cuisine” intake of celebrity and world events dumbed down our language; morphed it and gave us short attention spans. The latest news report became a mad lib – insert new celebrity name here, add bizarre outburst there. Suddenly everybody could be famous.

So how did the real celebrities fight back? The movie stars, the television heroes, the musicians? What did they do in the Naughties which had never been done before? The brief was tough, but here are some events and behaviours which made living in the Naughties a memorable decade.

It was OK to lose the plot. In fact, everybody did it
It’s hard to name a celebrity who didn’t fire off at a paparazzo or throw an inanimate object during a particularly bad hotel stay in the past 10 years. Some did it Houdini-style (Britney Spears); others never made it back (Phil Spector). Most just got a public caning for a while (Mel Gibson, Amy Winehouse, Russell Crowe).

One thing was for sure, the baying public was there every step of the way thanks to a hungry media scrum.

We had drug addictions, curse afflictions, tantrums, career doldrums and on-set outbursts. Nobody was safe from the probing lenses. See our celebrity meltdowns video.

We saw more than we needed to, thanks very much

Those who thought Pamela Anderson’s sex tape in 1998 was a one-off were sorely mistaken in the Naughties. 1 Night in Paris, in 2004, helped launch socialite and heiress Paris Hilton into the celebrity spotlight (despite her protestations) and from there it was, as they say, on for young and old. Socialite Kim Kardashian followed suit (with the unauthorized release of a sex tape) and soon she had locked in a reality TV deal. Other big names in sex tape scandals included Eric Dane, Verne Troyer and Colin Farrell. Sure there have been celebrity sex tapes throughout history, but the internet meant the distribution channels made them readily available. If the tape wasn’t available, there were plenty of leaked nude and racy photos to pore over online, from High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens to Disney princess Miley Cyrus.

Two became one, then morphed all over the place
Celebrity match-ups and bust-ups have been around forever. But what was special in the Naughties was that stars not only came together, their names were fused too. So Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in 2003 became Bennifer (first known use of a celebrity Portmanteau word – formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different , used in Lewis Carroll’s day), Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie became Brangelina and so on.

But the fun didn’t stop there. Jolie made it fashionable for celebrities to adopt children from all around the world when, in 2002, she welcomed her first child, seven-month-old Maddox Chivan into her home. Madonna followed suit, adopting her first Malawian child, David Banda, in 2006. Most recently Katherine Heigl adopted 10 month old special needs Korean daughter Nancy Leigh, nicknamed, Naleigh and Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick used a surrogate for the birth of their twins, Marion Loretta Elwell and Tabitha Hodge.

But wait, there’s more. Not only did celebrities find new ways to have babies, they managed to come up with some rather inventive names for them. Enter Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Suri Cruise and most recently, Sparrow Madden. See our celebrity broods and strange names gallery. One thing we hadn’t seen before the Naughties were celebrity same-sex unions. TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres announced in May last year she and her partner Portia de Rossi were engaged. They were married on August 16, 2008.

They had a lot of time on their hands, didn’t they?
The Hollywood Writer’s Strike, which started in 2007 and carried into 2008, left many in the entertainment industry worried about their futures. But not Arnold Schwarzenegger; he’d already dipped out and become the Governor of California.

Many began to see TV as a legitimate path, despite having lucrative film careers. Most notably and recently was Toni Collette’s shift to the small screen in United States of Tara where she picked up an Emmy for Best Actress. Similarly, Hugh Jackman decided to tread the boards with blond Bond Daniel Craig in Broadway’s A Steady Rain. Hollywood heavyweight Glenn Close took up a role in Damages, while Harvey Keitel switched to the US version of Life On Mars.

The rise of Twitter gave stars such as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore an outlet for their creative talents, while allowing fans to see into their lives even more closely. Musician John Mayer caught the Twitter bug too and it was the first decade where fans felt truly connected with the stars – although in his case perhaps it’s a little too well connected. Other celebrities looked to charities and causes, with PETA securing the services of many stars for its nude campaigns. Scientology and Kabbalah were also thrust into the spotlight thanks to the star power of Tom Cruise and Madonna.

So how does the decade rate against those which came before? They called Hugh Jackman the Naughties version of Clint Eastwood, Scarlett Johansson the decade’s Jayne Mansfield; everyone watched as history repeated itself, with the new generation looking for its own superstars and trends.

Tell us your thoughts on Celebrity in the Naughties below.

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