To be fair, everyone knew what to expect anyway – 90 minutes of Britney Spears going “Cuh! What happened THERE? Lorks a-lummy, I went proper bananas for a while, didn’t I? Oh well, I’m better now. Buy my record” – but that didn’t stop all the interesting parts of the documentary creeping out weeks ago.

But now that Britney: Have I Told You About My Record has been aired in America, we now know everything that happened in it from start to finish. So what did happen in Britney: You Know What’d Make A Lovely Christmas Present For All Your Loved Ones? My Record? Nothing. It turns out that people weren’t leaking the interesting parts of the documentary, just the bits where Britney Spears used actual identifiable words.

Britney Spears fans on either side of the Atlantic have equal reason to be jealous of each other today. In Britain, Britney’s new album Circus has been released but her warts and all documentary Britney: For The Record isn’t aired until tonight. Meanwhile, in America, Britney: For The Record was shown last night but Circus isn’t out yet.

So who has it better? The country that has already seen Britney Spears tearfully picking through the remains of her broken life, or the country that has already got full access to the sound of Britney Spears going “Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow” during a song where she appears to be begging her own father for sexual intercourse?

Well, the truth is that nobody wins. The British don’t win because the Britney Spears album can be heard for free anyway – and also because a victory that involves hearing Britney Spears going “UHH Pappi LOVE you! UHH Pappi LOVE you!” again and again isn’t really a victory at all – and the Americans don’t win because Britney: For The Record has been leaked so extensively that it’s barely worth watching anyway.

Before Britney: For The Record was shown anywhere, everybody knew that at some point during it Britney Spears would say that her life was worse than prison, and that she’d also confess that it was loneliness that sent her barmy. But was that just the tip of the iceberg?

No. No, that was pretty much the entire iceberg. Unless it was a special kind of iceberg that you can see 99% of on the surface, with the remaining one percent being made up of some sort of garbled nonsense about driving a car that doesn’t really make any sense. MTV reports:

Explaining her breakdown, Spears said that she had let the wrong people into her life. “[It was] a really bad time in my life. … I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say I was OK,” she admitted. “Maybe I had traumatic stress. I just remember I did not want to be at home. When I was in my car, I was driving and I was going somewhere.”

Now we’re not sure if that’s a metaphor for Britney’s life, or if she was literally driving a car somewhere at some point, but that’s not important. Nor is the fact that most of Britney: For The Record was leaked out so long ago that not a single person who watched it could have been even slightly surprised by anything that happened in it. No, what’s important is the overriding message of Britney: For The Record, the universal message that everyone can learn a little from.

And, if you even needed to be told, that message is “Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow.”

Profound, we’re sure.

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In fact it’s fair to say that so much of the Britney Spears documentary has now been leaked that the only new footage that’ll come as a surprise to anyone watching the whole thing next week is a three-second snippet of Britney Spears gazing into the middle distance and wistfully humming the theme-tune to Animal Hospital.

For instance, People magazine has now seen an exclusive preview of Britney: For The Record, and the most exciting bit left to review seems to be when Britney Spears starts crying and says of her life “It’s bad. I’m sad.” Bad? Sad? That’s the most eloquent you can be, Britney? Disappointing. We just expected something more profound from the poet behind “Womanizer womanizer/ You’re a womanizer/ Oh/ Womanizer/ Oh.”

If there’s one thing we hate it’s a spoiler. Honestly, when people told us that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense, or that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, or that Dumbledore is going to die in the next Harry Potter film, it really took the shine off our day.

So imagine how bummed out we were when people started blurting spoilers about the new Britney Spears documentary Britney: For The Record all over the place. We were furious! Apparently Britney Spears gets sad and cries a lot in it, which is absolutely the last thing we expected from a recovering psychiatric patient who’d had a high-profile mental breakdown, and now our enjoyment of it is going to be totally ruined!
We already knew that Britney Spears thought her life was like a prison sentence, only worse because never actually got to kill anybody and she still has to look after those poxy kids of hers (or something). But in case that wasn’t enough, People has seen a special preview of the documentary and seems determined to blab about it until its jaw falls off. Here’s what it said:

Spears takes topics ranging from her failed romances with Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline (”I never really faced it, and I just ran,” she says of divorcing him) to why she let “bad people” into her life. Her excuse: “Because I was lonely.”  At one point, Spears – whose father has permanent legal conservatorship over her affairs – bursts into tears while discussing her situation. “It’s bad,” she says. “I’m sad.”

As well as this brief rhyming extravaganza of unrestrained misery, Britney Spears apparently uses the documentary to lament of her loss of focus and control in recent years, how she isn’t cool any more and that she only agreed to be filmed because she didn’t like how she was being portrayed.

Which is good – judging by what we’ve heard about this documentary so far, if Britney Spears wanted to be portrayed as a hollowed-out constantly-sobbing paranoid depressive forced to perform against her will by a league of shadowy all-controlling authoritarians, then she’ll be super pleased with how it turns out.

In fact, Britney: For The Record might just go down in history as one of the most berserk marketing ideas ever. Two days after it gets broadcast, Britney Spears’ new album Circus is released, and that’s something that Britney wants to promote by being as uncomfortably miserable as possible on camera. What sort of circus is this anyway? One of those creepy European ones?