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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profound, we’re sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. No, obviously Britney Spears isn’t happy. In fact, judging by the slivers that have been leaked out about next month’s Britney Spears documentary Britney: For The Record, the poor girl seems sadder than ever. In the documentary, you see, Britney Spears compares her entire life to a prison sentence.

That’s not so bad, really – at least in prison you get three square meals a day, a bed to sleep on and as many violent bummings as a girl could wish for – but Britney Spears goes one step further than that. In fact, Britney Spears says her life is like Groundhog Day. And since that means it’ll culminate in a romantic encounter with Andie MacDowell, it’s clearly far far worse than any of us could possible imagine.

For a recovering psychiatric patient who couldn’t even feed herself earlier this year, Britney Spears has come on great shakes in recent months. She’s been granted increased visitation rights to her children, she’s got her professional life back on track to the extent that her singles go to number one, she’s allowed to sing alongside Madonna again and the thought of Britney Spears naked no longer inspires vomiting and madness.

So what’s Britney Spears got to be miserable about? Well, since you asked, everything.

As part of what looks like a trade-off with MTV where she gets to win all sorts of awards that she doesn’t deserve, the network is airing a warts and all documentary about Britney’s darkest days called something like Britney: Requiem For A Scalp later this month, and it looks as if it’ll be as wildly depressing as anything you could ever imagine.

For instance, now that her parents are keeping her personally and financially under lockdown, Britney Spears feels as if her life has become a prison sentence that she’ll never be freed from. Admittedly it’s a prison sentence in a jail that looks a lot like a sprawling mansion and, rather than get paid pennies for sewing mailbags, she gets paid millions of dollars to repeat the word ‘womanizer’ over and over to the sound of a Casio keyboard preset, but anyway. Here’s how Britney describes her life:

“I have really good days, and then I have bad days… Even when you go to jail, y’know, there’s the time when you’re gonna get out. But in this situation, it’s never ending. It’s just like ‘Groundhog Day.’ I’m having to pay for it for a really long time. If I wasn’t under the restraints that I’m under right now, I’d feel so liberated.”

Since historically Britney Spears seems to equate liberation with falling out of cars without any pants on, throwing up on relative strangers and smashing cars to pieces with an umbrella in bald-headed rage attacks, we’d argue that her current restraints are probably for the best for the time being.

But still, let’s just hope that MTV only decided to leak the most depressing segment of Britney: They Shoot Horses, Dont They. Because, honestly, if this is as lighthearted the documentary gets, we’re going to boycott the new Britney Spears album in case she ends up blowing the royalties on a nice new noose.

Do you enjoy the smell of peroxide? Do you ever float Indian style in your kitchen while that one nice black lady delivers a monologue about shiny floors? Are you pretty good at getting 14-year-old bloodstains off of mostly ceilings but probably a little bit off of the upper walls? Would grunge have appealed to you more if it had a heavier emphasis on germ-free personal living quarters?

If so, you should definitely put all of that down on a resume – because Courtney Love may really think about employing you. She said as much on her MySpace account, the venue she’s using to apparently hire a maid.

Well Courtney love is in trouble. Her house really is a total crap-hole though. Not that we’ve been there or anything. It’s just what we assume. Love spends far too much time sending Kurt Cobain’s ashes on vacation, possibly licking Pete Doherty’s always-peeling lips and generally looking awful to be able to dedicate any real time to personal household cleanliness.

That’s why she needs you. She needs your hunger for a dirt free mansion to swoop in and save her. She’s willing to pay you, you know. The catch is she’ll only pay you in carrots, which is really pretty ridiculous.

After all, carrots won’t pay the cable bill.

Her MySpace plea for a cleanliness-assistant touches on a bit more than the already mentioned topic. Really it babbles on for a bit in a mostly unrelated sort of way. Normally we wouldn’t include all the extra filler, but as it’s all a horrendously misspelled murder of the English language, we just couldn’t throw anything away:

is anyone insanely clean neatfreak near malibu? i need a non thieving non freaky housekeeper

also i need we need a documentarist, someone to document our studio as we go in wedsday, and i have ALOT of work to do til then and i wont just hand this to hbo or bbc 2 or bravo and god forbid not vh1! A DOCUMENATRY NOT A REALITY SHOW. get in touch with jason whp will further put you in touch with jason wienberg at untitled.

and am looking for a young PA type someone whor eally wants to get nto the film business cos as we startramping up pay some dues with me for a few months and you can be on this HTH movie – i think i know who i want to play kurt- he may not be as BEAUTIFUL as the other two but hes got something special and looks alot like him and has a great voice.

i know this is wierd- the agencies suck and im sick of PIGS who steal itts simple as that., so fuck it why not try my space , beats monster . no superfans please. and its very good money. btw the housekeeping part just early hours .”

thanks

wierdo mgcee

Keep in mind as you prepare your resume that love prefers Harvard over Yale, English degrees over mathematical ones, and she’d like to see your stomach velcroed shut so it’s easier to rip out your guts whenever the mood hits her.

Also, if you were involved in some sort of scouting as a child you should list that too, along with whatever merit badges you may have obtained. It might just give you that competitive edge.