So you’re a Dancing With The Stars voter. Your actions will decide who makes the Dancing With The Stars final.

You have four remaining dancers. One is Mya, perhaps the best celebrity dancer in the show’s history. One is Donny Osmond, the beloved cultural icon. One is Joanna Krupa, a smouldering bikini model. And one is Kelly Osbourne, who is Kelly Osbourne. You have to eliminate one dancer, effectively stopping them from wriggling around a studio in a barely-there scrap of sequinned spandex the following week.

And you choose to eliminate Joanna Krupa. Dancing With The Stars voters, you confuse us sometimes.

Spoiler alert: Mya wins the Dancing With The Stars final next week. She has to, surely. We’ve looked at this from every angle and it seems clear that Mya – who’s received two sets of perfect scores in the last fortnight – can’t not win Dancing With The Stars. Just look at her competition. Sure, Donny Osmond might be all lovable and toothy and less prone to spontaneously falling over than his sister; and Kelly Osbourne might be, you know, still inexplicably part of Dancing With The Stars, but Mya’s the only actual dancer left.

But what do we know? Nothing, that’s what. If we were in charge of Dancing With The Stars then things would have all been so different. Kelly Osbourne would have been eliminated back in September, and we’d have only booked Aaron Carter as part of an elaborate plan to use springs to fire him through the studio roof and into the lion enclosure of the neighbouring zoo on the first day of rehearsals. And Joanna Krupa definitely wouldn’t have been eliminated from the show last night.

But, alas, she was. Despite possessing everything we like about models (physical attractiveness) and nothing we dislike about models (self-awareness, basic cognitive ability), Joanna Krupa was given the heave-ho from Dancing With The Stars last night, meaning that she’ll miss the grand final. And, boy oh boy, was she angry when she found out. E! Online reports:

“It’s been such an amazing experience and I’ve grown as a person,” the 30-year-old model said after hearing the disappointing news. “Thank you to the judges. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I had a great partner.”

Yeah, that’s right Joanna! You tell those bastards!

But while Joanna Krupa has been forced to hand in her glittery unitard and go back to a life of wearing bikinis, swathing herself in goose fat and pulling sexy faces that make it look as if she’s trying to work out a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle, the rest of us get to look forward to next week’s Dancing With The Stars final. Who’s going to win?

Well, Mya, obviously. We said as much a few paragraphs ago. Seriously, you people have terrible memories.

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Admit it – for a moment there you were worried that Aaron Carter was going to win Dancing With The Stars.

It’s OK, we were worried too. Just the thought of renewed public validation of Aaron Carter filled us with absolute dread. What if he was allowed to bring back his reality TV show House Of Carters? What if he got to re-release his album Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)? What if he was driven so berserk by renewed fame that he started legally emancipating his parents again?

Well, relax. Aaron Carter was kicked off Dancing With The Stars last night. We’re in the clear.

We’re one week closer to discovering the winner of Dancing With The Stars. Actually, we take that back. We’re one week closer to discovering that Mya has won Dancing With The Stars. Because, goodness, it’ll be a sad day if any of the others beat her. Especially if it’s Kelly Osbourne. If we were Mya, and Kelly Osbourne was deemed to be a better dancer than us before an audience of millions, we’d go away and shatter our shins with a clawhammer. Just saying.

But we’ve got that to look forward to. At least we know for sure that Aaron Carter definitely won’t beat Mya at Dancing With The Stars, because he was booted off the show last night. Poor Aaron, he’s provided us with so much entertainment over the years – by taking all the drugs, embarking on the world’s most disastrous engagement, having it off with Lindsay Lohan and generally being so obnoxious that even Hulk Hogan’s family, the most obnoxious family in all of mankind, picked up on it – but he’ll just have to live with the fact that he isn’t as good at dancing as Kelly Osbourne. AP reports:

Carter cried early in the competition after harsh remarks from the judges… Head judge Len Goodman praised the young singer for his dedication. “You’re an inspiration to all young people that anything is possible,” Goodman said. “If you were my son, I would be so proud of you.”

And you know what? We’d be proud of Aaron Carter if he was our son, too. True, we’d have immediately crushed our testicles between two breezeblocks the instant he was born to prevent us ever repeating the atrocity, but if he ended up coming fifth in a televised dancing contest then we might be slightly proud of him. Fleetingly.

But at least Dancing With The Stars protected Aaron Carter from the magnitude of his failure this week. He may have come last, but at least they booked Susan Boyle and Michael Buble as musical guests to ensure that he wasn’t the very worst thing on the show. Although, based on this formula, to make Kelly Osbourne look good on the week she’s eliminated they’ll need to feature vocal performances by Josef Fritzl and Mumm-Ra The Everliving. Or something.

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Last night, Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos were eliminated from Dancing With The Stars.

We’ll just give you a minute to Google Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos so you know who they are, and then we’ll continue. Ready? OK, Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos, who are… no, wait, it’s gone. We’ll just Google their names again. Hang on. Oh, one’s an American footballer and the other’s the Iron Chef guy.

Anyway, the footballer and the Iron Chef guy – whose names we have already forgotten – were kicked off Dancing With The Stars last night. That’s basically the gist, more or less.

OK, hands up – when we announced the participants in this season of Dancing With The Stars, who honestly thought that Kelly Osbourne or Aaron Carter would make the final five? That’s right – none of you. And who could blame you? After all, logic dictates that Kelly Osbourne should have clumsily tripped over and snapped one of her femurs off in the middle of an Argentine Tango by now. And, honestly, the thought of people actually paying to endorse Aaron Carter in any pursuit whatsoever genuinely makes us hate the world a little bit.

But there they are. This year’s batch of Dancing With The Stars contestants has been whittled down to five, and both Kelly Osbourne and Aaron Carter are there. From this, we can only draw one conclusion – that everyone else on this season of Dancing With The Stars has been completely bloody awful. That’s right, Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos, we’re looking at you.

Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos became the latest contestants to be eliminated from Dancing With The Stars last night – Dacascos left because he lost a tense dance-off with Carter, and Irvin left because he’s so overwhelmingly atrocious at dancing that even the sight of him in his stupid spangly vest tops made most normal people instantly develop an irrational fear of dance. Anyway, AP reports:

Irwin finished his run on the hit ABC show with his highest score of the season. “Last night was a great night, and to see the audience here standing up, it’s their way of saying they appreciate the hard work,” Irwin said after learning his fate… Dacascos said being on the show was “one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

So with Michael Irvin and Mark Dacascos no longer in action, that just leaves Kelly Osbourne, Aaron Carter, Mya, Donny Osmond and Joanna Krupa in the running to win Dancing With The Stars. Only one can win. Only one will be remembered as the true Dancing With The Stars champion.

Actually, that’s a lot of rubbish. The winner might be remembered as the true Dancing With The Stars champion, but only for about five minutes. After that the show will cobble together another bunch of contestants – who will be very slightly less famous than this lot – for next spring and everyone from this season will be completely forgotten about. Even so, it can’t be Aaron Carter, can it? Can it?

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If you were Melissa Joan Hart, you’d probably want to be known for something other than Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

So good for Melissa Joan Hart. She’s finally exorcised the witch. Now, whenever people think of her, they won’t think of all the things that defined her hit show – like the creepy talking cat, her weirdly sexual aunt and the fact that appeared to still be attending high school in her mid-thirties – they’ll think of her as the woman who once came eighth in a middling season of Dancing With The Stars.

Unless Louie Vito gets remembered for that instead. He came eighth on Dancing With The Stars last night, too.

The halfway point of televised dance contests is always an important watermark. For us, personally, it’s the point where we convince ourselves that it’s never going to end and we’ll be forced to spend the rest of our miserable lives in a depressing never-ending spiral of fake tans and sequins and rictus Vaseline grins, listening to a tiny Italian man shriek endless incomprehensible high-pitched non-sequiturs by way of a nightmarish commentary until our cochleas give up the ghost and shatter into a billion pieces.

But that’s just us.

For Dancing With The Stars itself, this tends to be the point where it begins to take itself seriously as a dancing show, and forcefully starts to eliminate those crowd-pleasers who lack any discernible talent. That’s bad news for Michael Irvin, the butter-fingers footballer who seems mildly intent on unintentionally bludgeoning his partner to death before the season is out.

But it’s worse news for Sabrina The Teenage Witch star Melissa Joan Hart and professional snowboarder Louie Vito, who were both eliminated from Dancing With The Stars last night. In Hart’s case it was because she was a lousy dancer and nobody liked her, and in Vito’s case we suspect it was because a) being a snowboarder isn’t a proper job and b) he’s got a name like a mobster but he isn’t actually a mobster, which disappoints everyone when they meet him. E! Online reports:

“That’s the game,” Melissa said. “It’s tough, I was hoping to make it one more week. My husband was coming next week with my kids.”… “It’s a lot harder than it looks, dealing with frustration, nerves, because you’re doing something you’re not comfortable with in front of millions of people,” added Louie, who punctuated his exit with a backwards-twisty-twirly snowboard trick off the stage.

Don’t feel upset for Melissa Joan Hart or Louie Vito, though – sure, they’ll be disappointed by their exit from Dancing With The Stars, but it’s not like people will be coming up to them on the street to chastise them for their poor routines. Admittedly that’s because Melissa Joan Hart hasn’t been famous for about a decade and Louie Vito just hasn’t been famous, but should still come as a comfort to them.

Kelly Osbourne out next week, though, please.

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Oh Natalie Coughlin, we hardly knew you. No, literally, we’re still not completely sure who you are.

And now you’re gone. Last night Natalie Coughlin became the latest celebrity to be voted off Dancing With The Stars, after a nail-biting dance-off with Aaron Carter. So in many ways she’s lucky that she only went home, because we’ve always been of the understanding that anybody who is worse than Aaron Carter at anything at all should be smacked on the head and thrown to the lions.

In other Dancing With The Stars news, Kelly Osbourne hasn’t been eliminated yet. We know! Weird!

Here’s a theory: if Dancing With The Stars was called Swimming Without The Stars, Natalie Coughlin would have at least reached the quarter finals. This theory is based on two unequivocal facts - 1) Natalie Coughlin is a swimmer and not a dancer, and 2) Natalie Coughlin couldn’t be any less famous if she tried.

But what’s the point of wallowing in all these hopeless what-ifs? The fact of the matter is that Natalie Coughlin was eliminated from Dancing With The Stars last night, and there’s nothing that anybody could have done about it. Apart from, you know, picking up the telephone and voting for her. But who’d do that? The woman was rubbish.

Actually, no, that’s unfair. Natalie Coughlin wasn’t a rubbish dancer at all. In fact, you could argue that she was one of the best dancers in the entire competition. So instead let’s just say that she was voted off Dancing With The Stars because she’s inherently unlikeable as a human being and she wouldn’t know what a personality was if you smacked her on the arse with it. Yes, that seems fair. Access Hollywood reports:

Natalie blamed the ousting on having not revealed enough enthusiasm for the show. “I love this so much and I guess I didn’t show it — how much I loved it — but I really did and I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very disappointed,” [judge] Carrie Ann said. “Audience! Vote people! You’ve always had this incredible ability to mix strength and flexibility as well as fluidity, which is very unique.”

Although she’s probably quite upset at her comparatively early exit from Dancing With The Stars, Natalie Coughlin should look on the bright side – at least she did better than that old man and the woman from Entourage and Elizabeth Taylor’s friend and that terrifying cagefighter chap. On the other hand, though, she hasn’t done as well as Kelly Osbourne or Sabrina The Teenage Witch or Aaron Carter, and the only sensible reaction to that is to go home and enter into a depressive cycle of morbid alcoholism and self-harm.

So, you know, it’s swings and roundabouts.

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Dancing With The Stars is obviously getting tougher – it can afford to lose Chuck Liddell this early.

Chuck Liddell was ace. Don’t believe us? Fine, show us a better Dancing With The Stars contestant who rolls around inside a cage in his pants for a living and whose surname sounds a little bit like the name of a German discount supermarket. What’s that? You can’t? We rest our case.

Still, it doesn’t matter. Chuck Liddell has been eliminated from Dancing With The Stars anyway. It’s bittersweet news – it’s sad because Chuck Liddell had so much potential, but at least Dancing With The Stars is one week closer to ending now.

We hate to say it, but Dancing With The Stars hasn’t been living up to its full potential this year. You’ll remember that last year Dancing With The Stars was a flurry of stalking and horrific-sounding diseases and, in Cloris Leachman, the world’s oldest woman.

But this year? So far the highlight has either been an old man hurting his foot or the sight of Kelly Osbourne stumbling around out of time. That’s hardly an exclusive, is it? If we wanted to see Kelly Osbourne being disappointing so badly we could have just bought tickets to see her in Chicago or watched one of her music videos on YouTube or something.

And now we’re sad to report that Dancing With The Stars has lost another reason to watch. Last night Ultimate Fighting champion Chuck Liddell was kicked off the show, disappointing all four people in the minuscule subcategory of Ultimate Fighting fans who also like ballroom dancing, and dashing the hopes of anyone who desperately wanted to see Chuck Liddell suffer some sort of awful hallucinatory flashback mid-dance and start attacking people in the studio audience like a cross between Rambo and history’s angriest bear. But anyway, AP reports:

“It’s hard to do,” he said. “I made a shot at it.” … “You not so much danced but raided the two-step,” judge Bruno Tonioli said. “You bring carnage and mayhem to everything you do.” … Though the couple never topped a score of 19, Trebunskaya said Liddell made her proud each week.”You are my bear and you are my hippo,” she said. “I loved working with you.”

Never mind, Chuck Liddell. It was brave of you to try your hand at a show like Dancing With The Stars, even though your journey ended in failure. And besides, we’ve seen The Wrestler so we know that the rest of your life will be a resounding success – especially the part where you deliberately chop your hand open with a deli meat slicer. Boy oh boy, you’re going to do that better than anyone.

So now that Chuck Liddell has gone, who’ll be the next to leave Dancing With The Stars? Will it Macy Gray? Sabrina The Teenage Witch? Kelly Osbourne? Everyone, because the head of ABC will wake up one morning, think “Oh, what’s the point?” and deliberately burn down the Dancing With The Stars studio?

Yes, the last one please.

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Celebrities leave Dancing With The Stars for many reasons – because they’re injured, because they’re crap dancers.

And then there’s Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay is both. However, on last night’s Dancing With The Stars Tom DeLay was offed by injury, probably right before he could be offed by the fact that he dances like a peculiarly asthmatic sack that’s been filled with a bunch of lethargic kittens.

But Tom DeLay wasn’t the only celebrity to leave Dancing With The Stars last night. Debi Mazar was also eliminated, and once we’ve looked up her name on Wikipedia we’ll tell you exactly who she is.

Dancing With The Stars looks easy, doesn’t it? All you need to do is wriggle yourself into a succession of fairly absurd spangly hotpants and flap around with more self-control than Kelly Osbourne. And anyone could do that, right? You don’t even really need to be a star to appear on Dancing With The Stars, as proved by every single person who’s ever appeared on Dancing With The Stars ever.

But maybe, just maybe, Dancing With The Stars is a little harder than it looks. Maybe if you’re a slightly overweight 62-year-old politician whose career has become mired in a series of grubby money laundering accusations and you decided to do the show because you value material wealth over personal dignity, then Dancing With The Stars could pose a genuine threat to your health. Which certainly seems to be the case with Tom DeLay, who a) is all of those things and b) left Dancing With The Stars last night because he hurt his feet a bit. Newsday reports:

Twinkle-toes Tom is gone. And not a moment too soon – or so said his feet, both suffering from stress fractures. What a run… It was all very unusual. But fun, bizarrely so. Said DeLay, “Last night [my] feet were saying, ‘What did you do?’” Samantha Harris then asked, Will you continue? “No, I won’t. You can’t proceed if you can’t practice [or] you make a fool of yourself out there.”

So it’s farewell to Tom DeLay. We’re sad that we’ll never be able to see you gingerly grimace your way through another rudimentary routine that you’re clearly not physically equipped to participate in. However, Tom DeLay wasn’t the only contestant to leave Dancing With The Stars. Debi Mazar – who about six of you might recognise as the woman who occasionally shouts into a telephone for three seconds at a time once or twice during every other season of Entourage – was also sent packing. Not because she’d broken her feet, though. Because she was rubbish.

Now that Tom DeLay and Debi Mazar – plus whoever left the show last week – are no longer taking part in Dancing With The Stars, it’s really opened up the competition for the remaining contestants. After all, now we can really say that the chaff’s been removed from the, um, slightly larger pile of chaff. There’s a lot of chaff, that’s the point. There’s chaff everywhere.

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Getting Kelly Osbourne on Dancing With The Stars this year was nothing short of a masterstroke. We mean that.

Someone wins whatever happens. If Kelly Osbourne goes on to win Dancing With The Stars, it’ll be an epic display of triumph over adversity. And if Kelly Osbourne does terribly at Dancing With The Stars, clattering around the dancefloor week after week like some kind of epileptic Weeble until the judges do the decent thing and shoot her like a knackered racehorse, then it’ll be exactly what everyone expected.

Last night Kelly Osbourne did the latter. Which works out best for us, really.

When we announced this year’s Dancing With The Stars line-up back in August, we never really expected it happen. It was just too odd, even for Dancing With The Stars – a show that has previously given over periods primetime television to showcase the balletic abilities of Steve Guttenberg and the one from Jackass who’s recently spent the most amount of time inside a mental hospital.

This year, though, was different. This year Dancing With The Stars picked a roster of contestants so mind-boggling that watching it promised to be the television equivalent of gulping down three pints of toilet bleach and then puking into a kaleidoscope while 15 different off-key music boxes play the Grange Hill theme-tune backwards to a squadron of cackling three-year-old identical twins. Aaron Carter’s there. Macy Gray is there. Former United States House of Representatives majority leader Tom DeLay is there. And so is Kelly Osbourne.

Here’s the most unsettling thing, though – on last week’s Dancing With The Stars, Kelly Osbourne was actually quite good. Whether that’s because she actually demonstrated a decent level of competency in her routine, or whether it was because everyone had such a staggeringly low opinion of her that just the sight of her deliberately moving around without crying or punching anyone was a pleasant surprise is anyone’s guess. But the point was this – Kelly Osbourne looked like she could win Dancing With The Stars.

And then she came out last night and effed everything up. E! Online reports:

Sadly, the belle of last week’s ball landed with a bit of a thud tonight, repeatedly flubbing the steps of her tango, giggling nervously each time, and not bothering to mask her disappointment when the dance ended and, instead of holding the final pose for emphasis, she popped right out of it and apologized to her partner.

That sound you hear? That’s the universe righting itself. For a minute there we were worried – if Kelly Osbourne succeeded at Dancing With The Stars, then anything could happen. Ozzy Osbourne might suddenly become lucid. Jack Osbourne might suddenly develop a point. God, Sharon Osbourne might even start talking in a voice that doesn’t make her sound like a furious tiny witch trapped in the bottom of a well. Thank heavens it was just a momentary blip.

Not that we’re suggesting that Kelly Osbourne should leave Dancing With The Stars, of course – because at the rate she’s going it’s only a matter of time before one of her legs shears off and she somehow impales herself on her own jagged femur. And that’d definitely be worth watching.

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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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Dancing With The Stars is easily the best show on television. No, wait, not best – we meant least accurately titled.

It’s true. None of the words correlate. For one, the Dancing With The Stars contestants aren’t actually stars, let alone the definitive star collection that the titular use of the word ‘The’ suggests. Second, their graceless plodding technically isn’t dancing. Third, we’re not dancing with anyone – we’re just watching. Really it should be called Looking At Some People You Vaguely Recognise Clump Around A Bit.

Anyway, Dancing With The Stars is back. Who’s in it? Find out after the jump.

OK, no messing around. Dancing With The Stars returns for a new season starts on September 21. Can this new season surpass the mighty last season of Dancing With The Stars, which was won by a girl who looked about four, had a boy’s name and was in possession of one of the world’s creepiest stalkers?

No. No, obviously it can’t. Because that was awesome. Nevertheless, the new Dancing With The Stars contestants have been revealed – and they are…

Mya – No, not MIA. Mya. Oh, come on, you remember Mya – she performed on that Lady Marmalade song. No, she’s not Pink. Or Christina Aguilera. Or Missy Elliott. Or Lil’ Kim. The other one. Yes, there was another one. It was news to us too.

Melissa Joan Hart – It’s Sabrina The Teenage Witch! Fun fact: Melissa Joan Hart is 33 years old, which is weird because she looked about 40 in the last couple of Sabrina years. Either Melissa Joan Hart is lying about her age or she’s got awful genes.

Michael Irvin – Former Dallas cowboy. That doesn’t mean that he used to be a professional footballer – it means he used to ride around modern-day Dallas on a horse, getting into bar fights and shooting prostitutes. Legal note: Michael Irvin may not have literally shot a prostitute.

Ashley Hamilton - Ashley’s Dancing With The Stars profile describes him as an ‘actor, comedian, singer-songwriter’ which, just in case you didn’t know, is Hollywood code for ‘his dad is George Hamilton so he’s allowed to witlessly blunder through as many cack-headed half-thought-out careers as he likes because he’ll be minted as soon as the old man snuffs it’.

Aaron Carter - World’s most annoying three-year-old boy.

Kathy Ireland – Kathy Ireland used to be a model, so expect her to progress 75% of the way through Dancing With The Stars until it’s no longer feasible for the public to keep her in just because she’s a bit milfy.

Debi Mazar - Occasionally appears in four-second scenes on some episodes of Entourage. And that’s literally it.

Natalie Coughlin – This year’s Dancing With The Stars winner, on the basis that she’s an athlete and that’s how it works.

Louie Vito – Louis Vito is a professional snowboarder and not, as his name suggests, a character from The Sopranos. Could have fooled us.

Chuck Liddell - Hoping to bring his extensive Ultimate Fighting expertise to Dancing With The Stars. Our prediction? He’ll stub his toe after a fortnight in and cry off sick, the GREAT BIG GIRL.

Donny Osmond – Most famous, of course, for appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here with a fire-eyed bear who spoke in the lifeless voice of a thousand children and stank of table seasoning. This is true.

Tom DeLay - This year’s obligatory Hilarious Old Man Who Doesn’t Understand That Dancing With The Stars Will Destroy Whatever Meagre Credibility He’s Spent His Entire Life Trying To Scrape Together.

Macy Gray - The biggest problem that Macy Gray faces isn’t basic coordination – it’s building the strength in her neck to support her giant building-sized Easter Island head for the entire duration of a routine.

Joanna Krupa – Not a clue. Sorry. We can’t even be bothered to Google this one.

Mark Dacascos - From Iron Chef, which has always annoyed us because it makes out that being an iron chef is good, when actually iron’s capacity for heat conduction is so high that it’s actually probably quite a dangerous thing to be. Silica Chef, that’s the thing to be.

Kelly Osbourne – Wet-mouthed rehab bunny who’s taking on part of the great global Osbourne dancing reality show takeover of 2009, with Sharon Osbourne rumoured to be appearing on Strictly Come Dancing and Ozzy Osbourne planning to jig about under a CCTV camera in a car park in Thurrock for 25 seconds.

Exciting, huh? Huh? Anyone? Hello? Oh come back you gigantic sods.

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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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If we hate one thing about alleged mental stalkers with cars full of guns, it’s how they screw up your Paso Doble.

Just ask Shawn Johnson. Last week her alleged stalker was arrested in the Dancing With The Stars studio with loaded guns, a roll of duct tape and wads of unsent love letters in his car, and now it’s threatening to overshadow her performances on the show.

So that’s why Shawn Johnson has decided to not discuss the incident in any way, shape or form, as she discussed during a really long interview about the stalker on Access Hollywood.

Appearing on Dancing With The Stars is an activity fraught with danger – if you don’t knacker your back like Steve-O then it’s almost guaranteed that Bruno Tonioli will accidentally take one of your eyes out by prancing round like an attention-seeking toddler when it’s his turn to speak – but nobody could have been prepared for what Shawn Johnson has been through on the show.

Last week Robert O’Ryan was arrested and hit with a restraining order after allegedly going on the sort of stalky rampage against Shawn Johnson that’d get dismissed from a soap opera script meeting for being too overblown – reports suggest that O’Ryan had told everyone that he was going to father Shawn Johnson’s children before filling his car up with loaded guns and duct tape, driving to the Dancing With The Stars studio and scaling a fence to be close to her.

Which is pretty freaky and nightmarish and all, but then again Shawn Johnson should probably know better than to be a incredibly flexible teenage gymnast whose work uniform is basically just about enough lycra to cover her nipples and fanny. That sort of profession is always going to attract the weirdos, Shawn, and nothing you can do will change that. Not even giving yourself a boy’s name. Nice effort with that, by the way. Maybe you’d have more success if you tried augmenting it with a full beard.

Anyway, Shawn Johnson was so spooked by this Dancing With The Stars stalker incident that she’s chosen to open up about it to Access Hollywood. Or open up about the fact that she’s not going to open up about it, at least. Which admittedly doesn’t make any sense, so let’s just get to the quote before we start to have some sort of confusion stroke:

“It’s hard not to take the outside stuff and have it affect you during practice. Of course there’s been a lot going on that you try not to think about — negative, negative things really get to me, ‘cause I’m always the one that’s like, ‘The glass is half full.’ I try to find the positive in everything, so if anybody is negative or down or upset and stuff, it really kind of affects me.”

This display of positive mental attitude is exactly what propelled Shawn Johnson to the top of her game, and it’s a pleasure to witness. That’s why we’re so excited about seeing her next routine on Dancing With The Stars – a graceful Viennese Waltz performed in a lead panic box surrounded by armed security guards and at least 1,500 convincing Shawn Johnson body doubles. It’s going to be spectacular.

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How much should any man enjoy watching Dancing With The Stars? Enough to remember that it even exists?

Yes, that’s exactly how much. If you know more than three of the Dancing With The Stars contestants by name you’re on iffy ground. And woe betide anyone who actually votes on the Dancing With Stars results.

But is unexpectedly turning up at the Dancing With The Stars studio with two loaded guns, a roll of duct tape and a handful of love letters to Shawn Johnson liking the show too much? Apparently so, because a bloke’s just been arrested for that.

Not so long ago we mentioned that this season of Dancing With The Stars was going to be the barmiest one yet. It turns out we were right, but for wildly different reasons than we imagined.

What we meant was that one of this year’s Dancing With The Stars celebrities was recently admitted to a psychiatric hospital, one was once convicted and jailed for perjury and one enjoys hurling laptop computers at the heads of ancient invalids.

What’s actually happened is that a berserk fan of Dancing With The Stars contestant Shawn Johnson has been arrested for apparently hopping over a fence into the show’s studio just so that he could be with her. AP reports:

An order was issued against Robert O’Ryan, who was arrested on Tuesday. O’Ryan was stopped by security at CBS Studios after he jumped a fence on Monday afternoon. Police later searched his car and found a shotgun and handgun — both loaded — as well as duct tape and love letters. A sworn statement by Johnson’s mother states that she was told by police that he believed he was meant to have a child with her daughter.

It’s the romance of it all that brings a tear to the eye, really. After all, we’ve lost count of the number of women we’ve wooed by illegally breaking into their workplace with a handful of maniac love letters about how we were destined to father their children.

The duct tape and loaded guns are just precautionary back-ups – after all, we believe it was Richard Bach who first said “If you love someone, tape up their limbs and mouth so they can’t run away or scream for help and then force them to do exactly what you say by pressing a loaded shotgun against their temple.” Timeless stuff. Beautiful, even.

It’s weird to think that, of all the Dancing With The Stars contestants, Shawn Johnson ended up being the recipient of all this misdirected admiration, isn’t it? She’s just your average extraordinarily supple lycra-clad 17-year-old professional gymnast. What’s so special about that?

Because, you know, if we were going to turn into a terrifying creepy stalker for any of the Dancing With The Stars participants, it’d have to be Chuck Wicks. The way he rocks that single constant nondescript facial expression of his? Dreamalicious.

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Steve-O is fearless. He sets his hair on fire. He lets people throw darts at him. He shoots fireworks out of his bottom with such confusing regularity that people often mistake him for Sydney Harbour Bridge. But even Steve-O’s boundless physical endurance has its limits, which is why he ducked out of last night’s Dancing With The Stars because he hurt his back.

Next week: Johnny Knoxville quits Hell’s Kitchen because an onion looks at him funny.

All reality shows come replete with their fair share of dangers. American Idol contestants often have to battle laryngitis and vocal cord nodules. Anyone appearing on Survivor can expect to be pushed to the brink of physical exhaustion. And Beauty And The Geek routinely plunges people into the endlessly dark void of inescapable mental despair. Or maybe that’s just us.

The point is, Dancing With The Stars shouldn’t be one of these shows. It’s about ballroom dancing, for crying out loud – the sort of thing organised by nursing home staff to help take the residents’ minds off the fact that their families no longer love them. At best, the worst injury anyone expects from Dancing With The Stars is either the onset of deep-vein thrombosis brought about by unusually tight spandex or accidental sequin inhalation.

But no. Because this year’s Dancing With The Stars is killing people.

Just over a week ago, Nancy O’Dell and Jewel backed out of Dancing With The Stars due to injury. Not a total surprise, given that Nancy O’Dell’s hair makes her precipitously top-heavy and Jewel is, well, Jewel – but now things are getting serious. Steve-O, the Jackass star who deliberately injures himself for money, has also hurt himself enough to miss a show. AP reports:

The reality star was forced to skip Monday’s “Dancing With the Stars” after falling on his back during a dress rehearsal earlier in the day. He landed flat on his back after a failed front flip, smashing his spine into the microphone pack all performers wear. The 34-year-old was already nursing a pinched nerve in his back.

Well, look, OK, that does sound sort of painful. But Steve-O is a man who once skateboarded through a wall of fluorescent strip lightbulbs and trampolined into a ceiling fan and pushed a spike through his cheek on purpose and went to hospital for being mentally ill. Twirling around for the benefit of a shrieking Italian judge on Dancing With The Stars should be a cakewalk for him.

But it just goes to show that Dancing With The Stars is harder than it looks. And we agree with you completely, by the way – we’ve got our fingers crossed that it’ll be Denise Richards next, too.

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You’re a disgrace to humanity. Really, Jewel? You like Jewel? What do you like about her, her rubbish poetry or the fact that she’s named after a shiny pebble? Honestly, people like you make us sick. Why don’t you grow up, yeah? Grow up and stop liking rubbish singers with stupid one-word names, yeah? You moron.

Oh, and also Jewel has pulled out of Dancing With The Stars because of injury. That was probably our original point, in retrospect.

These bloody celebrities, eh? They don’t know they’re born these days. Just look at Dancing With The Stars – in the past contestants have managed to take part despite having serious heart complaints, or being octogenarians, or having a fanny growing inside their guts or even, in the case of Heather Mills, only having one leg.

True, we get the feeling that Heather Mills would cake herself in animal dung and punch a horse in the face in the middle of a shopping centre if it meant she’d get someone’s attention for even a second, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that Dancing With The Stars contestants can usually manage to at least make it onto the show before knackering their bodies up beyond repair. But clearly that’s not the case this year, because Jewel and Nancy O’Dell have both decided to drop out due to injury. MSNBC reports:

Singer-songwriter Jewel and Access Hollywood host Nancy O’Dell will not compete in season 8 of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. Jewel suffered tibia fractures in both of her legs, while O’Dell’s torn meniscus will require knee surgery. Both women will appear Monday night on DWTS’ season premiere, during which casting changes will be announced.

Both Jewel and Nacy O’Dell have expressed their profound disappointment at not being able to compete in Dancing With The Stars, but we truly believe that neither of them are as disappointed as us. Partly because we were keen to see which Jewel would be participating – the folksy hippy Jewel who lives in a van or the weird Britney Spears/ Terminator hybrid Jewel who nobody really liked much – but mostly because we would have enjoyed discovering who Nancy O’Dell actually is.

But still, Dancing With The Stars isn’t going to be a total failure just because Nancy O’Dell and Jewel aren’t in it any more – let’s not forget that this is the Dancing With The Stars season that’ll feature Denise Richards and Steve-O, for crying out loud. It’s almost as if every episode is guaranteed to end with someone weeping in the foetal position in the middle of the stage. Who wouldn’t want to watch that?

And anyway, if rumours are to be believed, one of the celebrities drafted in to replace Nancy and Jewel is Holly Madison - the Playboy playmate whose last two conquests have been Hugh Hefner and Criss Angel. If this is true then, given Holly’s fondness for weird-looking old men, Len Goodman had better do each show dressed as an icehockey goalkeeper for protection.

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