This R Kelly child porn sex-tape kerfuffle has rattled on for so long that the child in question is now a 93-year-old great-grandmother with an irrational phobia of urine, and yet still it shows no sign of concluding.

That's partly because R Kelly keeps successfully managing to push court dates further and further back every time things start to look serious for him – but no longer, because if R Kelly doesn't turn up to court in the next 90 minutes, he's going to be arrested. R Kelly was due to appear in court in Chicago yesterday, you see, but he failed to show up because his tour bus was crocked first by snow and then by a slightly overzealous group of Utah police officers. Hopefully, though, this threat of arrest will force R Kelly to show up in court once and for all, where he'll do the decent thing and get his child porn trial pushed back a couple of years again.

Utah's not a good place to go if you're famous. It's a place where you can't even angrily attack the interior of your own car without attracting a crowd of rubber-neckers, and the threat of bumping into Lindsay Lohan is so high that the CIA has put the state near the top of its official Idiot List.

But worse than that, Utah is a state with a police force so officious that it even stops controversial R&B singers from attending child porn hearings, as R Kelly discovered yesterday.

R Kelly has been waiting since 2002 to go to trial over charges that supposed sex tape of him allegedly having sex with what appears to be a 13 or 14-year-old girl and then doing a wee on her. If he's convicted of all charges, then R Kelly will end up spending anything up to 15 years in jail.

But that's only if R Kelly hasn't died of old age by the time the trial actually starts, because it's been pushed time and time again thanks to burst internal organs and ladder-related accidents. Most recently, the R Kelly child porn trial was set to start in September, but that fell through because his lawyer had a sore tumpsy from giving birth. So yesterday R Kelly was due in a Chicago court to hear when the new trial would start.

Except he didn't show up. Why? Had R Kelly gone on the run to found a brave new land where grown men can film themselves widdling on teenagers' heads whenever they want, unless they didn't do it in which case they'd be perfectly free not to? No, R Kelly was stuck in Utah because a policeman had decided that his bus driver wasn't properly rested and ordered him to pull over for eight hours. According to E! Online, this annoyed the prosecutors somewhat:

"It is an abuse of the process and disrespectful of the court and your honor for everyone who has come prepared to go," said Assistant State's Attorney Shauna Boliker. "The very least he could do is be here for his appointed court date."

And because of the Utah-enforced no-show, the judge decided to put an arrest warrant on R Kelly's head unless he shows up in court by 9am today, Chicago time. It could be one of the most important court hearings of R Kelly's life, too, because it's expected to be when the judge will give him a final start date for the trial.

Well, OK, maybe not a final start date – what's more likely to happen is that someone vaguely related to the case will trip over a skateboard, push the trial back again and give R Kelly the chance to record a couple more slightly inappropriate albums all about the way his penis resembles a car key.

Read more:

R. Kelly's Bus-Stop Blues – E! Online