The artwork for Adam Lambert’s new album For Your Entertainment has already kicked up one hell of a fuss.

Why? It’s simple. It looks like one of those awful transfer-print T-shirts that people who like wolves buy from tatty market stalls. It looks like something that the redneck wife of a professional wrestling fan would airbrush onto the back of her leather jacket. It looks like a poster that someone you hate would buy. It’s bizarre.

But it’s OK, because Adam Lambert says it’s all deliberate. Unfortunately it means that Kris Allen’s new album artwork will now probably show him covered in glitter and bumming a unicorn, but we’ll deal with that when we have to.

Adam Lambert clearly hasn’t read the rulebook. You know, the rulebook which says that the debut album from all American Idol graduates should come with artwork where the performer looks approachable and friendly. The rulebook which very specifically says that the debut album from all American Idol graduates should most definitely not come with artwork that makes them look like a naked genderless sex alien who suffers from debilitating migraines.

And yet that’s what the artwork to Adam Lambert’s forthcoming album For Your Entertainment is. Look, here it is all close-up…

Admit it, when you first saw the artwork you thought it was a hoax. You thought it was a hoax knocked up by a 12-year-old girl with a second-hand VHS copy of the 1986 Grace Jones movie Vamp and a Blingee account, didn’t you? You thought that not even Adam Lambert – the man who used American Idol to sing Ring Of Fire in the style of a creepy Middle-Eastern snake charmer and part-time date-rapist – would think of becoming a topless, blue-haired version of the Sarah Jessica Parker character from Flight Of The Navigator on the sleeve of his first album.

But he has. And he’s done it on purpose, as he told his followers on Twitter yesterday:

“Thank you to those who appreciate and understand that the album cover is deliberately campy. It’s an omage to the past. It IS ridiculous… For those that don’t get it: oh well… Glad to have gotten your attention. androgyny. Rock n Roll… *homage. When’s Twitter adding spell check?”

That’s awfully nice of Adam Lambert, but we’re not really sure it counts as androgynous. Not unless the definition of androgyny has expanded to include men who look as if they’ve woken up in a ditch on the day of their wedding and realised that their stag night prank involved being stripped, dyed and eyebrow-waxed, while simultaneously having their hand glued to their own face.

But nice try anyway. And if the album cover has walked the line between amazing and terrible so easily, then God knows what Adam Lambert’s album itself will be like, right Adam?

“[There's] a tune called “Music Again” written by Justin Hawkins of the Darkness!”

OK, we take that back, sorry. It’ll be terrible. As you were.

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A warning: if you don’t like fat teenage girls with silly emo haircuts and black nail polish, stay inside during November.

They’ll be out in force. Not only is New Moon coming out – which, let’s face it, would be bad enough by itself – but it’s also when For Your Entertainment, the first album from stupid-haired screeching emo vampire  American Idol loser Adam Lambert, is being released.

And Adam Lambert’s first single has just been leaked onto the internet. It’s called Time For Miracles. So long as that miracle involves the entire internet being deleted just to stop us from hearing it, we couldn’t agree more.

You remember Adam Lambert, don’t you? Of course you do – he was the break-out star of the last American Idol. And by ‘break-out star’ we mean that he was the contestant who looked most like Evil Spider-Man, had a singing voice that sounded most like an obese old lady being molested by a ghost and wouldn’t let on about his sexuality even though he literally couldn’t have been any gayer if he wore a T-Shirt with ‘I AM QUITE GAY’ written on it in sequins. You remember Adam Lambert. He was rubbish.

And, more importantly, he’s back. On November 23 Adam Lambert releases his new album For Your Entertainment – a slight misnomer because, if other American Idol albums are anything to go by it should be called For You To Buy, Play Once, Forget About And Then Hide Whenever Your Friends Come To Visit. But that’s beside the point, because the first single from Adam Lambert’s album has been leaked onto the internet.

The song’s entitled Time For Miracles, and it shows an impressive level of intelligence from Adam Lambert. You see, the song is from the forthcoming end-of-the-world disaster movie 2012, so its nearest reference point is Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing from Armageddon. And it has to be better than that, right? Listening to a cat vomit into a metal bucket is better than that. So, MTV, what does Time For Miracles by Adam Lambert actually sound like?

The Brian May-approved power ballad was composed by…

OK, sorry MTV, we’re just going to stop you there. Brian May-approved? Brian May-approved? That’s not exactly a mark of quality, is it? In fact, it’s pretty much exactly the opposite. Let’s just take a quick look at some of the things that Brian May has approved in his time: 1) the Queen album Hot Space, 2) haircuts that looks exactly like explosive candyfloss diarrhoea, 3) standing on the roof of Buckingham Palace playing the guitar like some sort of awful hairy wazzock, 4) getting his wife to sing songs based on the EastEnders theme-tune, 5) Adam Lambert’s new single.

So, yeah, we’re not exactly jumping up and down about it.

But, hey, if you still want to hear the leaked version of Time For Miracles by Adam Lambert, you’re going to have to track it down for yourself. Alternatively you can listen to a sneak preview on this 2012 video. Be warned, though – it sounds a bit like a miniature witch having a violent tantrum over a lesser Bond theme. But maybe that’s your thing.

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Hands up who remembers Chris Sligh from American Idol. Anyone? No? Fine. To refresh your leaking memory he was the fat guy with the glasses, who made it through mainly because he had a moderately good sense of humour, which papered over the cracks of his rather less impressive singing voice. He looked like Jack Osbourne. He also loved Jesus. Far more, it seems, than he loves American Idol these days. 

Writing on his blog, the tubby singer thought it high time he put paid to this ridiculous notion that a talent show will reap any kind of reward, as he ripped into a tirade of startlingly obvious home truths, telling future contestants what it’s really like when the spotlight fades.

“You are going to struggle. No one will care about you.”

Such comments will obviously serve as an almighty punch in the underpants to the hundreds of small town inbreds who intend on embarking on the annual pilgrimage to be scoffed at by Simon Cowell, or called “dog” by Randy Jackson. But to most of the rest of the world, it’s all really quite obvious.

Sligh, to further remind you, was one of the unfortunates who faded under the Jordin Sparks sunbeam during the sixth season of the show, and regardless of the hopeless nature of his failure to win, he claims to be one of the most successful entrants from that particular installment. He is now a full time musician/singer. Yet, even so, the bitter rage still spews forth like molten rocks spluttered from a dragon’s sneezing nose.

“You’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to be millionaires.”

He continues to say:

“They’re not going to buy your album.”

A hunch suggests that Sligh’s big fat slice of truth pie won’t stop anyone from giving it a go for season eight, or nine, or twelve, or whatever it is. Mainly because his observations were near pointless, as even a brain damaged dog could tell you that once these things finish, only the smallest handful of hopefuls will ever be heard from again. In fact, even the winners can fall pretty flat once released from the shackles of a weekly sing-off. Taylor Hicks won the thing, then his output totally failed to float anyone’s onions. It is, in short, a lottery.

Suggestions for Chris’ next tirade include: “Has anyone else noticed that Starbucks sell coffee?” Or “Isn’t it WEIRD that Superman wears underpants OUTSIDE his trousers? What is THAT about?”

Perhaps to shed a little more light on Chris’ unfortunate demise, here’s a clip of the big man in action…

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Our favourite part of watching American Idol has always been crying under the couch with our fingers knuckle-deep in our ears anytime someone holding our remote control decides to check it out.

Our least favourite part of watching the show has always been the aural bleeding. Admittedly that’s probably because our un-filed fingers had just been jammed in there, but still, in our head we blamed Paula Abdul.

Now that blame will have to shift to Ellen DeGeneres. She, apparently, is Abdul’s new full-time, permanent replacement.

Ellen DeGeneres is a very busy woman. She’s already got the world’s number one talk show of all time as ranked by women with boy haircuts, she hosts the Oscars pretty much everybday, Cover Girl thinks she really speaks to their desired 50-year-old woman demographic – and now she’s gonna be putting in an extra 40 hours per week telling children to please “For the love of all that is now or ever has been holy, slit your vocal cord before the sun sets another day. Your mother probably hates you.”

That, we figure, will be her catchphrase.

Surely you remember that Paula Abdul up and quit her job recently. When we first heard this we thought it meant she was no longer an expired 80s pop star. No, no she’s still that. It’s not really a job, but she is still that. She quit American Idol. At first the rumours were flying that she was gonna be replaced by MC Skat Kat. Although this would have been a tremendous step forward, talks fell through when Pixar refused to climb on board.

So Idol had to settle for second best.

Second best is Ellen DeGeneres. No – not that Ellen DeGeneres. The other one. The one with the talk show. Reuters says:

“Fox television executives and the producers of the hit singing talent show had been searching for a permanent, new judge to sit in Abdul’s seat when the ninth season of the show returns to TV in January 2010. “As the new judge, Ellen will offer her own unique perspective to the contestants throughout the competition,” Fox said in a statement. DeGeneres, whose award-winning talk show “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” is in its seventh season, described herself as a longtime fan of the show.”

This comes as harsh news to Abdul’s ardent fan who was desperate for her to make a triumphant return to the show. Possibly on a parade float or something. That fan died a while back though. Everyone else seems rather indifferent.

Well, everyone except DeGeneres seems indifferent. Here’s what she says about joining the judges:

“So getting this job is a dream come true, and think of all the money I’ll save from not having to text my vote.”

Well that’s that. There is no longer room for Abdul at the long table. There’s some question as to what she’s gonna do next. If any of you know of a job opening wherein a person can lay around comatose sobbing about how she could be so stupid, and why won’t Simon call her back, get that to her agent, won’t you?

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We knew it was a good idea for Paula Abdul to leave American Idol! The big time is hers for the taking now!

And it certainly doesn’t get any bigger than VH1 Divas! True, you might not have ever heard of VH1 Divas, but that’s only because it’s so big that it’s completely invisible to the naked eye, like oxygen or God or whatever. Or because it’s embarrassingly small and nobody cares about it except the people directly involved with it, and even then it’s only because they’ve been paid. One or the other.

Anyway, Paula Abdul’s hosting that. Woo!

When you think of a diva, who automatically springs to mind? No, not Mariah Carey. And, no, not Whitney Houston either. Come on, think harder. No, not Beyonce. And not Oprah Winfrey. Come on, this is easy, you just need to think. No, not Paris Hilton or Jennifer Lopez or Naomi Campbell or Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Mary J Blige or Diana Ross. Look, we’ll give you a hint – her name rhymes with Maula Babdul. What? Bette Midler? That doesn’t even rhyme, you idiots.

Jesus, the answer we were looking for was obviously Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul is the person who automatically springs to mind when you think of a diva. Idiots.

Or maybe she isn’t. Because, although she fits the diva bill in that she’s a woman and she sometimes makes ludicrous monetary demands of people, Paula Abdul falls down at the part about a diva needing to do other stuff than just stagger around garbling gibberish into the sky and occasionally just bursting into tears for the hell of it.

But that’s a minor detail because, following on from her American Idol departure a few weeks ago, Paula Abdul has been signed up as the host of the forthcoming VH1 Divas benefit concert in New York. The New York Daily News reports:

She announced her latest gig, how else, via Twitter. “I’m really excited [to] announce I’ll be hosting this year’s ‘VH1 Divas!’” Abdul wrote late Monday night. “Divas” executive producer Lee Rolontz was ecstatic Tuesday when the network made the official Abdul announcement. “We are so lucky, we are thrilled!” Rolontz told The News. “It was perfect timing.”

This Rolontz chap is right – it was perfect timing for everyone involved. For Paula Abdul, the gig came up exactly at the point in time where she realised that she wasn’t going to get on Dancing With The Stars or So You Think You Can Dance or Good Morning America or one of those 30-minute informercials about orthopaedic cutlery for old people, and for VH1 Divas Paula presumably came along just as someone more famous and capable backed out of the job.

Oh, we’re just kidding. Hosting VH1 Divas will be a cakewalk for Paula Abdul. So long as, you know, it doesn’t involve moving and speaking at the same time. Or speaking at all, for that matter.

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Paula Abdul’s bad decisions have included singing with a cartoon cat, marrying Emilio Estevez and speaking in public.

But quitting American Idol? That was her worst decision of all. And we don’t say that lightly – this is a woman who deliberately got married to Emilio Estevez, for crying out loud.

Anyway, it seems that the flurry of interest that swamped Paula Abdul’s departure from American Idol has now crawled to a trickle, And Paula now reportedly wants her old job back. Phew, it’s good that Simon Cowell is so famously compassionate, isn’t it? This could have got pretty awkward otherwise.

We’ve all been there. You’re in a relationship that turned stale long ago, so you decide to make a clean break and move on. Then, after the first rush of breathless excitement, you realise that being single doesn’t involve having crazy, borderline-illegal sex with a procession of supermodels – it mainly involves eating beans on toast in a damp flat and weeping because you’re watching a Holby City DVD boxset on your own.

Meanwhile you start to hear rumours that your ex is doing fine without you. More than fine, in fact – they’ve replaced you with someone new, someone prettier, someone less likely to interrupt important conference calls by screeching loudly about diarrhoea for no reason whatsoever. Suddenly you wish you’d never bloody left.

And that’s precisely the situation that Paula Abdul finds herself in at the moment. Sure, when Paula Abdul quit American Idol there was talk of her rapidly jumping ship to another equally-prestigious reality show where she’d be taken more seriously – a show like Dancing With The Stars. But when Dancing With The Stars announced its new line-up this week and Paula Abdul wasn’t on it, the alarm bells started to go off. Not real alarm bells, obviously. We get the impression that sudden loud noises make Paula Abdul kind of jumpy.

This all means that despite leaving American Idol, and then Twittering relentlessly about her decision to leave American Idol, Paula Abdul isn’t sure if she wants to leave American Idol after all. TMZ reports:

Sources connected to Paula Abdul say Miss Paula wants back on “American Idol”. Our sources say Paula’s Twitter is retracted — at least in her mind – if the price is right. The magic number is $10 million… She doesn’t want to do “Dancing with the Stars” — we’re told, because she wants to be able to jump on a plane on a moment’s notice to rejoin her fellow judges on “Idol.”

Wow, so Paula Abdul doesn’t want to join any other TV shows in case she’s mysteriously invited back to American Idol in the middle of the season, perhaps during a time when her reappearance would have the most impact on ratings. How completely unexpected.

It’s Victoria Beckham who we feel most sorry for here – she’d been drafted in as Paula’s American Idol replacement and now it looks like she’ll be jettisoned from her dream job before she can even get comfortable. We certainly hope Victoria Beckham and Paula Abdul don’t fall out about this. Or have a fistfight about it. A fistfight that results in both parties sustaining equally critical injuries. That would be a very bad thing indeed.

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Paula Abdul has always been a free agent – you can’t constrain her with things like rules or basic human logic.

But now she really is free. She’s free of the American Idol machine, with its cynical attitude to creativity and willingness to give her millions of dollars for doing hardly anything.

Apparently Paula Abdul could now be snapped up by So You Think You Can Dance, although she’s probably holding out for So You Think You Can Stare Off Into Space For Great Stretches Of Time While Softly Giggling At A Joke That Only You Can Hear. She’s got expertise there.

We probably owe Paula Abdul an apology here. When it was announced last week that Paula Abdul was quitting American Idol, we thought that – if she really was quitting at all – she’d end up being boiled for glue. Not even televisually speaking, either – we literally thought that someone would club Paula Abdul over the head and actually boil her down for glue. In real life.

But we forgot something important about Paula Abdul. People actually seem to like her. No, we don’t know why either. But they do. People like Paula Abdul so much that they’re quite happy to fill their cars up with pictures of her and then kill themselves outside her house. And you’re lucky if people even remember when it’s your birthday. She’s in a different league.

So it’s no surprise to see that Paula Abdul probably won’t stay unemployed for long. According to reports, both Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance are mad keen for Paula Abdul to contribute some of her trademark dribble-flecked non-committal craziness to their shows, too. The Chicago Tribune reports:

ABC chief Stephen McPherson had contacted Abdul to say that he’d love to see her at ABC. “We would love to have her on ‘Dancing [With the Stars],’ as a contestant, participant or judge. I think she’s a huge talent… We have no formal plans,” he explained. Nigel Lythgoe, producer of the Fox show “So You Think You Can Dance,” has said he would welcome her “without question.”

It makes perfect sense for Paula Abdul to scooch over to a dance-based version of American Idol – after all, she knows the format inside-out and she calls herself a choreographer. Admittedly she’s a choreographer who worked on a film based on a line of freakishly sexualised, giant-headed plastic dolls for a few weeks until she was inevitably sacked, but that still sort of counts. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t that count?

But anyway, whether Paula Abdul decides to opt for Dancing With The Stars or So You Think You Can Dance, it’s important that she doesn’t allow her new management to enter into a fatally hard-line contract negotiation after a couple of years. Because if she screws this up, Paula Abdul had better hope that someone invents a reality TV show about women who sing duets with animated cats who – it’s heavily implied – they’re engaged in a graphic sexual relationship with. Because that’s literally the only other thing she can do with any level of competency.

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Replacing Paula Abdul on American Idol will be tricky – producers need to find someone vivacious, warm and emotional.

But for now they’ll stick with Victoria Beckham. She’s not really any of those things – in fact she’s a sour-faced android, so she’s the precise opposite – but she is available. We can’t overstate that enough. Victoria Beckham is always available for work. Always.

Victoria Beckham will temporarily replace Paula Abdul on the new American Idol. So will Katy Perry, in what appears to be a stipulation on Victoria’s part to ensure that she isn’t the crappiest thing about the new American Idol.

If there’s one thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a silhouette that doesn’t look exactly like a toffee apple. And if there’s another thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a speaking voice that doesn’t make her sound like a recruitment consultant from Basildon who detests life. And if there’s another thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a haircut that didn’t start off as ‘Tinkerbell’ but end up as ‘malnourished pederast’. Or a cleavage that doesn’t look like a human scrotum trapped in a glass vice.

More relevantly, though, if there’s one thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, its to break America. But up until now, all her attempts have gone down in flames. Her reality TV show was cut down to one episode. Her guest spot on Ugly Betty saw her inexplicably adopt the speech patterns of an infant John Merrick having an asthma attack. And her efforts to befriend Katie Holmes were dashed when Katie tripped on a pavement and Victoria discovered that she was full of nothing but wires and bleeping circuit boards.

But now Victoria Beckham’s dream may finally be realised, and it’s all thanks to Paula Abdul. Because Paula Abdul quit American Idol so close to the new season’s audition stages, it left the producers in a bit of a bind. Should they keep the American Idol judging panel as a threesome? Should they hire a permanent judge straight away? Or should they plug the gap with whichever vaguely music-related celebrity had the least amount of real work on at the time?

Luckily for Victoria Beckham, they went with the last option. God bless sweet desperation. People reports:

As the dust settles on the shocking departure of Paula Abdul, 47, from next season’s American Idol, now comes confirmation from Victoria Beckham’s publicist that the former Posh Spice, 35, will make a “one-off appearance” as a guest judge on the top-rated FOX show.

Even though it’s only for one show, it’ll be sort of exciting to see how Victoria Beckham fares on American Idol. Not because we’ll get to see her utilise the culmination of 15 years of music industry knowledge or anything, but because she might get to say “You’re going to Hollywood.” That’s a seven-syllable sentence, which will break her personal best by around four syllables. Exciting!

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You probably felt a surge of conflicting emotions when Paula Abdul revealed that she was leaving American Idol.

First there was shock. Then incredulity. After all, American Idol had reportedly offered Paula Abdul $5 million a year to stay – who’d turn down a sum like that? And then came begrudging acceptance. After all, this is Paula Abdul we’re talking about – a woman whose modus operandi seems to be ‘how could I make the least possible amount of sense here?’

So maybe Paula Abdul really is stupid enough to turn down that sort of money. Or maybe it’s all a publicity stunt…

It didn’t really make a lot of sense when Paula Abdul quit American Idol this week, did it? Admittedly, coming from a woman who routinely punches herself in the face with dogs and shrieks about diarrhoea during important conference calls, it’s actually one of the most sensible things she’s ever done – but from the perspective of a normal human being, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Because if Paula Abdul leaves American Idol, it leaves everyone effed. It’d mean that the American Idol judging panel would be staffed by three glowering humourless nimrods – well, two glowering humourless nimrods and a babbling A.D.D-addled toddler – and it’d fling Paula Abdul back into semi-remembered obscurity.

No, really – it would. What has Paula Abdul done aside from American Idol over the last decade? Released a woeful single that she hopelessly mimed at the Super Bowl, taped a reality TV show that made her look like a cast-iron lunatic and got kicked off an underperforming movie about over-sexualised plastic fashion dolls. American Idol is literally the only thing that Paula Abdul can do, and she can’t even do that very well.

And that probably explains the number of conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds. We half-jokingly hinted at it ourselves yesterday, but some people are now seriously suggesting that Paula Abdul has in fact signed a new American Idol contract, and that this is all part of some giant ratings-grabbing bait and switch ploy whereby Simon Cowell realises two episodes into the new season that the show can’t go on without Paula Abdul, allowing her to come back in a blaze of glory.

It’s got everything – drama, a strong soapy element, a sort of happy ending, plus Simon Cowell has a history of doing this sort of thing – and maybe that’s why Ryan Seacrest and Randy Jackson are being unusually cagey about the whole affair, as E! Online reports:

On his radio show this morning, Seacrest said Abdul’s departure was real—”as far as I know.” Jackson, meanwhile told Extra, “It looks to be true [emphasis added].”

Alright, it’s not exactly Area 51 territory, but it does give us hope that maybe – just maybe – Paula Abdul will return to American Idol. We’re praying that she does. Not because we’re big fans of Paula Abdul, you understand – in fact we’re fairly sure that we’d end up punching ourselves unconscious within seconds being in her proximity – but because if this really is a ploy to win ratings and it works, it’d open American Idol up to a world of hacky fake storylines that we’d be desperate to see.

Just imagine – this year it’s ‘Has Paula left?’ but next year it could be ‘Kara’s unborn child – is Randy the father?’ or ‘Ryan gets secretly replaced by a robot trained to destroy humanity’ or ‘Simon Cowell pulls a face so smug that it causes the universe to implode’.

That last one’s not really that hacky or fake, but you get the picture.

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That’s it. American Idol has lost its heart. Well, maybe not its heart – more like its atrophied cerebellum.

Anyway, look, Paula Abdul has left American Idol. That was our point. And Paula Abdul’s American Idol departure is a shock – for all the threats and posturing from her management recently, we were certain that Paula was just angling for a bigger salary. But no – first Paula Abdul Twittered her resignation and then Fox confirmed it.

We can’t overstate what a loss this is. Without Paula Abdul around, the American Idol contestants will now be forced to sleep with each other. Disappointing.

American Idol has been good for Paula Abdul. It was the show that finally got people to stop seeing her as the hasbeen who did that awful song with a cartoon cat and start seeing her as the boogly-eyed, desperately incomprehensible, painkiller dependent woman who’d somehow lucked her way into a high-profile job that she seemed vastly underqualified for.

But that’s all in the past now. Paula Abdul has decided to quit American Idol for good, either because contract negotiations broke down or because of tense interpersonal relationships between the judges or because Paula wanted to dedicate more time to her hobby of quacking like a duck at her own reflection for hours at a time. We’re sure that a clearer picture will emerge in the next few days, but all we have for now is the Twitter message that Paula Abdul wrote to the world yesterday:

“With sadness in my heart, I’ve decided not to return… I’ll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all being a part of a show that I helped from day 1 become an international phenomenon.”

And Fox’s confirmation that Paula Abdul was a goner:

“[Paula was] an important part of the ‘American Idol’ family over the last eight seasons and we are saddened that she has decided not to return to the show.”

This announcement had been coming for a while, ever since Paula Abdul threw a tantrum because she wasn’t getting paid as much as Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell. At the time it looked like a canny negotiation tactic on her part, but now that it’s backfired it seems more like greedy petulance. It seems unlikely that Paula Abdul will ever score such a high-paying job again, unless of course planet Earth is invaded by an army of shrieking, easily-distracted aliens and she’s employed by the government to communicate with them. Which could happen.

So what happens to Paula Abdul now? Well, it’s time for her to wistfully reflect on all the amazing opportunities that American Idol has given her – like the opportunity to allegedly sleep with an American Idol contestant, the opportunity to disfigure her face on a dog, the opportunity to be an international laughing stock and the opportunity to see what it’s like to have a crazed fan commit suicide on her doorstep. Golden moments, one and all. It’ll be sad to see Paula Abdul go.

And it’ll be crushingly inevitable when, two shows into the new American Idol season, Simon Cowell dramatically and spontaneously realises on camera that he has to immediately re-hire Paula Abdul, just like he did with Louis Walsh on X Factor a few years ago. Probably.

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Yesterday we said that Paula Abdul was probably going to leave American Idol. And she really was, too.

She was going to leave. It wasn’t just a dimwitted bluff to make American Idol pay her more money. Paula Abdul was definitely leaving American Idol. Unless the show decided to pay her a lot more money, in which case she’d consider staying. But it’s not about money. Its about being treated with a basic level of human decency. And money. It’s mostly about money.

Anyway, Simon Cowell has revealed that he wants Paula Abdul to stay. That was probably our point.

When Paula Abdul threatened to leave American Idol yesterday because Ryan Seacrest was being paid more money and Simon Cowell was being paid more money but she wasn’t being paid more money, many simply dismissed it as empty posturing. But those people don’t know. They don’t know the sacrifices that Paula Abdul has made to appear on American Idol.

Paula Abdul had plenty of work before American Idol came knocking, you know. Sure, her pop career has stalled a little, but she still had her choreography work. And she was, um, the answer to the pub quiz question “What’s the name of that pop star who did that rubbish song with the dancing cartoon cat and then stopped being famous to the extent that most people assume she’s now dead?” And sprawling around your house off your chops on painkillers takes up more time than you’d expect, you know.

So Paula Abdul is quite happy to walk away from American Idol to further pursue her hobbies of crying in public and smashing up her face on tiny dogs. But she might not need to, because her knight in shining armour has arrived. Now, yes, the armour is only shining so that the knight can only look at his reflection in it while licking his lips in a creepy way, and he’s riding a horse that’s been reinforced to cope with the awesome weight of his hefty manboobs, but Paula Abdul isn’t in a position to be choosy at the moment.

That knight, if you hadn’t already guessed, is Simon Cowell. And he wants Paula Abdul to stay on American Idol, damn it. People reports:

“She’ll be fine. She’ll be on the show,” judge Simon Cowell told Extra on Monday. “I don’t get a lot of say. I’ve just made it clear that I want Paula on the show. Full stop.” Meanwhile, host Ryan Seacrest expressed a similar sentiment. “I think as far as I know you’ll see everybody back,” he told the TV show. “I hope so.”

It’s beautiful to see the American Idol family pull together for Paula Abdul like this. They love her, they don’t want to see her go and their display of unity is bound to sway the bean-counting producers into giving her exactly what she wants.

Unless, you know, what she wants is more money than Simon Cowell. Because then the bitch can walk. Seriously, she’s gone. And she’d better not Simon Cowell in the eye on the way out, either. He knows people. You hear him? HE KNOWS PEOPLE!

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As far as American Idol goes, Simon is the brain, Randy is the mouth and Kara is like the appendix or something.

And then there’s Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul is American Idol’s beating heart. Admittedly it’s a slightly terrifying heart that seems to be drunk a lot of the time and often shrieks to itself for no particular reason, but it’s still a heart. What would American Idol be like without Paula Abdul? It’d be professional and consistent. And rubbish.

But we’ll see that next year, because Paula Abdul is about to quit American Idol in a pay dispute.

Even though fewer and fewer people are watching American Idol – perhaps because the whole show is essentially three months of bad karaoke followed by a nightmarish Gillette ad of a winning single – it seems like the principal American Idol stars are about to have their wildest wishes granted in the show’s current contract negotiations.

Ryan Seacrest, for example, is going to get $45 million to present American Idol for the next three years. Simon Cowell is apparently after $100 million for the same period of time. And Randy Jackson – well, actually Randy Jackson has just been given a ball of scrunched up tin foil because that’s what he thinks money is. But what about Paula Abdul, the woman so beloved by American Idol viewers that some of them occasionally will kill themselves in slightly misguided demonstrations of their adoration for her?

Nothing. Not a peep. Apparently nobody has even begun to talk about granting her wildest wishes. Why? We just don’t know. Maybe it’s because Paula Abdul’s wildest wishes involve fairy tears and unicorns that can poo gumdrops. Or maybe it’s because whenever anyone tries to negotiate her American Idol contract with her, she gibbers on incomprehensibly for 45 minutes, then starts applauding something that only she can see, then falls over. Feasibly it could be either of these two things.

But whatever the reason, Paula Abdul is furious. So furious, in fact, that her longtime manager of three weeks David Sonenberg has told the media that Paula Abdul will leave American Idol unless her demands are met. Essentially it’s the plot of Die Hard 3, except it probably won’t end with Paula Abdul dying in a helicopter crash. The New York Daily News reports:

“She’s not a happy camper as a result of what’s going on. She’s hurt. She’s angry. I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual; I think unnecessarily hurtful. I find it kind of unconscionable and certainly rude and disrespectful that they haven’t stepped up and said what they want to do. Very sadly, it does not appear that she’s going to be back on ‘Idol.’”

So there it is. Paula Abdul is the Kim Jong-Il of American Idol. While producers are busy sorting out Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, she’s threatening to bomb Hawaii because people have stopped taking her seriously. She’s bluffing, of course – like Kim Jong-Il she probably won’t carry out her threat, accept whatever meagre scraps are thrown her way and then, um, develop the early stages of pancreatic cancer.

It’s not really a comparison that stands up to much inspection, is it? Sorry.

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This year’s American Idol was amazing for one solitary reason – we’re looking at you, Kara DioGuardi!

That’s right. It wasn’t down to Adam Lambert’s uncompromising talent, nor was it because show kick-started a giant about sexuality. It was because of Kara DioGuardi and the way she just sort of sat around not really doing anything for vast tracts of time.

So clearly when Kara DioGuardi decided to get married, we knew the wedding would be infused with this same rock and roll spirit. And it was, if quietly marrying a contractor before hardly anybody counts as rock and roll now.

Kara DioGuardi has, let’s face it, had a hell of a year. Nobody even knew who she was at the start of the year, but American Idol has changed all that – now the whole world knows that Kara DioGuardi is the woman who isn’t as entertaining as Simon Cowell or as gregarious as Randy Jackson or as flat-out berserk as Paula Abdul and doesn’t really do a lot except upset the perfectly good three-judge dynamic for no good reason whatsoever.

In short, Kara DioGuardi has hit the bigtime.

And it’s because of this that Kara DioGuardi’s contractor boyfriend Mike McCuddy realised that he’d be legally entitled to half of her American Idol earnings if he married her. No, that’s not right. We meant that he realised how much he loved her. No, that’s not right either. The first one. The first one’s right. Oh, look, Kara DioGuardi married her boyfriend on Sunday, that’s the point. AP reports:

Kara DioGuardi had a busy Fourth of July weekend: The “American Idol” judge married her beau, contractor Mike McCuddy. DioGuardi’s publicist, Danica Smith, says the couple tied the knot on Sunday in Prospect Harbor, Maine. Smith says 30 guests witnessed the ceremony at the Prospect Harbor United Methodist Church.

And that’s literally all we know about this mysterious Kara DioGuardi wedding. Did any of Kara’s fellow American Idol judges attend the ceremony? Unlikely – Kara’s already fallen out with both Paula and Simon, and Randy can’t go to weddings because of his compulsion to shriek either the word “DOG!” or “HOLLYWOOD!” during the bit where you’re supposed to say why the couple shouldn’t get married.

Did noted songwriter Kara DioGuardi compose the music that was played during the ceremony? Again, unlikely – if the American Idol winner’s single was any indication of her songwriting ability, then it would have meant that she’d have to walk up the aisle to a piece of music which sounded like every Gillette advert ever played at once, on the bagpipes, by an army of crying pensioners with shattered ribcages. And nobody wants that at their wedding, do they?

Are we only writing about Kara DioGuardi’s wedding because it’s just about the only thing we can find that hasn’t got anything to do with Michael Jackson today? Well, yes, obviously. Duh.

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We’re just the same as you. Since he won American Idol, we’ve been eagerly anticipating Adam Lambert’s debut album too.

Hang on, what do you mean Adam Lambert didn’t win American Idol? And what do you mean Adam Lambert recorded his debut album On With The Show four years ago for a small independent record label and it’s about to be released against his wishes?

Wow, we really didn’t know as much about Adam Lambert as we thought we did. Still, at least we can all agree on one thing about Adam Lambert – he must love his wife very much.

Now that American Idol is a distant memory and he can no longer play off his sexual ambiguity for attention, everyone is keen to know if Adam Lambert can still be a success. And, let’s be honest, the odds are against him.

True, Queen want Adam Lambert to be their new singer, but Queen are rubbish. True, Adam Lambert has a small army of slavish internet followers, but so did David After Dentist and he never really broke out to be the multi-platinum recording artist that everyone expected. And, true, Adam Lambert made it to the final of American Idol, but American Idol has been going on for so long now that we’re pretty sure that we could GHD an emo goat and it’d probably be able to make the final as well.

So really there’s only one conclusive, failsafe way to determine whether or not Adam Lambert can still be considered as a success – his debut album will have to enter the charts at number one and stay there for a meaningful amount of time, like a month or a year or until the end of time or something.

You might think that Adam Lambert would find that easy, since he’s currently recording an album with the cutting edge of the music industry like Lady GaGa’s writers and producers. But that’s actually for his second album. Adam Lambert’s debut album was recorded four years ago for a very small record label, is entitled On With The Show and is about to get released any day now in a transparently opportunistic effort to cash in on his post-Idol fame. Here’s Want, the lead single from it…

Well, OK, we take all of our sarcasm back. Want is actually a staggeringly good song. Lyrically it’s incredibly profound – we don’t think that the sentiment of ‘love is all you need’ has ever been expressed in a pop song before – and musically Adam Lambert is bang-on as well, since we read the other day that the next big pop trend will be for songs that sound exactly like Robbie Williams B-sides from 1998. Adam Lambert sure must be thrilled with the release of On With The Show:

“The work I did back then in no way reflects the music I am currently in the studio working on. Back in 2005 when I was a struggling artist, I was hired as a studio singer to lend my vocals to tracks written by someone else. I was broke at the time and this was my chance to make a few bucks, so I jumped at the opportunity… I can’t wait for people to hear what my music really sounds like.”

Oh. Well if Adam Lambert doesn’t want us to buy On With The Show then we’re not going to buy it. In fact, we respect Adam Lambert’s opinion so much that we’re never going to buy any of his music ever again. And if any of his music is played on the radio, we’ll switch the radio off. And every time we say his name out loud, we’ll pull a funny face. We’re sure everyone can agree that that’s the most amount of respect that anyone could possibly be expected to give Adam Lambert.

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OK, that’s it. Adam Lambert has had enough of the speculation. He’s going to put an end to this right now.

For weeks, Adam Lambert has been forced to endure all kinds of unwanted media speculation over his sexuality. And now he’s reached the end of his tether. Nobody should suffer the torment he’s been put through. And that’s why, on the cover of Rolling Stone, Adam Lambert has stated once and for all that he definitely isn’t gay.

Wait, what? Adam Lambert said he is gay? Really? But that doesn’t make any sense! His nail varnish is so masculine!

Just a hunch here, but we have a feeling that the next issue of Rolling Stone is going to feature a bear on the cover, along with the headline ‘Hey, I Just Did This Excellent Crap! Over There, In The Woods! Look, It’s Next To My Friend The Pope! He’s A Catholic! Did You Know That?’

Why? Because Rolling Stone has just officially outed Adam Lambert as a gay man. Let’s get straight to the quote, shall we? Adam Lambert told Rolling Stone:

“I don’t think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear that I’m gay. Right after the finale, I almost started talking about it to the reporters, but I thought, ‘I’m going to wait for Rolling Stone, that will be cooler. I didn’t want the Clay Aiken thing and the celebrity-magazine bullshit. I need to be able to explain myself in context. I’m proud of my sexuality. It’s just another part of me.”

Now, yes, look, congratulations to Adam Lambert for having the guts to stand up and out himself on his own terms like that, but we can’t help feeling that he’s making a terrible mistake here.

What set Adam Lambert apart from his American Idol counterparts was his aura of mystery. Was he gay? Was he straight? Sure, he might have already been outed once and he’s openly got a boyfriend and any fool with the internet can easily access pictures of him kissing boys with tongues and everything he’s ever done, said or thought in public has been unquestionably informed by the fact that he’s a gay man – but who could really say for sure, huh?

We suppose what annoys us most about Adam Lambert’s admission that he’s gay is that it’s in direct violation of rock star tradition. Everybody knows that before a singer can admit to being gay he first needs to first 1) embark upon an awkward, loveless marriage with a female employee, 2) record a zany duet with Kiki Dee and then 3) hint at his homosexuality by claiming that, rather than seeing people as gay or straight, he prefers to think of human sexuality as a sliding scale of endless permutations.

What we’re trying to say is that Adam Lambert has gypped us out of his zany duet with Kiki Dee. And we’re not sure that we’ll be able to forgive him for that.

It now remains to be seen whether or not Adam Lambert’s gay admission will affect his level of fame. To be honest, we can’t see it happening – it doesn’t matter what he does, to us Adam Lambert will always be that bloke who couldn’t even win American Idol. And long may he reign.

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