Remember that rumour that Hilary Duff was going to star in 90210? What a ridiculous rumour that was.

Because, please. This is Hilary Duff we’re talking about. Multi-millionaire singer and actress Hilary Duff. She’d never lower herself enough to appear on an embarrassingly self-conscious youth-orientated CW TV show like 90210. That’s absurd.

But luckily, Hilary Duff would lower herself enough to appear on an embarrassingly self-conscious youth-orientated CW TV show like Gossip Girl. So she has. It’s great news for anyone who watches Gossip Girl and actively identifies themselves as a Hilary Duff fan. So that one creepy man must be thrilled.

Have you heard the news? Gossip Girl is where it’s at lately. No, really, it is. It is. Chace Crawford was named as Summer’s Hottest Bachelor by People magazine recently, and he’s in Gossip Girl. And Kelly Rutherford got pregnant last year, and she’s in Gossip Girl. And, um, Michael Jackson died last week and, er, people gossiped about him and he had quite a girlish figure, and OH ALRIGHT, Gossip Girl isn’t where it’s at in the slightest. Gossip Girl’s a slightly rubbishy TV show that we’ll never properly invest in because life is obviously too short.

But all that’s about to change, because very soon Gossip Girl is going to become a slightly rubbishy TV show that we’ll never properly invest in because life is obviously too short that Hilary Duff will briefly appear in. It’s incredible news!

Oh, come on. Hilary Duff. You know who she is. She’s Disney’s discarded Miley Cyrus prototype. You remember. Fights with elderly screen legends a lot. Hilary Duff. Oh, you remember.

No? Well, look, she’s going to be on Gossip Girl soon and that’s that. EW reports:

The actress-designer-pop chanteuse will play Olivia Burke, a movie star who enrolls at NYU in search of a traditional college experience. She ends up rooming with Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) so it’s safe to say she’ll be majoring in Drama! Duff will debut in this season’s fourth episode, slated to air Oct. 5.

We’re genuinely thrilled about Hilary Duff joining the cast of Gossip Girl – it’s literally the holy grail of people we don’t really care about deciding to star in TV shows that we’ve never even watched a single episode of. Well, not literally the holy grail – technically that’d involve Radio One DJ Jo Whiley agreeing to do a multi-episode arc on the FX TV show Sons Of Anarchy – but it’s close enough.

And Hilary Duff shouldn’t worry that recently turned down a spot on 90210 because she’d rather have her own show, only to discover that her own show wasn’t good enough to be picked up by NBC, thereby forcing her to return to 90210’s network with her tail between her legs to accept a spot on a TV show that couldn’t be any more similar to 90210 if it employed Tori Spelling out of a sense of pity. There’s nothing embarrassing about that at all. Ahem.

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OK, we admit it. We haven’t watched any of 90210, and nobody else has either. But that’s all about to change, because 90210’s knight in shining armour is charging over the horizon to resurrect its ratings – that’s right, Shannen Doherty is returning to the show!

According to the woman herself, Shannen Doherty is set to appear in the 90210 season finale. Finally, someone with enough star power to hold down a supporting part in a 2007 made-for-TV Christmas movie. You’re saved, 90210! Saved!

When it was announced that Beverly Hills 90210 was being developed into a spin-off, everybody knew that it could go one of two ways – it could either do a Battlestar Galactica and become a deadly serious space opera full of impenetrable allegories to the Iraq war, or it’d be a sort of shitty OC rip-off full of relentlessly braying knobends who all appear to think that the universe revolves around them even though their all-time life highpoint is bound to be involve acting in a Clearasil commercial.

Needless to say, it turned out to be the latter.

However, that’s not to say that 90210 is all bad. In fact, it performs an important social function by keeping some of the original Beverly Hills 90210 cast in gainful employment. If 90210 hadn’t given Tori Spelling a minor recurring role, there’s a fairly strong chance that she’d currently be pushed up against the outside of a restaurant window awkwardly begging diners for scraps.

As for Jennie Garth, well let’s just say that 90210 has probably stopped her from joining the human trafficking trade.

And then there’s Shannen Doherty. Shannen Doherty was the beating heart of Beverly Hills 90210 – albeit the obnoxiously bratty beating heart who seemed to hate every minute of it – and, after one headline-grabbing appearance on the 90210 spin-off, she’s decided to make her glorious return during the show’s finale. But only because she likes the show. It hasn’t got anything to do with her film career imploding more than a decade ago, you hear? The Press Association reports:

Shannen Doherty has revealed she’s returning to the Beverly Hills 90210 spin-off. The actress reprised the role of Brenda Walsh for a few early episodes of the series, 90210, and has now confirmed the character will be back for the season finale. She told E!: “You’re the first people I’ve told. It is the finale, so you can probably expect a lot of drama.”

Yes, you read that right – Shannen Doherty is going to bring a lot of drama to the 90210 finale. We don’t think she means onscreen by the way, since just about the most dramatic thing to happen in the show so far involves a girl having the hots for the editor of the school paper.

But Shannen Doherty is definitely going to bring the drama offscreen, where she plans to kick over a craft services table and pin a chef to a wall by his throat because the sandwiches have been cut into rectangles instead of triangles.

But will Shannen Doherty’s return make us watch 90210? No. And the reason is simple – the show’s title hasn’t been abbreviated enough. Going from Beverly Hills 90210 to 90210 is just lazy. Call us when it’s called 9021, or Ni- and then we’ll think about it.

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The second is that there’s no Tori Spelling. We’d assumed that Tori Spelling was a shoo-in to appear on 90210, what with it being the show she’s most associated with and her being such a rubbish actor that she’d be grateful of the work and all. But it wasn’t to be.

Not until now, anyway – Tori Spelling is returning to 90210, which will be great news for the three people who watch 90210, are old enough to remember Tori Spelling and aren’t recovering lobotomy patients.

Like many people, when we heard that a new spin-off of hateful early-1990s teen drama Beverly Hills 90210 - a show about braying arseholes made by braying arseholes for braying arseholes – our first reaction was to fall to the floor clutching our temples in agony.

Once that went away, though, we assumed that 90210 would be the perfect excuse to re-employ some of the stars of the original series. They’ve all dropped off the radar in recent years and would probably work for scraps, plus it’d be a nice lineage to the show’s previous generation.

All the old gang wanted in – Shannon Doherty returned as Brenda Walsh for a few episodes, Jennie Garth returned as Kelly Taylor for a few episodes, Jason Priestley is apparently going to direct an upcoming episode, and who can forget Hillary Swank’s hilarious cameo as the disabled transsexual who chewed through her own tongue to quicken her own death? Happy days. But there was no Tori Spelling.

Sure, Tori Spelling had been approached to star in 90210, but that soon fell apart. Why? Well reports at the time seemed to suggest that Tori Spelling wanted more money than producers were willing to pay, but we think we know the truth – Tori Spelling really wanted to see if 90210 was going to be lousy enough for her standards.

You see, Tori Spelling doing anything good in her life would be a tremendous oversight. What if she agreed to be in 90210 and everyone loved it? That would have really overshadowed her voiceover work on one episode of Biker Mice From Mars and the made for TV movie Mother, May I Sleep With Danger, wouldn’t it?

Luckily, though, enough time has passed for Tori Spelling to see that fewer and fewer people are watching 90210 and that it was axed in Australia after a handful of episodes and that it’s utter dog-piddle from start to finish. So with that in mind, guess what? Tori’s back in! People reports:

Looks like Donna Martin will return to 90210 after all! Tori Spelling is in “final negotiations” to return to the world’s most famous zip code, a show rep confirms to PEOPLE. The actress, who was set to star in the CW’s spin-off when it was announced — but then had “no plans” to join the show for its fall debut — is close to finalizing a deal to be in multiple episodes.

OK, so maybe it’s not a completely done deal that Tori Spelling is returning to 90210, but we can guarantee that – even if she doesn’t – Donna Martin will definitely make an appearance. And when we say ‘Donna Martin’ we mean ‘a heat-warped Marilyn Monroe waxwork dummy’. It’s the same thing, really.

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Why? Because new Beverly Hills 90210 makes a clean break from the past. It’s banished all the pastel sweaters and pouffy hair of the old Beverly Hills 90210 and brought in a brand new team of youngsters who underline just how completely brand new the brand new Beverly Hills 90210 is. It’s brand new, you know.

So who’s the biggest star of this super-new, bleeding-edge Beverly Hills 90210? Um, Shannen Doherty. Off the old Beverly Hills 90210. But it’s not all cripplingly pointless news, because now she’s famous again, Shannen Doherty gets to put the record straight about a fight she didn’t have with Jennie Garth more than a decade ago. Whew!

There are a few surprising things about the new series of Beverly Hills 90210. Firstly, the studio responsible has only decided to abbreviate its title down to 90210 rather than wrongly pander to its braindead young audience and call it something like Bevvaleee Hilz Nine Oh Too Won Piss.

Secondly, Shannen Doherty is back in it. Shannen Doherty, for crying out loud. Since leaving the original show in 1994 because everyone agreed that she was a stroppy little princess who crew and co-stars to peel her boiled eggs for her (or something), Shannen Doherty has been filling her wilderness years with one Kevin Smith film, about 30 seconds of Charmed, a car crash and the worst-sounding TV show in history.

But now Shannen Doherty is back, and she’s got a few scores to settle. Like, for instance, remember that time that Shannen Doherty and her Beverly Hills 90210 co-star Jennie Garth had a real-life fist-fight? No?

Actually us neither – we only have a finite amount of brainspace and we’d rather use it to remember what our relatives look like than to store information about violent incidents between two people from a 15-year-old TV show that we never even liked in the first place – but that’s not going to stop Shannen Doherty from banging on about it, is it?

No. You see, Shannen Doherty has decided to finally come forward and proclaim that the fist-fight between her and Jennie Garth never even happened. Shannen told Us Weekly:

“We never did,” Doherty, 37, tells Us. “I think I would remember Jennie’s fist connecting with a part of my body or a part of my face. It just goes to show you how people will lie.”

Great stuff. Breath a sigh of relief, everyone. Oh, you already are. What’s that? You’re not breathing a sigh of relief? That’s actually a sigh of disappointment and barely-concealed anger at Shannen Doherty, Us Weekly and hecklerspray for wasting your time with a story about something that didn’t even happen, even though if it did actually happen it wouldn’t have altered a single molecule of your life anyway?

Whoops.

Well, it would be if she actually did anything worthwhile ever, instead of just getting knocked up and kind of lingering around, like that person at a party you kind of know but don’t want to talk to but at the same time don’t want to ask to leave as that would be far too rude. Even though they’re standing there, people are staring and it’s killing the funtime vibe – you’re ruining the party, Tori Spelling. Get out.

Ahem.

It would seem that this is the exact attitude favoured by the execs behind the remake of Beverly Hills 90210 – imaginatively titled 90210 – who appear to have asked Tori to leave the TV party. Maybe it didn’t quite happen like that, but we’re trying to fit this in with quite a poorly-thought out and stretched analogy. Hush down.

Listen: Tori Spelling was on board for the new 90210, probably being all ‘like whoa’ and all deep and introspective (while being rich) when she was getting into character, but then she found out that her co-stars, Shannen Doherty and Jennie Garth, were being paid around $50,000 per episode, whereas poor old Tori was only getting about $20,000 for each exciting adventure.

Unsurprisingly, little Miss Spelling reacted quite badly to the news, demanded equal pay and was turned down. Unsurprisinglyier, Tori then backed out of the show, leaving 90210 again without Donna Martin - just as it was in the 90s when she ended her run on the show after numerous spats with the cast and crew. Old habits, and all that.

Fortunately, there is more than enough for Tori Spelling to fall back on – she has… hmm… this one’s a toughie… well, she has a kid to look after… and… hmm… nope – that’s about it, really. She could write another book, or sell more of her stuff or something, but she doesn’t really seem to have that much else going for her right now.

While she may have had a point in expecting wage equality with her guest appearances on the new 90210, hecklerspray didn’t really know what to think about it all. Then we were pointed in the direction of one of those ‘quote’ things where someone said some words about it, and it told us what to think. The source told Deadline Hollywood Daily:

“She thought she deserved parity, and she’s got a point.”

Which is the kind of statement you don’t really want to argue with – straightforward, no fluff, gets the point across: some textbook quoteage. Well done that ’source’.

Alas – even with the crippling loss of Tori Spelling, it looks as if the producers intend to actually go ahead with 90210. How they could dare we do not know, but the premiere of the show is set to air on September 2nd. We will be watching, probably crying and definitely laughing at how bad it’s sure to be.

Not that we’re negative or anything.

But this has to be the worst case of copycat behaviour we’ve ever seen.

Tori Spelling, of Beverly Hills 90210 and… errm… some shit reality TV show fame, has gone and got herself one of those baby things in what experts are calling ‘clearly a rip off of Jessica Alba‘. The brazen attempt to hoard some publicity is sure to backfire as members of the public lash out at Tori and her derivative behaviour.

“Get some originality!” they may cry, “everyone’s having kids now! You’re copying lovely Jessica!”

But Spelling, with her many years in the limelight – or, more accurately half-in, half-out of the limelight – knows exactly how to react to her ‘your baby is a cynical ploy’ critics. She used the power of words:

“I’ve always wanted a little girl since I’m such a girly girly.”

But the wily veteran knows this wouldn’t be enough to shut the fools up, so she went on when talking to People Magazine:

“I immediately started crying. I couldn’t believe it. I have my beautiful little boy and now I’ll have my little girl! It’s amazing.”

Tori knows full well that an outpouring of emotion is something that even the harshest of critics will falter at – the sheer joy surrounding the birthing of a new life into this world is one that only utter bastards could be scornful of. Like hecklerspray, for example.

But such a blatant rip-off of another celeb’s actions has managed to reap dividends for the washed-up ’star’, who is set to star in the re-imagining of 90210. Or reinvention. Or whatever bullshit buzz word they want to use to make it sound as if it’s a good thing that no one in any realm of television or the movies seems to have an ounce of genuine creativity about them.

But at least Tori didn’t completely copy Jessica and saddle her child with a future psychological problem (commonly referred to as ‘a stupid name’), calling her a living cry for attention Stella Doreen. Granted, Doreen is stupid, but Stella is fine. Probably as it makes us think of beer.