That’s right. Duffy. Duffy who your mum likes. Duffy who sings like a baby goat stuck in a cattle grid. Duffy who looks like she’d burst into tears if you showed her a sad kitten. Duffy won three Brit awards last night, roughly six more than she deserves. But still, it’s not like Iron Maiden won anything, is it?

What? Iron Maiden did win something? God. We’re doomed.

If you missed the Brit awards last night you’d do well to keep quiet about it, because we didn’t and it was such a horrific waste of two hours that we’d seriously consider chopping the top of your head off in your sleep and swapping brains with you if it meant we’d forget it.

Because, let’s not mess around here, the Brits were bad last night. Worst in living memory bad. Everything about last night’s Brits was wrong. The barely-there hosts. The set (really, whose idea was it to make the winners go on a five-mile hike just to get to the podium?). All the cutaway shots of bored-looking bald men in suits. The winners. Everything.

In fact, to keep us from getting so angry that we accidentally crap out one of our kidneys, we’re just going to bulletpoint some of the more memorable moments from last night’s Brits for you and have done with it:

* U2 performing their new song as the lyrics flashed up behind them like they were too deeply profound to go ignored. They aren’t profound. It’s a song about some shoes.

* Incidentally, we promise never to mock Bono for his sunglasses again if he promises to never take them off again. Seriously, the man looks like Gollum’s malformed twin.

* Duffy winning Best British Female.

* Duffy accepting the award by saying “Best British Female? I don’t know what that means.” She’s a clever one, that Duffy.

* Coldplay still not realising that shouting “OK!” before every line of every song they perform makes them all look like wankers.

* Duffy winning Best British Breakthrough.

* Girls Aloud’s artfully-staged ‘nude’ performance being wrecked by all the cameras clumsily picking up the straps of their dresses.

* Duffy winning Best British Album.

* Take That miming from an actual spaceship just to annoy Robbie Williams.

* Duffy winning Best Jumped-Up Working Mens’ Club Cabaret Act.

* Paul Weller winning Best British Male purely because there was nobody else to give it to.

* Duffy winning Most Marketable Amy Winehouse Substitute Who Probably Won’t Take All The Drugs Or Punch Paying Fans In The Face.

* Iron Maiden winning Best Live Act, followed by the swift realisation that Radio 2 listeners should never be allowed to vote for anything ever again.

* Duffy winning Best Sustained Impersonation Of Uni From The 1980s Dungeons And Dragons Cartoon.

That is all. Try harder next year, please.

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It may not have happened yet, but we can’t see it being edgy, cool or vaguely risky. The show goes out at 8pm, leaving today’s young pop stars with an entire hour to swear before the watershed kicks in.

Just over a week ago, we watched the Grammys which quite frankly overshadowed the entire Brits ceremony. Not only did the Grammys have a million categories where nearly everyone can win, but we don’t expect there to be any pre-show scraps like the alleged one between Rihanna and Chris Brown. Unless someone attacks Chris Martin with a pack of streaky bacon.

Hosted by Kylie and the two blokes from Gavin And Stacy, we’ll no doubt see references to their own show multiple times during the Brits. Well, that and Kylie putting on her best fake smile when she doesn’t get all the references towards Cumberland sausage.

Its shame really that M.I.A couldn’t keep her newborn child inside her belly for an extra week. How selfish of how to boost the Grammy ratings with a potential live birth. Poor Fearne Cotton would have been perfect to follow the event live on a special ITV2 show. Imagine her mopping up M.I.A’s broken waters and getting the first interview with the child.

Coldplay, Duffy, Elbow, Radiohead and The Ting Tings have all been nominated for best British album. This strikes us as nothing short of an amazing feat for Radiohead to be nominated. Not because it’s a rubbish record, but their In Rainbows album was released in 2007. It became downloadable in October and physically went on sale in December. Perhaps the organisers didn’t want to nominate Estelle in case she did a wonky dance as an acceptance speech. Or maybe everything else released last year was utter gash.

We’d go through each and every nomination, but to be honest it’ll be a waste of your time. Despite winning the Mercury prize, Elbow will win bugger all, Coldplay will sweep the board and make cheesy acceptance speeches and Take That will have to do with their music being used in supermarket adverts.

But what about the entertainment on the night? Who is going to perform at the ceremony and no doubt see their record sales/downloads rise dramatically the next day. Make sure your socks don’t blow off, because the following people are going to be singing and messing up dance routines. Coldplay, Duffy, Estelle, The Ting Tings, Pet Shop Boys, Girls Aloud, Kings Of Leon, Take That and bloody U2.

Yes, U2 are going to be providing us with a performance with their latest single in an attempt to get more people to like it and get over its strange title. We don’t know if Bono plans to spice it up with some visual imagery of dying children, topped off with a speech about how economically fucked we are.

Each year, the ceremony honours a band/artist who in the eyes of the BPI has contributed outstandingly to music. This year, synth-based techno duo The Pet Shop Boys get the dubious honour. With fifty million sales behind them, we can’t really argue with how successful they are. At least they kept Simply Red out for another year.

Will someone turn up drunk at the ceremony? How many swearwords will be uttered? Who’ll balls up their acceptance speech and fall off the stage? No-one knows! Tune in to ITV from 8pm tonight to see the supposed best of British music being celebrated.

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Is that what happened, though? No – thanks to the Brits' stringent 'don't let Ozzy Osbourne say more than three words in a row' policy, the only vaguely controversial thing the Osbournes brought to the Brit awards was the way that Sharon Osbourne's face looked as if it had been attacked by jellyfish in her sleep.

Oh, and Leona Lewis didn't win any of the four Brit awards she was nominated for. That's sort of controversial, isn't it? Anyone?

The Brit Awards always manage to scrape at least one stand-out moment, whether it's Jarvis Cocker mooning Michael Jackson, that Tubthumping bloke lobbing water at a politician or Joss Stone acting like the world's biggest anus. There was plenty of scope for controversy at last night's Brits, too – Ozzy Osbourne wanted to violently attack Heather Mills, for example, and the puffy-cheeked chimney sweep from Kaiser Chiefs got in a strop because people thought he was quite a lot crapper than he thought he was – but nothing came of it. 

In fact, aside from a brief display by Vic Reeves reinforcing why he isn't famous any more, the Brit awards were so utterly incident-free that we wish we spent two hours doing something a bit more worthwhile, like trying to burp the national anthem or crying.

So, without anything interesting to discuss, the Brits can be boiled down to two things – the performances and the awards. The awards went to the artists you expected them to – Take That got a couple, Foo Fighters got a couple, Arctic Monkeys got a couple, Mark Ronson won one – and Mika and Kate Nash also won a Brit each, although they weren't so much 'expected' as 'horribly, horribly wrong'.  

Sad old X Factor winner Leona Lewis didn't win a jot, though, despite being nominated for four Brits – Best Breakthrough, Best Female, Best Album and Best Single. Leona's losses might have been down to music industry snobbery – she won a talent show contest, after all – or a backlash because you can't listen to any local radio station for more than 30 seconds without hearing Bleeding Love any more.

And then there are the performances. Despite the much-trumpeted musical collaborations at this year's Brit awards, nothing really clawed out of the realms of mediocre. Mika wanked around like a little girl hopped up on Um Bongo at a karaoke party with Beth Ditto. Rihanna and Klaxons sounded like one of those dreary mash-ups that were popular six years ago. Mark Ronson, Adele, Daniel Merriweather and Amy Winehouse made Version sound even more Stars On 45s-y than usual and Kaiser Chiefs were upstaged by some tiny buildings.

And let's not forget that Paul McCartney finished the evening with the same four-hour version of Hey Jude that he closes every single bloody event he's ever invited to with.

So that was the Brits 2008. Woo hoo. Let's put in an early motion to get Joss Stone to host next year's show. And let's fill her dressing room with Special Brew beforehand. At least that way we'll have something to talk about afterwards.

Read more:

Leona Loser - Mirror