The big names you love to hate

Matthew Ridge

It was a fight to the wire between Paul Holmes and Matthew Ridge for the title of "most overexposed male celebrity" of 2004.

In the end, there were just decimal points between them, but television personality and former league star Matthew Ridge took it by a nose.

Ridge was voted most over-exposed male celebrity by 37.4 per cent in the Herald-DigiPoll study.

Holmes was on 36.7 per cent, his raucous departure from TVNZ and morning talkback show unable to compete with Ridge's six-pack on the New Zealand Fashion Week catwalk.

On the dais, Ridge joined his former partner in love, Nicky Watson.

Watson was a far more convincing winner than Ridge - she clinched 41.20 per cent for the most overexposed female celebrity, with TV presenter Charlotte Dawson coming in second on 21.7 per cent.

One News presenter Judy Bailey came third, with 16 per cent.

Both Ridge and Watson snared a great share of the young vote in the 18-to-39 age group. The over-60s said they saw too much of Holmes and Bailey, although the poll was taken before her salary increase.

Bailey got the nod from 30 per cent of voters over 60 years of age, but only 8 per cent of those under 39.

Among the males, Mike King came a distant third, with 9.6 per cent.

Despite trawling the country in an election-style vote-grabbing Queen's Tour, John Campbell managed to rake up only 4.6 per cent. He outranked Michael Laws, who in real life won the Wanganui mayoralty.

The two other females in the poll were just blips on the radar of over-exposure - if music station C4 host Jacqui Brown and broadcaster and radio DJ Stacey Daniels had been political parties, they would not have made it over the 5 per cent threshold and into the Beehive.

For the top-reigning couple, it was a busy year in terms of "getting noticed" in New Zealand.

In 2004 they did some stuff together - both modelled in New Zealand Fashion Week, and they also had a short-lived guest stint on Celebrity Treasure Island. However, the pair went solo for other things.

Ridge got kicked out of a Greymouth pub after insinuating a local was fat and did his pioneering best in City Celebrities-Country Nobodies.

He kept up his various television sports shows, washed cars, tried unsuccessfully to stop his property development company M3 going into liquidation, and ended the year by suing the National Business Review, claiming they defamed him in an article about his financial affairs.

And Watson was in the glare of the public eye for hosting the Sky TV reality show The Player.

She later lent her profile to campaigning against domestic abuse and battery hen farming.