Sarah Harding, Chris Brown: Singers Behaving Badly!

Firstly, few people could make a claim that they were genuinely that surprised about it – she was always the member of Girls Aloud who you'd least want to find yourself in an argument with – but if you cast your mind back to 2003, you'll remember that Sarah's band mate, Cheryl Cole once found herself in a similar scrape in the toilets of a Guildford nightclub.

Now that Cheryl has became something of a national treasure – charming the country with her appearances as a judge on X Factor – people seem to have forgotten the fact that this is the same women who once gave a female toilet assistant a black eye after she tried to stop her from stealing a handful of lollipops.

These incidents of celebrities behaving badly are far from isolated... just look at Chris Brown. In February 2009, the singer turned himself in to the police after beating-up his girlfriend at the time, Rihanna. Images soon began to circulate on the internet showing the Barbadian beauty bruised and battered. Brown – who was also aged 20 – was then convicted, but manage to avoid serving any jail time.

His mother insisted that he'd never been a violent person. Right or wrong, he certainly didn't do her any favours in March when after appearing on TV chat show where the Rihanna issue was brought up, he smashed a window during an advert break, confronted members of the production crew and stormed out of the building shirtless.

Brown's frequent Twitter tirades would suggest that people are having a harder time forgetting the past than they did with Cheryl but it seems remarkable that Sony were willing to release Brown's third album Graffiti just months after  his conviction. But more remarkable have been the series of tweets from both Chris Brown and Rihanna which have been arising suspicion over the past few days that the couple may be getting back together.

Elsewhere, P Diddy and Lil' Wayne have both found themselves on the wrong side of the law on a number of occasions – Weezy has served time for being found in possession of a .40 calibre pistol whilst Diddy's rap sheet stretches for miles – but both have managed to continue to enjoy fruitful careers.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, anyone who loosely followed the goings on of the Leveson Inquiry into the practices of the British media will be aware of how little time Hugh Grant has for the press. Having verbally attacked the papers for making his life a living hell since he was caught in L.A. with his trousers down (literally), he took things one step further when he attempted to run over a camera wielding member of the paparazzi in his 4x4.

Elsewhere, supermodel Naomi Campbell was accused ten times between 1998 and 2008 of assault, Amy Winehouse famously punched a fan at the front of the crowd during her 2008 Glastonbury performance...and let's not even get started on Pete Doherty.

Whether or not we secretly crave this kind of drama from our favourite celebrities is a matter for a debate, but it will certainly be interesting to see how the rest of Sarah Harding's career pans out from here.