The 2006 Billboard Music Awards take place tonight, and it'll be the snooziest awards show of the year, featuring performances from dullards like Mary J Blige and Janet Jackson; so thank God that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are hosting it.
Only that's not exactly what's happening any more. Sadly Mary J Blige and Janet Jackson are both going to be hawking their boring new albums for all they're worth, but Britney Spears and Paris Hilton won't be hosting the Billboard Music Awards any more. Britney Spears pulled out last week and now, right at the eleventh hour, Paris Hilton has decided that she doesn't like the jokes she would have to tell so she's dropped out as well. But the Billboard Music Awards are bigger than one listless, slightly fliddy-looking internet porn star, and so a new megastar presenting team has been drafted in for tonight's ceremony. Ladies and Gentleman, please be upstanding for Richard Blackwood and the woman who played the mandolin in Timbuk 3.
It's difficult to take the Billboard Music Awards seriously. As well as being the only music awards ceremony to make the Grammys look brief and nuanced, this year Nickelback and Mary J Blige have received more Billboard Music Awards nominations than anyone else – a fact that single-handedly destroys any notion of credibility that the awards may have once had. But this year things were going to be different. Things were going to be fun. The Billboard Music Awards were going to be hosted by the world's shittest pair of new best friends, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton – and who wouldn't want to see that?
Over the last couple of weeks Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have taken over the planet in a whirlwind of dressing up like morons, freaking people out with their bare vaginas and getting called "cunts" by Lindsay Lohan, so the Billboard Music Awards were set to be the formal confirmation that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have been the slurring, under-dressed bad mother double divorcee and taxi-pisser combo of choice for 2006. But it isn't to be. Last week Britney Spears pulled out of hosting the Billboard Music Awards – possibly because at the last awards show she went to everyone took the piss out of Kevin Federline so much that she got all upset – and now Paris Hilton has followed suit, as Metro reports:
She took one look at the script and decided she would not go along with the jokes written for her at the Billboard Music Awards. Hilton called off the Billboard event after seeing the script on Friday and deciding it contained some material she found 'objectionable'. Elliot Mintz, her spokesman, said: 'It is my understanding that some satirical references ridiculed some of her peers. Paris did not want to say anything that could appear hurtful or embarrassing about people she knows.'
Paris Hilton's refusal to host the Billboard Music Awards has two very serious repercussions. Firstly it means that the audience will be spared the sight of Paris Hilton performing an elongated comedy riff on the subject of the Lindsay Lohan "Cokehead! Cunt!" incident from last week, and secondly it means that the Billboard Music Awards writers have now got a terrifyingly small amount of time to come up with some new material that subtly reflects on Paris Hilton's unwillingness to read their script.
If only jokes about drink-driving pretend celibates who can't sell any copies of their rubbish reggae album without starting fights with divorcees in nightclubs and who's been seen with a man's bit in her mouth by everyone with an internet connection weren't so hard to think up…
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