Saturday 2 January 2010

Twenty Ten ? Or Two Thousand And Ten ? You Decide ...

Firstly, I hope all readers and contributors to this blog enjoyed a peaceful and profitable Christmas and New Year period. I guess I had a decent one really, and am now looking forward to the year ahead, and will be glad to be restoring a schedule and routine again in the coming weeks. Man cannot live by turkey alone !

Also, it has to be said that Dom and Scott have more or less single handedly been keeping this blog going for at least the last six months, with little else from the remaining contributors. On my behalf, I apologise for my lack of commitment. Buying a PS3 and getting addicted to FIFA 10 from mid October certainly hasn’t helped the cause. However, you can’t live in the world of console gaming forever, so I thought I’d put a piece together, just out of interest really looking back at the noughties in the world of sport and entertainment, with one or two other bits thrown in for good measure. (O.K., it’s not going to earn you any money, but at least you won’t lose any like anyone following most of my tips will last year !)

“Let’s all meet up in the Year 2000. Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown ?” Sang Jarvis Cocker on Pulp’s hit single in 1995. I was 15 then, it seemed an eternity away to 2000, now we're ten years the other side of it. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that at the coming of the new Millennium I was at the end of my teenage years. What excitement lay ahead ? Well, we had the musical delights of the “Baha Men”, televisual treats such as “Big Brother” and sporting moments such as Paula Radcliffe relieving herself in a gutter. But for every “Afroman” there was an “Arctic Monkeys”, each “Naked Jungle with Keith Chegwin” there was a “Shameless”, for every “Winston Bogarde” there was a “Christiano Ronaldo”. I hope to prove that the “noughties” were not quite as bad as everyone I have spoken to recently is making out, but that’s not to say the likes of “Daphne and Celeste” will be escaping lightly !

The “noughties” put “Chavs” and “WAGS” centre stage. We heard of “Carbon Footprints” and a “Credit Crunch”. Bin-Laden, Bush and Blair stole the political headlines, while Tennant, Cowell and Goody took the lion’s share of the limelight in the entertainment industry. In sport, the likes of Beckham, Flintoft and Wilkinson hogged the back pages. Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 took a new generation of console gaming to heights which would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier. And while the kids were gyrating round the lounge on their “Wii”, the grown ups too were immersed in the world of gadgetry, with Sat Navs, Hair Straighteners and Blackberrys to keep them amused ! It was a decade of celebrity and indulgence, much like the eighties, but actually in a good way.

I’ll take this opportunity to take a brief look back over the decade which is affectionately referred to as the “Noughties” over the next couple of weeks in a series of posts. Firstly, let’s go back to the eve of December 31st 1999, where it all began. Or was it about to end ?





Thanks For Reading,
Mountain Man

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