This is very important news, and we’ll tell you why soon. Anyway, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrived in New York for the first time since the birth of their last children so that Angelina can promote her new movie The Changeling.

We said we’d tell you why it was so important that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were returning to America, didn’t we? Well, alright, we will – it’s important because, um, well, Brad Pitt is, um… and Angelina sort of… no. We’ve got nothing. Literally nothing. Maybe they left the gas on or something. We genuinely couldn’t care less.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins haven’t been on this planet for long, but the time they have spent on it has almost exclusively been in France. Imagine that – 10 weeks surrounded by nothing but onion trees, shrugging mechanics, afternoon naps and excessive female bodyhair. That’s tantamount to child abuse in our books, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie should bloody well be ashamed.

Which we assume they are, because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have decided to return to America with all their children, where they can be brought up the way God intended – on a diet of Ritalin, incessant flashing images, processed food containing constituent parts that have never seen a speck of sunlight and brightly-coloured cartoon dinosaurs that shout the alphabet.

Yes, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have decided to return to America with their entire flock of culturally nonspecific offspring to allow Angelina Jolie to promote her new movie The Changeling. It’s an important movie for Angelina Jolie, because it’s the first role for several years where she hasn’t just played Angelina Jolie. Also, it’s a Clint Eastwood film, so there might be an Oscar in it for her if she licks enough arse. Access Hollywood reports:

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have brought their six kids to New York City for the first time since the birth of their twins, Vivienne and Knox. The actress and mother of six is scheduled to walk the red carpet at the film’s premiere for the first time since giving birth to her twins.

As nice as it must have been for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to spend time in another country with less media intrusion and a slower, idyllic pace of life, it will do everyone some good to return to America.

More people will recognise Shilou Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, for example, so she’ll find booking a table at a restaurant much easier. And Brad Pitt’s bodyguards can beat up people who they actually understand for once. And lovely old Olivia Poupot gets to go a few days without giving a hilariously disdainful police statement about what a dreary couple of bastards she thinks Brad and Angelina are.

But the break won’t last – Brad Pitt is filming Inglorious Bastards in Germany at the moment, so after a few days, the entire brood will decamp back to Europe again. But no matter where they go they’ll always have a little piece of America inside them. True, it’s an impacted clump of hamburger that’ll cling to the inside of their colon until they day they die, but it’s good enough.

There's an old saying that goes 'An Englishman's home is his castle, and if he ever wants to imprison a Scandinavian male prostitute in his castle against his wishes then that's probably OK'.

But sadly it seems like America, the so-called land of the free, has got some issues about people chaining male prostitutes to their walls and vaguely insulting them for a bit. Just ask Boy George.

Boy George is just about to set off on a tour of America, except that now he can't get a visa because of his upcoming prostitute-chaining trial. Not that Boy George should worry too much, though. We know for a fact that there are plenty of other countries who'll give you visas no matter how many terrified manwhores you've chained up to a wall in your sordid little sex dungeon. Um, we read that in a book or something once. Ahem.

These days you can get banned from America for just about everything. If you punch people you get banned from America, if you're a terminally habitual drug user you get banned from America, and now it seems that if you might have chained a prostitute to a wall once you get banned from America as well.

Weirdly, though, if you're Fearne Cotton you can just breeze through passport control without a care in the world despite your numerous atrocious crimes against humanity. It hardly seems fair at all.

And this utterly illogical immigration system has messed up Boy George's plans something horrible. All he wanted to do was go to New York and give a free concert to all the binmen who he managed to ritually humiliate by spazzing out like a girl that time he was forced to do community service with them, but now even that's been taken from him.

Why? Because there's a possibility that he chained up a Norwegian male prostitute in his house last year. Did we mention that? We did? Oh, whatever.

Although he denies the charges, Boy George's false imprisonment trial is set to start later this year. And because of that, Boy George has been denied an entry visa into America. We can see why – as far as we're able to tell, America is full of fat bald gay men with oddly-painted faces who enjoy nothing more than chaining prostitutes to their wall and threatening them, so there's a chance that Boy George might just blend into the crowd and never return – but Boy George is getting quite worked up about it, as the New York Times reports:

Boy George was “devastated” and that “George is astounded at the decision and is having lawyers here in the States look at it in the hope that someone will change their mind.” … The statement said, “George has not been convicted of anything in London, and there is a presumption in the Western world of innocence until proven guilty.”

Well, that's partly true – the presumption is innocent until proven guilty, unless the accusation involves chains, 1980s popstars and frightened homosexual prostitutes from Norway, in which case it's funny to just mention it as many times as possible regardless of how true it is.

So Boy George won't be going to America any more. And, as rough as Boy George has got it, it's not him we feel most sorry for. No, it's the New York binmen who won't get to see Boy George's concert any more. True, there's a chance that an alternative act who's also done community service with the binmen will be shipped in from overseas to compensate, but if that happens it's likely to be Naomi Campbell, and those poor refuse workers will be lucky to escape with their lives.  

We’d do anything to help you out. Say you thought some Russian military types had tampered with your food; we’d be there to help you. Sure, we’d be putting our own life at risk as we gingerly slurped your tomato soup, but we love you and would never turn down your request.

However, there are some factors that we can’t control: famine, Bono, global warming and hay fever (oh dear God the hay fever). At first the problem is confined to one area, but it then slowly spreads around the world. Look at Bono – Ireland suffered for so long until he was unleashed to the world.

Now it’s England’s turn to unleash one of their ropiest creations, this time on an unsuspecting America. Lily Allen has been granted a visa. Batten down the hatches, quick!

Lily’s cheeky chirpy cockney songs have never been off radio and TV stations in England. Most of the time it’s a lucky dip to see if Smile or LDN is going to be played next. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t every ten minutes or so.

But then, would the public like to hear a makeshift hecklerspray band doing a freestyle jam on a few metal cans and coat hangers? No, probably not.

In-between writing and recording her second album, Lily has been doing other stuff as well. You see, she’s not like the other one dimensional singers without a soul or conscience. She can do more than pout and attempt to look sexy – Lily can present too! Well, that’s what BBC 3 believes anyway.

Some genius came up with the Lily Allen and Friends show. A programme where a few celebrity people come on to plug a TV show or product they’re involved with.

In-between all of the ker-azy chat comes the part of the show that makes up about 89% of the content, the always reliable feature: “clips from the internet showcasing wacky people which means I can sit on my arse and do fuck all for a bit,” used every week. Honestly, we’d never seen the Chocolate Rain man before. We are so thankful. The show really is worth the license fee alone to watch TV content which comes from YouTube.

For some time now, Lily’s wild child antics have seen her banned from America. Having the odd drink doesn’t seem to be a popular thing with Uncle Sam and her persistent drunken nights out haven’t helped. For a long time she’s been banned from the land of obesity and Maury. Now Magazine reports:

“Lily had to have her pee regularly checked and then blood tests on top to prove she wasn’t on drugs before the US government would give her a working visa.”

We just feel sorry for the poor sod that had to check her piss. How this was done we aren’t sure, but we’re willing to bet it was all down to the texture and aroma of the urine. But that doesn’t matter now; she’s got the visa, and she was reported as feeling:

“Chuffed.”

Though we would like to remind US visa officials of her odd antics at last week’s Glamour awards. She clearly wasn’t sticking to tap water or lemonade during the ceremony and looked slightly worse for wear. This will probably scare the shit out of the people who gave her legal permission to visit America.

Have fun with her in the USA. And don’t feel inclined to send her back anytime soon.

And with this firmly drilled in to her mind, it’s good to see Leona Lewis has taken the same advice. As her appearance on X Factor 2006 dragged on, her singing style never really changed that much. Any song with a BPM over 40 was totally inappropriate for her. Instead she belted out ballad after ballad keeping grannies, young children and people in comas extremely happy. After boring us all silly with her hit Bleeding Love she’s now done the same to our American chums. She’s only ruddy gone to number one in the album charts!

You have to hand it to Simon Cowell. He may be the smuggest twat in the world and a crap spokesman for the RSPCA, but he knows how to milk something until it’s dry. So far he’s doing extremely well at doing this with Leona Lewis. The high-trousered judge told The Press Association:

“What Leona has achieved is simply incredible. This is the hardest market to crack and for her debut album to go in at Number One is unbelievable.”

Yup, that’s true. America is pretty hard to crack. Unless you’re a country & western singer, rapper, hip-hop artist or a whiny R&B bod, you don’t have a chance in hell in denting the American chart. And you won’t get a chance to meet Oprah. That itself is an honour; to make music for women to badly dance to. Or, in Leona’s case, sing on a song that you didn’t write, produce or play any instruments on.

But where so many have failed such as Robbie Williams and Jay-Z hating Oasis, there has been a reason for this. You see, Simon Cowell is like the wicked witch of the music world. He casts evil spells that result in bland and unimaginative music. One of the people he shitted out was Leona Lewis. It also helps a fair bit that people will buy anything he’s connected to. Consequently, this means big sales:

“Spirit has sold 204,841 copies this week in the US. Her nearest rival in the Billboard Top 200, the album Troubadour by George Strait, has sold 59,000 copies.”

This comes before her appearance on American Idol which will only have thirty million Americans watching. Of course her singing on the show has nothing to do with the fact that Cowell is a judge on the US version. No, we’re being way too cynical here.

So far, the crater-faced crying Scottish boy who won X Factor in 2007 hasn’t hurt our ears yet with more mass-produced bollocks. But if Cowell is able to turn Leona Lewis – a brilliant karaoke singer, into a household American name, then God knows what will happen. The thought of him shedding his tears in other countries can only depress the people living there. And we want to spread joy, not blubbering and depression.

Still we can’t grumble too much – whilst America laps up Leona, she’s consequently missing from UK radio and TV stations. Something we can safely say is much more important then a credit crunch or global warming.

Read more:

Leona makes US album chart history – PA

Or, to put it another way, Piers Morgan went to America looking for success, and America (and by America we mean Donald Trump) looked back at Piers Morgan and replied: "Sure, why not? You're a man with all the qualities required to succeed here. Your wish is our command".

What is wrong with America? It all started off so positively some 40,000 years ago when a bunch of wandering nomads from Asia decided to set up camp. They had a quaint little society going on, and for thousands of years everything was wonderful, but then in 1492 some Italian named Chris landed on the shore and it all turned to shit.

Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, then Will and Grace, and now this, the ultimate coup de grace – Piers Morgan – whose list of crimes include making people feel sympathy for Jeremy Clarkson, being editor of the News Of The World once, and having the name Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan. Commenting on Morgan's performance in the show, touped-twat Donald Trump told him:

"You're a vicious guy; I've seen it … You're tough, you're smart,
you're probably brilliant, I'm not sure. You're certainly not
diplomatic, but you did an amazing job and you beat the hell out of
everybody."

The final task on Thursday's finale was to hold a charity event and raise as much money as possible. Morgan's rival, country singer Trace Adkins, had the duty of babysitting The Backstreet Boys, while Piers was responsible for the auction and food.

Trace sold more tickets, but Stefan Pughe raised the most money, earning an additional $250,000 (£125,000) for his charity.

And what was Morgan's chosen charity? Why it was the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which provides support for families of U.S. military personnel who have died in the line of duty.

Which is all very well, but it just goes to prove that, no matter how much of an utter cunt you are, if you cheer loud enough in support of the troops, all will be forgiven, even if you had previously been sacked for publishing faked photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by British Army personnel.

Whatever, America, you can have him, but don't doubt for one moment that this is anything other than your Judgement Day. So long, it's been good to know ya.

Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis is number one in the American singles chart, proving that not even global superpowers are immune to personality-free girls doing generally passable Whitney Houston impressions.

It's worth pointing out, though, that Leona Lewis is the first British female to get a US number one single since Kim Wilde in 1987. And if Leona Lewis keeps her head down and work hard, maybe she'll reach the same dizzying heights. That's right, the TV gardener/ health food commercial actor/ novelty Christmas single with the fat one from Smith & Jones combo is now well and truly within her grasp.

Of all the megastars that X Factor has ever produced – like Chico and, um, that crying Scottish boy we just mentioned and Emily the scarily violent schoolgirl – none have been bigger or more successful than Leona Lewis. Right from her first appearance on X Factor, it was a certainty that Leona Lewis would win – she had it all.

OK, not quite 'it all' as such – try and talk to Leona and all you'll get back is a tumble of meaningless robotic statements about how grateful she is and what and honour everything is and how she's wanted to sing since she was a little girl – but Leona Lewis was able to sing a bit like Whitney Houston and looked decent in pretty dresses, which is usually enough to win these things anyway.

And now Leona Lewis has surpassed all expectations after an appearance on Oprah helped push her single Bleeding Love to a coveted American number one spot. The Independent reports:

Yesterday Lewis's single shot to No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100, knocking Usher from pole position – the first British woman to top the US singles charts since Kim Wilde in 1987 with her cover of The Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On"… Despite finding her music "very safe" and "overwhelmingly mainstream", the Billboard contributor Paul Sexton agrees that Lewis has undoubtedly hit the big time. "There's no denying she's a big star now," he said. "Getting to No 1 in America is a very big endorsement, whatever you think of her music."

What's all the more shocking is the chiming endorsement that Oprah Winfrey gave Leona Lewis when she appeared on her show: "Wow, wow, wow… Talk about a star is born. You're the real deal, girl," she told Leona on air – marking the first time in history that Oprah Winfrey has ever got excitable about anything on TV, with the sole exception of everything else she's ever encountered.

And Leona Lewis' success in America has meant that she's leapfrogged Amy Winehouse, who is yet to score herself a US number one despite all the attention she's got there. However, Amy Winehouse can win Grammys and Leona Lewis can't even win a Brit, so if Leona wants to start winning the critics over she should probably start huffing crack on videotape and cutting herself. Just a thought.

Read more:

The Oprah Effect: America's next big thing – The Independent 

In the UK, Big Brother mainly comes undone whenever racism is brought up – sometimes to the extent where entire South Asian subcontinents communally burn little wicker Jade Goodys.

Not in America, though – mental illness is their thing. The latest season of Big Brother there has come under fire because a housemate called Adam decided to reveal that he thinks all autistic people are 'retards' who have bad haircuts. Which is remarkably insensitive, given that up to 85% of all Big Brother housemates worldwide are probably a little bit retarded themselves.

What? It's true.

As much as Big Brother is a colossal parade for attention-seeking dickwipes who'd stab their own parents to death with a dildo if it meant that they'd get just one picture in a magazine for it, you have to admit that it's pretty good at focusing people on issues.

As we've said, in Britain Big Brother helped to raise awareness of racism thanks to Jade Goody's chronic bullying of Shilpa Shetty, while Australian Big Brother made sure that people stopped and thought twice before they rammed their balls into womens' faces.

But generally mental illness is an issue avoided for the most part, partly because no housemate would ever be stupid enough to air their controversial views on such a thorny subject in front of millions of viewers, and secondly because to even want to go on Big Brother in the first place you'd need to have a fairly hefty case of some low-level personality disorder yourself. 

In America, though, Big Brother has wound up in trouble with an Autism charity thanks to a weird little outburst by a housemate called Adam, who apparently works with mentally disadvantaged children. The Associated Press reports that, when asked what he'd spend his potential Big Brother-winning cash on, Adam replied that:

he would spend his winnings on a hair salon for people with developmental disabilities "so retards can get it together and get their hair done." His partner, Sheila, told him: "Don't call them that." Adam responded: "Disabled kids. I can call them whatever I want. I work with them all day, OK?"

Which is fair – it's your right as a worker to call stuff whatever you like. For example, when we worked in a pet shop we used to call kittens 'Furry Little Tossers' and it was OK because we worked there. Similarly, nobody batted an eyelid at the nursing home when we'd refer to the guests as 'Smelly Almost-Dead Wrinkleshits'. And, honestly, you should hear the things we say about you.

However, Autism charities haven't taken Adam's progressive viewpoint lying down and are demanding that Big Brother broadcaster CBS apologises for Adam's outburst, something that it isn't keen of doing very much, only releasing a nondescript statement to try and calm everyone down:

"We certainly find the statements made by Adam to be offensive but believe they were countered by the immediate reaction of shock and condemnation from a fellow houseguest, Sheila… Adam's remarks would not have been permitted to air unchallenged."

So what looks likely to happen now is that Adam will get evicted from Big Brother at the first opportunity, then he'll be fired from his job for the brainlessness of his remarks. And you know what? That's the worst thing that could happen.

Remember that, regardless of the words he chose to explain it, Adam wanted to use his Big Brother prize money to build a special hairdressers for autistic children. Now that he's clearly not going to win, those poor kids are just going to have to struggle on through life with their rubbish badly-conditioned haircuts. Their loss.

Read more: 

Autism Group Demands Apology From CBS – Associated Press 

That's right, it's sodding Fearne Cotton being jammed down your throat every day and night on TV, goading you closer to suicide with her big stupid voice and ridiculous clothes. Fearne Cotton is easily the worst thing about living in the UK.

But guess what? Fearne Cotton isn't going to live here any more! She's got a deal to host a primetime NBC show in America, so she'll go and live there instead. This is how Tina Turner must have felt when Ike died.

American TV producers know that nothing goes down with audiences as well as a vaguely annoyed British person. Simon Cowell's done well there, as have Anne Robinson, Gordon Ramsay and – bewilderingly – Piers Morgan. But maybe NBC misread the memo recently, because when it was chosing the host of new show The Guinness Book Of World Records – Live!, it didn't stump for a vaguely annoyed British person. It went with a vaguely annoying British person.

OK, not vaguely annoying. So annoying that just the thought of her makes us want to cry blood. It's Fearne Cotton.

Somehow – we think because she's young and looks like she knows how to send a text message – Fearne Cotton has managed to become every producer's favourite youthy presenter. It's quite an accomplishment for Fearne, because someone who studiously fills their sentences glottal stops and shouts! Every! Word! Like! It's! More! important! Than! It! Actually! Is! as much as Fearne should really have never graduated from drama school.

But, hey, as The Sun reports, that's America's problem now:

The bubbly blonde, 25, has signed a big-money deal with NBC to host The Guinness Book Of World Records – Live!… Fearne’s two-hour Guinness Records special will feature a countdown of the craziest records ever held. The show will end with a live motorcycle stunt in which Clint Ewing, 27, will try to ride through the longest-ever tunnel of fire.

What? It's not a series? Fearne Cotton is only presenting a two-hour special? That's rubbish. But, hey, maybe it'll lead to more American work. Maybe Fearne Cotton will still go and live there eventually. Right?

Well maybe not. Look at Fearne Cotton's presenting track-record. She presented Top Of The Pops and it died. She presented Love Island and it died. She presented Holly & Fearne Go Dating and not a single person watched it. She helped to host the UK's Eurovision Song Contest qualifiers and Scooch won. The woman is the kiss of death, which probably isn't something that Clint Ewing wants to hear.

Stil, maybe two is hours is all America needs to realise that a tiny pretend-cockney gonk constantly shouting made-up words and pretending that she likes indie music even though the most leftfield record she's ever bought is clearly Lady In Red isn't for them. But at least they're taking Fearne Cotton off our hands for two hours. Thank you, America.

But if you ever come for Konnie Huq we'll cut you with a knife.

Read more:

US deal is a nice little Fearner - The Sun