So now we know who the American Idol finalists are. And now we know that one of them isn’t Danny Gokey. Thank heavens.

Despite being a leading contender to win American Idol from the get-go, thanks to his unique combination of tragic backstory, inability to scream properly and having a face like a remedial-level semi-melted walnut, last night saw poor old Danny Gokey ejected forever.

Gokey’s goodbye sets up a thrilling American Idol final between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen that, if we know American Idol, will be 16 hours long and drive everyone to the brink of tedium-induced suicide. Joy.

Now we’re no American Idol experts – in our mind, all the previous seasons have somehow merged into one solid, impenetrable tumour that sounds like I Will Always Love You played on a glockenspiel made out of abused circus monkeys – but has a contestant as uniformly disliked as Danny Gokey ever made it to the American Idol semi-final before?

It’s hard to imagine. For someone so fundamentally unlikeable as Danny Gokey to make it anywhere near the American Idol top three is slightly staggering. It means that people were rooting for Danny Gokey after his first audition went from tear-flecked “I’m doing this for my dead wife in heaven” tragedy to uncomfortably jockish, Durstesque whooping in the blink of an eye once he knew he’d passed to the next round.

It means that people were rooting for Danny Gokey when, during Disco Night, he danced like a baby deer with polio on an ice rink on a cruise ship in a hurricane. It means that people were still rooting for Danny Gokey when he used his rendition of Dream On by Areosmith to make a noise like a constipated pterodactyl being punched in the face. It’s bizarre.

But if there’s one thing that nobody could possibly ever root for, it’s the image of Danny Gokey standing next to a saxophone singing scat to a Terrence Trent D’Arby song. That’s an unforgivable crime, and it’s why Danny Gokey was finally eliminated from American Idol last night. Reuters reports:

Paula Abdul appeared to fight back tears. Afterward, judge Simon Cowell said Gokey’s elimination and the looming showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen, who was considered an underdog, came as a surprise. “None of us would have predicted this, guys,” Cowell said. “No disrespect, because you were brilliant last night, and just now by the way Danny, congratulations.”

Ah yes, the American Idol final. It’s Adam Lambert vs Kris Allen. And, really, it could go either way. It’s the plucky underdog against the season’s swaggering show-stopper. It’s the humble everyman against the snarling alien. It’s (possibly) gay against (we’re assuming) straight. It’s a man so painfully anonymous that he may as well have spent the last six months with his face pixellised like someone from Cheaters against a creepy bloke with a singing voice that we imagine sounds like Joe Pasquale ejaculating. And we wouldn’t miss it for the world.

But only out of professional obligation. You don’t think we’d actually watch American Idol if we didn’t have to write about it the next day, do you? Because, you know, it’s sort of rubbish.

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God, is American Idol still going? Yeesh. We want it to end now. And it’s not just us – Simon Cowell does too.

Or we assume he does, based on his pissy demeanour throughout last night’s American Idol. Last night, faced with the nightmarish proposition of Kris Allen singing One Republic, Adam Lambert singing U2 and – God help us all – Danny Gokey singing scat, Simon Cowell decided that the best way to get through American Idol was by being an arsehole.

We’re not making that up. Danny Gokey sang scat. Frankly we’re surprised Simon Cowell didn’t punch anyone in the face.

This season of American Idol has been going on since approximately the actual dawn of bloody man, so naturally people have their own personal endurance limits when it comes to watching it. We, for instance, tend to get sick of American Idol during the first tenth of the first second of the first promo announcing the first episode of the season. But that’s just us.

For others it’s the interminable doldrums of the American Idol mid-section where the public hacks away week after week at mediocre nobodies like what’s his name and whojammacallit and it doesn’t seem to make a blind bit of difference to the number of remaining contestants. And then there’s Simon Cowell, whose own personal endurance gave up the ghost during last night’s American Idol.

And for good reason, too. Last night the remaining three American Idol contestants were put through Judge’s Choice night, where each of the American Idol judges picked songs for the performers – with the exception of Randy Jackson because the song he chose, a ditty called Woo Dog Dog Dog Baby Dog Baby Hollywood Baby Dog Dog, doesn’t actually seem to exist.

Anyway, long story short, Kara DioGuardi made Kris Allen sing Apologize by One Republic. And that’s bad enough – Apologize is the sort of song that’s popular with people who don’t actually like music and just want a background noise to block out the voices in their head telling them to hurt themselves – but then Kara decided to criticise the song choice afterwards, which set Simon Cowell off on a stroppy little rampage:

“It’s a copout. … You can’t choose a song for him then blame him for doing the song,” Cowell said. “You didn’t hold up to your responsibility.” “You’re gonna tell me about interpreting songs?” DioGuardi shot back. “Have you ever interpreted a song in your life?”

As for the other American Idol contestants, Adam Lambert sang One by U2 on Simon’s say-so and Cryin’ by Aerosmith, which largely sounded identical to One by U2 and Cryin’ by Aerosmith except higher-pitched and creepier. Also, Danny Gokey, knowing that he had some way to go to top his off-kilter screeching last week, took on a Terence Trent D’Arby song that required him to a) dance and b) go “Doo-be-doop-ba-doob-a-dee-dwoop” like a hateful little tossbag.

So who’ll be eliminated from American Idol tomorrow? Honestly, we couldn’t care less. But we’d quite like it if an audience member could keep poking Simon Cowell in the back of the head with a stick until he lashes out and stabs someone, please.

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We have some breaking news. Apparently America likes speccy idiots who scream like bellends and are rubbish.

It must do. Because on last night’s American Idol Danny Gokey - the man with a face like a remedial-level bespectacled foot who had performed Aerosmith‘s Dream On in the style of a traumatised burns victim – wasn’t eliminated. Instead, Allison Iraheta was told to pack her bags and instantly leave the public consciousness.

Allison Iraheta did OK on American Idol, and she’s young – she’s got the rest of her life to consistently fail to reach the same heights before dying embittered and resigned.

Before we get into last night’s American Idol, let’s just deal with the issue that everyone’s thinking about, OK? Randy Jackson is a mystic soothsayer and we all need to worship him as an almighty deity. There, we said it.

It’s true – before American Idol started to get serious, Randy Jackson proclaimed that a boy would win. And a boy will win – thanks to Allison Iraheta’s elimination last night, it’s a fact that American Idol will be won by either Danny Gokey, Adam Lambert or Kris Allen. This means that Randy Jackson can see into the future, and everything he says is Nostradamus-style coded prediction. So based on the vocal output of Randy Jackson throughout the season, what else does the future have in store for us? Dogs, apparently. Lots of dogs. Dogs that aren’t really feeling it. They’re the worst kind of dogs.

But let’s panic about the uprising of our new canine overlords later, because last night Allison Iraheta was voted off American Idol. Sad, yes, but Allison should take solace from the fact that the people who voted her off American Idol were also the same people who decided that Danny Gokey isn’t an offensively clueless turdmouth who deserves to spend the rest of his life in total obscurity, so they’re obviously not the full ticket.

So what will we remember most about Allison Iraheta? Well, there’s the succession of increasingly bad haircuts, obviously. And the fact that she had a voice like a man. But most of all, we’ll remember that Allison Iraheta’s name was so hard to spell that we deliberately avoided writing about her in case our spellcheck caught fire and burnt down. Oh, the memories.

But anyway, although it’s goodbye to Allison Iraheta, it might not be farewell. American Idol host Ryan Seacrest had some comforting parting words for her last night, as Reuters reports:

The red-haired singer’s swan song had the two women judges standing and cheering, and afterward Seacrest, who also hosts a radio show, made a prediction about Iraheta. “I know I’m going to be playing you on the radio real soon,” Seacrest told her.

That’s right – coming soon, Ryan Seacrest’s new radio competition entitled Guess The Name Of This Anonymous Idiot Who We Briefly And Wrongly Thought Might Be Famous Once A Couple Of Months Ago. We can’t wait!

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When you think rock, chances are you think Slash. And then when you think Slash, you think silly silly hat.

Anyway, last night was American Idol‘s Rock Night, and Slash was drafted in to be the guest mentor. Did he do his job? In the sense that he made one of the contestants sound like a wounded dinosaur being forced to participate in a violent bout of prison sex, then yes. Slash did his job extraordinarily well.

So which of the American Idol contestants will be eliminated tomorrow? The American Idol judges didn’t force their opinions on anyone. At all. Ahem.

At this precise moment in time, there are only four American Idol contestants left in the competition. We’ve said goodbye to all the old favourites like Blindy and Monobrow and that completely anonymous woman and now we’re left with American Idol‘s creme de la creme. Plus that bloke whose wife died.

And at this point, the American Idol judges already know which two performers they want in the final – Adam Lambert and Danny Gokey. The trouble with this, though, is that they might not get want they want, due to a) Adam Lambert being in the bottom two last week and b) Danny Gokey being an absolute shitcake.

So that’s why everyone knew what’d happen during last night’s American Idol – the judges would fall over themselves praising Adam and Danny, while Kris Allen and Allison Iraheta would be told that their voices had single-handedly given Simon Cowell Ebola of the bum. And that’s exactly what happened, even though Kris Allen and Allison Iraheta were perfectly decent and Danny Gokey chose to make this noise instead of doing any actual singing…

But we shouldn’t judge Danny Gokey for singing like a 1950s housewife who’s just seen a mouse in her kitchen, because this was American Idol Rock Night, and everyone knows that the essence of rock is making a series of wildly jarring noises with your mouth. It’s why Allison Iraheta sounded like an emphysemic woman trying to shout at the moon during her performance of Cry Baby, and it’s why Adam Lambert sang Whole Lotta Love in the style of a man who’d necked a handful of laxatives earlier and was trying desperately to clamp his sphincter shut so he wouldn’t drown the audience with a horrific poo tsunami.

We’ll just have to wait until tonight to see who’ll get the boot from American Idol this week. If the judges get their way, Kris Allen will get eliminated. If the audience votes honestly, Danny Gokey will go. If we have our way, the four American Idol judges plus the entire production team will sign a televised pledge promising that Rock Night was a ghastly mistake that will never be made again, and then they’ll cancel the rest of the season by way of apology.

Our way sounds the best.

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Ah, American Idol Disco Night – a tradition right up there with visiting elderly relatives and hereditary bowel disease.

Honestly, why? Whose idea is it to keep bringing Disco Night back to American Idol? If it isn’t someone who has a financial interest in those cross-channel ferries than run a nightclub service to Calais every month with music by a middle-aged local radio DJ then we’ll be surprised. American Idol Disco Night is terrible.

So what happened on last night’s American Idol? Some people with funny haircuts sang some uninteresting disco songs in a mediocre way. Don’t you watch American Idol?

Because each season of American Idol lasts roughly – and this is just a ballpark here – 400 years, it doesn’t take much for the show to look stale. And, for all sorts of reasons, that’s exactly what happened on last night’s American Idol. Here’s why…

1 – It was Disco Night on American Idol last night. Disco Night, for crying out loud. There are only two places where disco music – or at least the disco music chosen by the American Idol contestants – should be heard. Wedding receptions and hell. Provided that wedding receptions aren’t automatically a direct subcategory of hell, of course. And we need hard proof that they aren’t. In summary, disco music makes us want to kill ourselves.

2 – In terms of the zeitgeist, American Idol has been blown clean out of the water this week by Britain’s Got Talent and, specifically, Susan Boyle. Nobody wants to see pretty young starlets wiggle and writhe through zippy performances any more – they only like hearing depressing songs performed by dumpy little sasquatches who look like they pick their dinner out of their hair every evening. Plus, screw you Danny Gokey. You’ve got a dead wife? So what? Susan Boyle has got fairly big eyebrows. That’s tragedy.

3 - This far into American Idol, we can start to see through each contestant’s palette of tricks and gimmicks. So when Adam Lambert slowed down If I Can’t Have You enough to let him pull an array of faces that made it look like he was being sucked off by something startling like a dinosaur or his grandmother, it wasn’t a surprise. That’s what Adam Lambert does every single week on American Idol. Similarly, when Lil Rounds was rubbish and a bit embarrassing to watch during her performance of I’m Every Woman, that wasn’t a surprise for exactly the same reason.

In fact, the most interesting thing we can honestly say about last night’s American Idol is that Anoop Desai didn’t shave beforehand – something that Paula Abdul singled out as an example of his artistic growth. We haven’t shaved for over a week. We think that makes us Ernest Hemingway. Thanks, Paula!

But still, because Matt Giraud inexplicably got saved from elimination on last week’s American Idol, two performers have to get the shove tonight, and that has to be a good thing. Or is it? We’ve just realised that we’ll get two goodbye performances instead of one this week. And they’ll both be disco songs. Arses.

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First the good news – after months of endless faffing, American Idol has finally started eliminating finalists.

Now for the bad news. Jorge Nuñez was eliminated from American Idol last night. Jasmine Murray also got the boot, but it’s the loss of Jorge Nuñez that stung the most. Not because he’s a good singer, you understand. but because all the cheap-shot monobrow jokes we thought up about him will have to go to waste.

Still, Danny Gokey and Scott MacIntyre are still there, so at least we can still use our cheap-shot blindness and dead wife jokes. Hooray for American Idol!

At any given point over the last few months, American Idol has been about dead stalkers, bikinis, chronic in-fighting or however you’d describe that awful shrieking girl who couldn’t decide if she was Spanish or not. But not any more.

As from this week, American Idol started to be about the exact thing it excels at – interminable, piss-weak Michael Jackson cover versions that nobody could ever truly bring themselves to like. Oh, and dramatic over-long eliminations.

And since this week was the first week of the American Idol live finals, the elimination process got to be explained to us all in all the infinitesimal detail usually reserved for holiday slideshows by people you rightfully dislike. On this year’s American Idol, you see, there’s a new rule called something like the Judge’s Save. We shall now attempt to explain the American Idol Judge’s Save to you:

If the public vote out a contestant who the American Idol judges like, the judges have the right to reverse the decision and keep them in. But only so long as a) it’s a unanimous vote by all four judges, b) American Idol has yet to reach the top-five stage, c) a double eviction can take place the following week, d) the date numerically adds up to a prime number, e) the saved contestant can solve the ancient mystery of Ishra-Nikk using only their elbows and a second-hand Ped Egg, and f) the moonlight on the citadel casts a shadow in the shape of Bulgaria.

Fortunately, though, American Idol didn’t need to implement the Judge’s Save last night, on the basis that both eliminated acts were legitimately hopeless. First to go was Jasmine Murray – a girl who shouldn’t be really be mocked because she’s only 16 and incredibly earnest, but should be mocked because she looks identical to Janice from Dr Teeth And The Electric Mayhem and couldn’t have any less charisma if she was made out of farts. You’ll have forgotten her name by the weekend.

Second to be eliminated from American Idol was Jorge Nuñez, and that decision really stung. Again, we’re not disappointed because he could sing well – we can’t stress enough that he couldn’t – but because now he’s gone it’s less likely that he’ll acrimoniously break up with his monobrow due to creative differences, leading to his monobrow scoring a critically-acclaimed role as the lead in Cats on Broadway. Jorge Nuñez, you will be missed. Sort of.

So who’ll be next to be eliminated from American Idol now that Jorge Nuñez and Jasmine Murray are out? Our guess – one of those other terrible wankers. Just a hunch.

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Tonight, the top 13 American Idol contestants take part in the first of this year’s soul-destroying live finals.

So, you know, hooray for that. The American Idol finalists are gently being eased into the competition, because tonight is Michael Jackson night and therefore all they need to do to impress the judges is squeak a lot and, if possible, turn into either a giant plasticine rabbit or quite a nice car.

However, there’s just one thing wrong here – we don’t actually know who any of the top 13 American Idol contestants actually are. So we suppose we should bloody find out, then…

American Idol Contestant 1 - Anoop Desai. FACT: Anoop made it into the American Idol finals via the Wild Card round. As we all know, this means that Anoop Desai is terrible and won’t win.

American Idol Contestant 2 - Adam Lambert. FACT: If you crept into Pete Wentz‘s bedroom at night and attacked his testicles with a Ped Egg, the resulting audio-visual spectacle would be exactly the same as when Adam Lambert sings.

American Idol Contestant 3 – Allison Iraheta. FACT: Allison Iraheta was originally going to be called ‘Alison Irata’ but the woman who filled in her birth certificate was both dyslexic and spiteful.

American Idol Contestant 4 – Megan Joy. FACT: Megan Joy’s extensive tattoos are there to disguise the fact that her arms are covered in nipples. BONUS FACT: Never type ‘Megan Joy’ into Google Images without having Safesearch on first.

American Idol Contestant 5 – Kris Allen. FACT: Kris Allen couldn’t be any blander if he was made from nothing but wet dust.

American Idol Contestant 6 – Alexis Grace. FACT: If the redhead from Mythbusters wore a hat and was generally unbearable to be around, she’d often be mistaken for Alexis Grace’s twin sister.

American Idol Contestant 7 – Jorge Nuñez. FACT: Jorge Nuñez’s monobrow is evil, and constantly tries to make him defraud the gentry.

American Idol Contestant 8 – Matt Giraud. FACT: When Matt Giraud sings, he pulls the exact same face that girls do when you fart and hold their heads under the duvet.

American Idol Contestant 9 – Lil Rounds. FACT: Lil Rounds is the sister of Lil Kim, cousin of Lil Bow Wow and great aunt of sickly carbonated tropical drink Lilt.

American Idol Contestant 10 – Scott MacIntrye. FACT: Scott MacIntyre has got shit hair and the demeanour of a vicious murderer.

American Idol Contestant 11 – Michael Sarvner. FACT: Michael Sarvner is both ginger and fat. This means he’ll get the American Idol disabled pity vote even more than the blind bloke.

American Idol Contestant 12 - Jasmine Murray. FACT: Jasmine Murray’s favourite colour is either blue or yellow, we’d imagine. Or orange. We don’t know.

American Idol Contestant 13 - Danny Gokey. FACT: Danny Gokey is the one who’ll win American Idol because his wife died.

There. Don’t forget to print this story off before tonight’s American Idol. It won’t help you in the slightest, but at least you’ll be able to either suffocate yourself with it or papercut your ears off if anyone attempts to sing Earth Song.

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American Idol is really hotting up at the moment, what with all that singing and crying and blah blah blah.

But the big question is, who’s going to win? It’d be sensible to ask the American Idol judges. But who? Not Simon because his teeth might burn a hole into your retinas. Not Paula because you’d want a legible answer and not the new judge because she looks so much like the photographer from Just Shoot Me that it honestly freaks us out.

So that leaves Randy Jackson. And he says a boy will win American Idol. So that’s that.

This week’s American Idol has been real edge-of-your-seat stuff, hasn’t it? Seriously, wow. Getting to see which singers we’re allowed to forget about instantly and getting to see which singers we can forget about in a month when they’re inevitably voted off – with the glimmer of a chance that we won’t be allowed to forget about one of them until precisely three seconds after their debut inspirational power-ballad single is released – is absolutely entertainment at it’s best. Also, we have pathetically low standards.

But you know what? All we want to do is to skip forward a bunch of months and discover who the winner of American Idol will be. This is down to our enormous impatience as human beings as well as our deep – yet entirely rational – phobia of useless Whitney Houston covers.

Luckily for us, AOL is just as intolerant of American Idol as we are, so it’s gone straight to the source to find out who’ll win. Well, not the source as such – it went to Randy Jackson, the judge who looks as though he knows slightly less about American Idol as the rest of us but is still really excited by it nevertheless.

And guess what? Randy Jackson seems certain that a boy will win this year’s American Idol:

“I just think for some reason this year…the boys are just on a whole ‘nother level. I mean, there are some great girls as well. I’ve been saying it — I said it before them [Simon and Paula], and you can quote me… These kids are different than any other season we’ve had, and I think that these boys are some of the most talented we’ve ever had.”

And, of course, one of the boys that Randy Jackson is probably referring to is Danny Gokey – the American Idol contestant who has the bland looks, tragic emotional background and instant forgetability of a winner. Honestly, the American Idol producers want Danny Gokey to win so much that they’re a whisker away from showing footage of him healing the blind with the power of his touch alone.

Anyway, it’s a gamble for Randy Jackson to bet on a boy to win American Idol so early – in the past girls have won the most seasons of American Idol, followed by boys and then Taylor Hicks who, as everybody knows, is an asexual cartoon gold prospector from the 1850s.

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