Prison Break is no more. Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly has decided that Prison Break’s fourth season will be its last. This will no doubt come as a shock to the solitary homeless man who didn’t think that Prison Break got cancelled in 2006 anyway.

So Prison Break may be dying, but let’s focus on all the positive things it gave us – like Wentworth Miller and that hour a week where nothing good was on TV so we could read books instead.

The problem with most big American dramas these days is that they don’t know how to stretch out for multiple seasons. Lost got around this by becoming so impossibly dense that you can’t follow episodes without the aid of a flipchart and an encyclopedia. 24 just repeats itself exactly every year with only minor changes, like the introduction of a female president who’s got a face that looks like a cake. And Heroes is determined to deliberately lose all of its viewers by progressively getting worse and worse with every passing minute.

And then there’s Prison Break – a show about a man breaking out of prison with the aid of his magical tattoo. Which was all well and good, except that at the end of the first season he broke out of prison, leaving nowhere for the show to go.

That’s why the following three seasons of Prison Break – where tattoo man goes on the lam, gets caught, goes to another prison, breaks out of that prison too and goes on the lam again, all because the president is evil or something – were such hopeless failures. You want examples of how bad the latter seasons of Prison Break were? OK, here’s three:

1) In America, the audience halved between the first season and the fourth season.

2) The Prison Break cast got so bored by the ridiculous plotlines that they actually took to killing boys in drunken accidents to pass the time.

3) In the UK, not even Channel Five thought that seasons three and four of Prison Break were good enough to broadcast. And this is Channel Five – the channel that, in a few hours, is genuinely going to broadcast a documentary about a clever pig.

And these reasons are why Kevin Reilly from Fox has decided to put Prison Break out of its misery. The LA Times reports:

The action series starring Wentworth Miller will return on April 17 for its final run of four to six episodes. The show premiered in 2005 as a hit but has progressively run out of steam. “Creatively, the show’s just played out,” Reilly said. “Creatively, everyone feels enough stories were told. We want to finish strong.”

“Well, alright, maybe not strong,” we then imagine Kevin Reilly went on to say “But mediocre. No, no, mediocre’s not the word either. Alone and ignored. That’s the one! We want to finish alone and ignored!”

But now pilot season is coming up, so let’s just hope that Fox learns from the demise of Prison Break and stops commissioning shows that can’t possibly stretch beyond their quickly-completed premise. Apparently Fox is especially keen on the new high-concept drama Man Jumps Off Log, about a man who wants to jump off a log. He does actually jump off the log within the first six seconds of the first episode, but we’re sure they’ll find away to stretch it out for years after that.

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Janet Jackson has been cancelling swathes of concerts on her current Rock Witchu tour because of a mystery illness that suddenly took hold five minutes before a show in Canada. The fact alone that nobody would reveal the illness was a cause for consternation – but now we know.

Janet Jackson has been suffering from migraine-associated vertigo. We’re sure that Janet Jackson’s fans are all completely sympathetic to this diagnosis – don’t forget that symptoms of vertigo include nausea, vomiting and difficulty standing – all of which will be familiar to anyone who witnessed Janet Jackson pop a nork out during the Super Bowl halftime show of 2004.

Janet Jackson’s mystery illness has been a cause for concern for quite some time now. Last month in Canada Janet Jackson cancelled a show at the eleventh hour and was rushed to hospital. The lack of immediate diagnosis, coupled with the fact that Janet Jackson then cancelled further concerts, became quite the cause for concern.

Was Janet Jackson seriously ill? Had she come down with cancer? Did she have a dicky ticker? Was it time for her to update her will to include her imaginary teenage daughter? Or, conversely, was Janet Jackson just doing that thing her brother Michael does where he conveniently gets quite ill whenever he’s asked to do something he doesn’t feel like?

Maybe we’ll never know. Or maybe Janet Jackson’s spokesperson has now revealed exactly which illness she’s suffering from in quite specific detail. Which one is it, huh? Huh? Oh, the second one. E! Online reports:

“After a thorough medical evaluation, it has been confirmed that Janet’s symptoms are being caused by a rare form of migraine called vestibular migraine or migraine-associated vertigo for which she is currently receiving treatment,” read a statement released by Jackson’s camp and obtained by E! News.

Well that’s a weight off everyone’s mind, at least. Janet Jackson isn’t seriously ill after all – she’s just got a bit of a headache.

Actually in all seriousness it’s quite easy to see how Janet Jackson could develop something like migraine-associated vertigo. Now that she’s on tour, she spends her nights standing in front of gigantic blasts of thrashing noise, and that probably caused havoc with her inner ear.

Oh, no, wait, sorry – this is Janet Jackson we’re talking about, isn’t it. Her concerts actually involve her whispering the word ’sexy’ over and over during several songs that all sound like a mouse farting on top of a broken wind-up clock. That probably wouldn’t do much to her inner ear at all, in retrospect. God knows what’s up with her.

Still, we hope that Janet Jackson makes a speedy recovery from this vertigo that’s been blighting her tour so badly. Hopefully she’ll be able to get over this illness, complete all her shows and get back to what she does the best – making albums that nobody even pretends to notice any more. Attagirl, Janet.

Sadly, none of these groups watch Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. The group that likes her won’t watch it because they don’t like how she’s portrayed in it, the group that hates her won’t watch it because they hate her and the group that doesn’t care won’t watch it because ultimately they’re quite sensible. And that’s why Denise Richards: It’s Complicated is getting cancelled.

Personally we blame the title. Denise Richards: It’s Complicated is both vague and untrue. Denise Richards Exceeds The Most Negative Aspects Of Her Reputation While Simultaneously Doing Her Best To Prove The Opposite would have got the viewers flooding in. But, no, nobody ever listens to us.

If someone told you to go and make a TV show about Denise Richards’ life, there’s an overwhelming chance that you’d have picked one of the following options:

1) Woo Hoo! It’s The Denise Richards Bikini Trampoline Hour!

2) Laptop/Old Lady Discus Eventing With Denise Richards.

3) Denise Richards Apologises For That James Bond Film Directly Into Camera For Up To Six Hours At A Time.

What you wouldn’t make is Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, a reality TV platform for Denise Richards to endlessly bleat about how the media twists everything she says and occasionally sit down with her nephew and have awkward conversations about whether or not he’s ever cracked one off to her threesome scene from Wild Things.

Denise Richards: It’s Complicated came whirling in on a cloud of mad eyed spite-hype and promised to rip the lid of the pointlessly bitter feud that’s raging on between Denise Richards and her ex-husband Charlie Sheen, only for E! viewers to realise that even they didn’t care about Denise Richards to sit through hour after hour of utter tedium to get there.

So Denise Richards: It’s Complicated has been cancelled. Probably. Here’s OK! magazine with more:

“The numbers started out pretty good – just over 1.5 million tuned in for the premiere episode,” a source told The Insider yesterday. “But the audience has dropped off… Viewers were disgusted that a mother of two young girls would use such foul language,” the source adds.

That this news comes at the exact same time that Charlie Sheen has impregnated his new wife and got a massive payrise must be a kick in the teeth for Denise Richards. All she wanted to do was raise her children in the uncomfortable spotlight of the media and now even that unalienable right has been taken away from her.

Who knows what Denise Richards will do next (porn)? She’s a working mother with bills to pay (do porn please) and with her acting career drying up there can’t be many more avenues for her to explore (porn, do porn, for the love of all that’s holy Denise Richards do porn porn porn porn porn).

Anyway, we can survive the loss of Denise Richards: It’s Complicated so long as nobody buggers around with Living Lohan. We don’t know what we’d do if both our favourite reality TV shows about a famous woman with questionable parenting skills that we’ve never watched more than 15 seconds of were cancelled, you see.

While normally this would be greeted with trepidation and a slight amount of fear, the sheer quality of the source material, combined with the fact that the film is supposed to actually be, y’know – good – has people sweating around the groin, awaiting next year’s release.

That is, unless Fox have their way and ban the film from ever coming out.

Oh, we’re not kidding here – that’s what they’re trying to do in the latest of legal battles that shows just how the company is actually forged from Satan’s testicles themselves. There’s evil, then there’s Fox evil.

This is the company that cancelled Family Guy in its prime – though they did bring it back, they actually ended up becoming more evil by letting the damn thing continue, seeing as it’s turned into utter tripe in recent years. Then there was the cancellation of Firefly, but we won’t go into that – it’s still too painful. They cancel, they block, they ruin and they devour, and they never seem to stop.

Next on their list is Zack Snyder, director of 300, and his adaptation of Watchmen, the classic 80s comic series that ranks amongst the finest books ever written. Apparently. With some nice spoof adverts.

The film is bankrolled and due for release through Warner Bros early next year, but some convoluted and complicated legal wrangling has revealed that Fox are claiming that they own the rights to a film release of the property.

While this came about in February of this year, well before Watchmen fever had truly got a hold of the internets, it has been decided recently by a judge that Warner Bros could not have the case thrown out of court as they had asked.

What this means is that Fox are free to pursue their copyright infringement case against Warner Bros, and are looking to get back either damages for the trouble – sure to be a few quid at the very least – or, in a worst case scenario, ban the movie from being released indefinitely.

And it looks like Fox’s band of lawyers, built as we all know from pure evil, are looking to force a worst case scenario – pushing to kill the project altogether rather than take some of its potentially huge box office. A statement released by Fox read:

“Warner Bros.’ production and anticipated release of ‘The Watchmen’ motion picture violates 20th Century Fox’s long-standing motion picture rights in ‘The Watchmen’ property.”

Which is pretty standard stuff until you realise they seemingly don’t even care enough to get the name of the comic right in the first place. So if they don’t even care about that, do they care about you, the fans – the public? Do they bollocks. It’s idiots in suits playing at running the world again, and it’s getting to be a bit annoying now.

But hey, at least Fox can clear the way for their own films to come out next year, and there’ll be no risk of them being compared side-by-side with Watchmen. That could be viewed as a good point. If you were mental.

The case is far from settled, though Fox are pushing for it to be fast-tracked through the courts. Probably so they can get back to stealing candy from orphanages, or burning down babies or something.

Today’s vitriolic rant brought to you by hunger pains and a lack of coffee. We will resume normal service shortly.

However, a spokesman for Winehouse has said that this isn’t the case and that the real reason is to do with a clash of interests regarding the development of the song, of which Amy had “other ideas”.

Is Amy telling the truth, or is it Mark? Who knows? As far as that argument goes, it’s probably best to live and let die.

It’s a terrible shame for all things Bond as, when it comes to musical collaborations, nobody does it better than Winehouse and Ronson.

Fortunately though, unlike the prospect of this dream Bond-duet, tomorrow never dies and, as they are young and have all the time in the world to recover, Ronson has stated that he hopes they’ll have the chance to die another day, having another go with the Bond theme next time around.

It’s a brave statement that goes to show that they aint no octopussies.

Oh dear.

Ronson told Sky News:

We did work on it but we never finished it, so that’s about it. We tried to work for a little bit. I’m not sure she’s ready to work on music yet.

And Amy’s spokesman responded:

She has always made her own decisions about her music. Needless to say, this is part of the process between artist and producer and we’re sure they will continue to make great music together.

And so, as the moonraker of Amy’s mind gently drifts her from one traumatic experience to the next; from scaring the living daylights out of her dad to the point where he wants her locked up, to her wanting her own husband to remain locked up, from her husband wanting a divorce, to her being cautioned for nutting some good Samaritan on the street, it seems that the world is more than enough for Amy.

Read More – Winehouse is not ready for music – Sky News

Not only do you have to live with the fact that you've wasted a great big portion of your life endorsing the very worst type of music ever invented, but now Van Halen have postponed a load more reunion dates as well.

This is the second batch of shows that Van Halen have ditched this month so far, and it's all because Eddie Van Halen is currently being tested for a mystery medical condition. Sounds serious. We just hope that whatever the condition is, it's important enough to deny thousands of fans the chance to pay an inflated amount of money to see a gang of old men play music that all sounds like the theme-tune to Biker Mice From Mars.

Van Halen has always enjoyed something of a fluid line-up but, among the 400 singers and schoolboy bassists called Wolfgang that have passed through Van Halen's ranks, Eddie Van Halen has always remained the constant of the band.

Sure, Eddie Van Halen may have taken the odd day off to record Michael Jackson's most overrated song or develop a crippling substance abuse problem or two, but he's always been the beating heart of Van Halen. So when Eddie Van Halen contracts a mystery illness and has to go and be tested, that pretty much spells curtains for Van Halen as a band.

Earlier this month Van Halen cancelled a few dates because of Eddie Van Halen's 'issues. At the time we were undecided whether this meant Eddie Van Halen had fallen out with his bandmates for the billionth time in a decade, or whether his ex-wife's autobiography had plunged him back headfirst into a blizzard or booze and drugs, or whether he just has post-traumatic stress disorder from that time his garden got a bit flooded.

But now that a total of 17 Van Halen dates have been disrupted, it's starting to look like Eddie Van Halen might actually have quite a serious medial problem, as Reuters reports:

Rock band Van Halen's reunion tour fell into disarray on Monday when it announced it would postpone all shows through April 19 while guitarist Eddie Van Halen undergoes tests for an unspecified medical condition… According to organizers, Van Halen, 53, who has battled cancer and substance abuse, "is currently under doctors' care" and will "continue medical tests to define a course of treatment." No further details were made available.

Sounds worrying and, although his music makes us want to tear lumps of flesh out of our faces, we still hope that Eddie Van Halen's condition isn't as deadly as it's starting to sound.

Because, seriously, first Patrick Swayze and now Eddie Van Halen? Our 1980s icons are being obliterated. And these things always come in threes, so if we were Steve Guttenberg or Roland Rat we'd be bloody well cacking it at the moment.

Read more:

Van Halen scraps more shows amid mystery ailment – Reuters 

That's certainly the case with Van Halen. After more messily aborted reunions than you could ever wish for, Van Halen finally hit the road in September to play their bad-haired, leotard-wearing widdly-widdly-woo hard rock music to as many middle-aged bad-haired nostalgia freaks as the possibly could.

Except it couldn't last and, with crushing inevitability, the rest of the Van Halen reunion tour has been scrapped; either forever or until the band feels the need to demonstrate its innate lack of personal and organisation skills in public again.

You know why bands split up? It's because they hate each other. And you know why bands reform? It's because they're greedy. And if you put a bunch of greedy people who hate each other on a stage and ask them to work together, it'll inevitably end in tears. It happened with the Spice Girls reunion just a couple of weeks ago, and it's happened with Van Halen so often that we can't be bothered to count any more. 

Van Halen is a band so opposed to getting along that it's been through four singers and a couple of bassists in its time. But to its fans, the classic Van Halen line-up was Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth. Two years ago a tour by that classic Van Halen was promised, but it didn't happen because they decided to replace Anthony with a boy called Wolfgang and Eddie Van Halen kept getting wankered on all the booze.

However, once he sorted himself out, Van Halen actually managed to properly reform – albeit with Wolfgang in tow – for their long-promised tour last September. And they were strong – playing their one song that everyone knows and some others night after night so well that not even an actual natural disaster could halt them.

Until now. The Van Halen reunion is off and, as UPI reports, it might be because Eddie's found the keys to the drinks cabinet again:

Although performances were lined up through April 19, TMZ.com cited unnamed sources as saying the band's hotel reservations are being canceled now that the rest of the tour has been scrapped. The band's last three shows were canceled as Eddie Van Halen is said to be having "issues," the report said. The rock icon, who spent time in rehab last year, has been in media headlines the last few weeks because his ex-wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is making the rounds to promote her new tell-all memoir.

Yes, there's nothing to turn a man to drink like a book by his ex-wife about how much he used to drink. But at least Eddie Van Halen's 'issues' didn't kick in for five months after the tour started, meaning that thousands of people got to hear Jump and then a bunch of other stuff that they jigged around to and pretended they knew so as not to let the band's feelings down.

And, if an alcoholic relapse did bring about this tour cancellation, then we wish Eddie Van Halen the speediest of recoveries, and hop he gets back to scheduling and then cancelling tour dates as soon as possible.

Read more:

Report: Rest of Van Halen tour scrapped - UPI 

The Vanity Fair Oscars party – probably the most prestigious Oscar night party held by a magazine specifically for actresses to get trollied on free booze because they're not as good as Cate Blanchett – has been cancelled.

It's a blow to the credibility of the Oscars and no mistake – with no Vanity Fair party to go to, Elizabeth Hurley's got nowhere to topple out of in front of some cameramen even though she's never been able to make a film that hasn't made us want to stab ourselves in the neck. Won't someone think of Elizabeth Hurley?

The Oscars, it's fair to say, are up in the air this year. And that's got everything to do with the writers' strike. If the writers' strike continues then the Oscars will go the same way as the Golden Globes with no stars attending, no clips of movies shown, no witty between-gong banter scripted and – worst of all – Atonement winning something.

But some are saying that the writers' strike will be over by the weekend, and if that's the case then the Oscars will be business as usual – full of trussed-up actors and actresses parading up and down a red carpet talking about what an important job they do as if they all worked down the mines. And even though half the stars invited didn't turn up, Monday's Oscar luncheon reflected this bullish 'business as usual' attitude with aplomb.

However, it's not going to be business as usual for the Oscars. And that's because Vanity Fair has decided to cancel its traditional Oscars party. E! Online reports:

"After much consideration, and in support of the writers and everyone else affected by this strike, we have decided that this is not the appropriate year to hold our annual Oscar party," the New York-based magazine said in a statement. "We want to congratulate all of this year’s nominees and we look forward to hosting our 15th Oscar party next year." A VF spokeswoman wouldn't say how much money the mag is losing by scrapping the party so close to showtime, but she said that much of the materials that have been ordered can be used next year. 

Like sandwiches, for example. They'll keep for another year. And over the next 12 months the giant ice sculpture of an Oscar statue ordered by Vanity Fair might warp and buckle until it starts to look like Danny DeVito on The View, but screw it. Those famous bastards don't know they're born anyway. 

So with no Vanity Fair party to go to, what's left for the celebrities to go to after the Oscars? Well, there's always Elton John's AIDS fundraiser – but who wants to think about something as mopey as AIDS when they've just won a sparkly golden man for memorising some words better than anyone else? And then there's the Governors Ball held by the Academy, but that just sounds like it'll be full of retired colonial bombardiers with gout. So that means that stars can either make their own entertainment or do an Eddie Murphy and bugger off home immediately after they don't win. 

Of course, the worst-hit by the death of the Vanity Fair Oscars party are the British breakfast TV presenters whose only job is to stand by the entrance of the Vanity Fair party and shout "George! George! Angelina! Keira!" at stars as they walk past ignoring them. Without the Vanity Fair Oscars party to cover, chances are you'll see them standing outside your local Argos on the morning of February 25 trying to interview a tramp because he looks a bit like Nick Nolte. Won't someone think of the tramps?

Read more:

Oscars Strike Out with Vanity Fair - E! Online 

It was an exciting thought – that maybe by the time we tucked ourselves up in our one big communal hecklerspray bed (head-to-toe, we're not perverts) – Dr Phil would have restored factory settings on Britney Spears, reverting her back into the Britney we love best, the provocatively-virginal schoolgirl who dressed up in pigtails and a miniskirt and asked grown men to hit her. But sadly that hasn't happened because Dr Phil has cancelled today's scheduled Britney Spears episode as a result, citing pressure from the Spears family.

Lesson learnt, Dr Phil has decided to instead do a show entitled Fine, But Don't Come Running To Me Next Time Your Minge Is All Over The Internet.

Britney Spears has been getting a lot of attention for her antics on Thursday, but who can really look inside themselves and say that they've never locked themselves in a bathroom with one of their children during a dispute with a former spouse, possibly having takensome form of substance, possibly with a gun, possibly screaming that they'd either kill themselves or their baby until the authorities arrive and they're strapped into an ambulance and taken to hospital for psychological evaluation? Can you? Can you really? Really? We thought everybody did that. No? Just Britney? Ohh, so that's what all this fuss is about.

Anyway, long story short, Britney Spears is effed. She's not allowed to see her children, her hopes of ever being a parent with equal custody are fading fast, her career's taken another dive and her new boyfriend is a paparazzo, the type of person who she usually hisses death threats at.

Clearly there's only one man in the whole world who can fix Britney Spears, and that's Dr Phil. When Britney Spears left hospital, Dr Phil was by her side, probably whispering helpful catchphrases like "Let's call a spade a shovel" and "I want you to get excited about your life." And this was due to be followed up today by Dr Phil devoting an entire episode of his TV show to trying to help Britney Spears out of her current mess.

But now it isn't happening. Right now Dr Phil is claiming that he ditched the episode because:

"The Spears situation is too intense at this time, and out of consideration to the family."

And it is considerate, too – considerate because now Britney Spears' father won't have to walk round to Dr Phil's house and throw a brick through his windows and poo through his letterbox. Life & Style magazine reports that Jamie Spears – Britney's father – wasn't entirely chuffed when he heard about the show:

"As soon as Jamie realized Dr.Phil was making public statements about Britney, including assessments of her condition, he got angry. He started making phone calls to everybody in the family, telling them not to cooperate."

So where does that leave everyone? Well, it leaves Britney Spears in exactly the same position she was in before, in so deep that she can't see where her life is going and rich enough not to care. But Dr Phil? Don't you worry about Dr Phil. This is just one minor setback on his route to world domination which will inevitably end with a hologram of his face projected onto the moon, silently judging everything anyone does.

Plus his show tomorrow is about harrowing domestic abuse involving children. And who wouldn't want to watch that?

Read more: 

Dr. Phil cancels Britney Spears show – New York Daily News