Jade Goody embraces Jack Tweed in the weeks before her death earlier this year

Celebrity took a nosedive in the first decade of this century. No longer was a celebrity required to have something to celebrate. Now being a celebrity was an end in itself. On 4 April, 2009, Sky News provided its viewers with a live broadcast of the funeral of Jade Goody. The dead woman was 28 years of age, and had died tragically from cancer, which, if spotted earlier, could have been treatable. She left behind two small children. For her family and close friends her death was a terrible loss.


The live broadcast of a funeral is usually reserved for individuals who have made a major contribution to society in some form or another. For instance, the funeral service for singer Michael Jackson in July last year and that of George Best a few years ago were accorded similar treatment.


Goody had made no such contribution. Her only claim to fame was that she was a celebrity, an entity that entered a new realm in the first decade of this century. Jade Goody's claim to fame and celebrity came via the reality TV programme Big Brother, which debuted in 2000.


There was no requirement for contestants on the programme to exhibit any outstanding skill. The vetting process did not include questions about any major contribution to humanity, society or business undertaken or attempted by applicants. They were selected on the basis of whether their interaction with other contestants would make good TV, in the same way that some monkeys are regarded as better specimens for experiment than others.


Since the advent of television, celebrity has always been tied up with the medium, but prior to recent years the status of celebrity required something to celebrate, like talent. Quite often the talent was dubious, but it was at least the basis for some form of celebrity.


Film stars were celebrities. Television presenters were celebrities. Even models, whose talent was confined to seducing a camera, were celebrities. The only people required to possess no talent whatsoever yet be accorded celebrity status were the British royal family. The dysfunction that permeated the family served as a substitute for any talent.


Through the middle and into the later decades of the last century, celebrities had a certain allure. Their lives were raised onto a pedestal. The air up there was rarefied. Their public appearances were carefully choreographed for a compliant media. They were not like you and me.


Then the media expanded, and with it the appetite for celebrity gossip and news increased. At the same time, popular culture began its descent to its current station and the appetite became insatiable. What was a celebrity to do but grab a good PR flunkie and wrap themselves in cotton wool. Celebrities became less accessible. The tabloid press grew frustrated in the hunt for celebrity fodder.


Then, in the last years of the last century, along came reality TV to save the day. Big Brother was the daddy of reality TV in these islands. Throw the monkeys in a cage, feed them a strict ration of nuts and aggrevation, and see who comes out on top. A new celebrity factory got underway.


The experiment was a huge success. A number of those who emerged achieved instant fame, including Irish woman Anna Nolan, who went on to apply her talent to afternoon TV in her native land. For the likes of Nolan, the Big Brother experience proved to be a launching pad for her TV talent. Three years later, Goody was launched on the world and she emerged as a celebrity.


Ironically, Goody's celebrity did achieve something in the end, although it had nothing to do with talent. The diagnosis of her cervical cancer and the news that earlier screening would have benefited her prompted a surge in women in the UK attending for early screening.


The nadir in this new form of celebrity was reached in the last days of her life. Every aspect of her slow deterioration was followed in minute detail on TV through her final weeks. In this it replicated the media spotlight thrown on the last days of Pope John Paul II as life ebbed slowly - from him. Both were celebrities, but only one of them had contributed something meriting widespread celebration.


The explosion of reality TV through the decade had other implications for celebrity. One of the more ludicrious manifestations of the phenomenon was I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. This series involved corralling a bunch of half-assed celebrities in a jungle and putting them under a Big Brother-type microscope, with various bells, whistles, worms and crocodiles thrown in.


The contestants in this carry-on tended hoped their appearance would raise them back to the status of fully-fledged celebrity. The most famous half-assed celebrity to emerge from the jungle was the model Jordan, otherwise known as Katie Price.


In 2004, she met her future husband Peter Andre in the jungle. Andre was a half-assed singer who became a fully-fledged celebrity when he married Jordan.


She in turn brought celebrity in the 21st century in a new direction by penning a celebrity novel. Her attempt at fiction reached number one in the bestseller list, which made her a celebrity writer. In this, Jordan once more turned the old notion of celebrity on its head.


Not alone did talent not beget celebrity, but the celebrity actually spawned a previously untapped talent, this one for writing. Norman Mailer, a celebrity writer in his day, must be turning in his grave, although old Norm's reputation with the ladies suggests he may have made an exception for a woman of Jordan's perceived attributes.


Back home in dear old Ireland, it was also a heady decade for celebrities. We had reality TV too, although, to be fair, the Irish version usually demanded that something other than bitching and fighting be achieved on air. Thus we had Celebrity Bainisteoir and Fáilte Towers and other forgettable lurches into the genre.


As for the actual celebrities themselves, they spawned and multiplied like never before.


The decade began with a celebrity chef, Conrad Gallagher, getting arrested for alleged theft of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Dublin. The December 2000 arrest was followed by a trial that ended in acquittal. It was one up for the celebs.


By then, with the Celtic Tiger in full belch, we couldn't get enough of celebrities. To cater for the growing appetite, publisher Mike Hogan launching WHO magazine. Hogan's previous venture had been In Dublin which between its pages at one stage used to advertise brothels. Now Hogan was moving from the oldest profession to the newest. Unfortunately, even Ireland couldn't deal with another celebrity rag and WHO folded within two years.


Reality TV show Popstars produced its first winner in 2003, sending an outfit named Six out to conquer the world. In keeping with the new wallpaper currency of celebrity, they bombed within months. 2003 also saw two celebrity marriages on the island. Westlife refugee Brian McFadden married Kerry Katona in Slane Castle, while Paul McCartney and Heather Mills opted for Castle Leslie in Monaghan. Both unions went down in flames. The appropriate marriage vows should have been, "to cherish and celebrate, until on the front page do we part in red hot recrimination".


Another celebrity marriage that year involved Westlife's Nicky Byrne and Cecilia Ahern, daughter of Ireland's first celebrity taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.


Reality TV, Irish-style, was introduced to our screens with the advent of Celebrity Farm in 2003. This was a poor man's hybrid of Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity, in that the contestants had to live together and perform tasks involving both nature and animals. To be fair to them, charity was the winner, but thankfully the show was never repeated.


Celebrity Farm begat Celebrities Go Wild, which begat Fáilte Towers, each worse than the previous one, all draining the tiny pool of celebrities and resorting to conferring celebrity on some whom nobody even knew. The only exception to the rule was Celebrity Bainisteoir which at least involved some real people doing real things.


As the decade wore on, celebs began living dangerously. Brian and Kerry split up, Colin Farrell – an odd Irish celebrity due to his talent – checked himself into rehab. The tabloids waited with bated breath for Farrell to declare that it was the celebrity existence that did for him, but the actor has more class than that. He just liked to party.


In 2006, celebrity bad-hair exponent Peter Stringfellow came to Dublin to open a club for like-minded celebs. Somebody forgot to tell him that not everybody was wowed by his wattage. Protests over the state of undress on show inside the club ensured that celebs stayed away and the place shut its doors after six months.


That was the same year that the Tiger took on the Dubliner magazine in a celeb death match. The magazine had published some dodgy pics purporting to be of Tiger Woods's wife Elin during the Ryder Cup, which was being hosted in the K Club. Tiger, being a wholesome kind of chivalrous guy, took offence and sued. Oh if we only knew then what we know now.


In the midst of the fluff and the fawning and the grasping for the oxygen of self publicity, there lurked tragedy in celebrity Irish style.


Through 2007 a previously little-known model, Katy French, rose without trace to become a celebrity par excellence. Her rise began with a public spat with her ex-boyfriend, restauranteur Marcus Sweeney, over whether or not she should have posed in her knickers on a dining-room table for a high-profile shoot. That was in January. By the tail end of November, she was celebrating her 24th birthday in celebrity style. Rumours were afoot that the likes of Bono might show up, but it turned out to be a damp squib. Within a week she was dead after ingesting cocaine and lapsing into a coma.


On the night she died, her demise was the first item on the Nine O'Clock News. The taoiseach sent his aide de camp to the funeral. She had epitomised the cult of celebrity in the decade, having risen without doing anything discernible that merited celebrity.


A new order is now blowing through the world of celebrity. Big Brother's next series is being hailed as the last. The public appetite for the democratisation of celebrity is fast disappearing. Harsher times call for more realism. But there is little doubt that the first decade of this century was certainly weighed down with the concept of celebrity.