So Victoria Lindsay much have thr right grumps at the moment. Not so long ago, Victoria Lindsay was viciously beaten by eight mostly-female teenagers who intended to post the video on YouTube and become the new Chocolate Rain or whatever. And when Dr Phil heard about this, he thought “Lummy, a child in danger! Only I can help her!”

Actually that’s not the case at all – Dr Phil thought “Whoopee! Easy ratings!” and decided to make an episode of his show about it, quickly helping one of the suspects post bond so she could appear on it. But now the episode has been cancelled because of Dr Phil’s suspect ethics. And now nobody’s lives will change because a fat bald man shouted a worn-out catchphrase at them. Literally nobody wins.

YouTube, it’s fair to say, is responsible for some really dumb trends. Who can forget the time everyone tried leaping out of their moving cars and dancing on the bonnet because a rapper made a song about it? Or when Paul McCartney invented nodding your head? And if we see one more dramatic chipmunk on the street begging for money, we won’t be held responsible for our actions.

But perhaps the stupidest YouTube craze around is the craze of beating people up on camera and putting it on YouTube. Not because of the physical and psychological trauma that the victim will inevitably go through – frankly those babies need to man up a bit – but because if the attackers are stupid enough to film their own faces on the entire internet as they beat someone up, then they probably deserve to be arrested.

This craze has already cost one aspiring singer her spot on X Factor, and now a bunch of people won’t be going on Dr Phil about it either. But that’s not to say that Dr Phil didn’t try really really hard to get them on anyway.

Recently eight Florida teenagers were arrested and variously charged with felonious battery, kidnapping and false imprisonment after attacking 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay and filming it with intent to post the video on YouTube. During the attack Victoria suffered concussion, eye and ear damage and was knocked unconscious.

As well as being a horrific individual case, the attack also preys on the general public’s fears of youth and technology, which sounds perfect for a Dr Phil episode – after all, if an overweight, dubiously-qualified man can’t save these attackers by shouting a lot of half-baked self-help slogans at them in front of a crowd of easily-convinced rednecks then all is lost.

Trouble is, some of the teenage suspects couldn’t meet bail – which is why someone working for Dr Phil decided to step in and and free them. And that little manoeuvre has arsed up the episode for good, as the New York Times reports:

Dr. Phil pulled the plug on plans for a story on the Florida teenagers jailed for participating in a videotaped beating after learning that members of his staff helped one of the eight suspects post bond…Terri Corigliano, a spokeswoman for “Dr. Phil” McGraw, wrote in an e-mail message that “in this case, certain staff members went beyond our guidelines (re the bail being paid). These staff members have been spoken to and our policies reiterated. In addition, we have decided not to go forward with the story as our guidelines have been compromised.”

It’s just another blow for Dr Phil, who just can’t stop suffering these embarrassing setbacks. First Dr Phil’s proposed Britney Spears episode was ditched because Britney’s family said he was exploitative and only interested in self-promotion, and now this has come along, too.

But don’t worry Dr Phil, we’re sure one day a terrible news story will turn up that you’ll be allowed to pounce on and profit from for the sake of nothing but a simplistic desire for ratings. Your time will come, you great big adorable bear.

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Intervention Scuttles a Dr. Phil Show – NYT

Everyone knows that – it's the reason why all the hecklerspray staff are such well-rounded, perfectly normal individuals. It's also the reason why the family of Britney Spears have all got the hump with Dr Phil for speaking out publicly about Britney's recent psychological snafu. Dr Phil, they say, have broken the Spears' circle of trust.

And circles of trust are a lot like hymens – once broken they can only be repaired by complicated, expensive and largely unnecessary surgical procedures. We think. 

Dr Phil lives to help people. OK, that's not strictly true – we get the impression that Dr Phil actually lives to shout worn-out old self-helpish catchphrases at emotionally-crosseyed rednecks who just want to be on TV – but helping people is sometimes a by-product of that. On Dr Phil's show today, for instance, he'll be helping five dumpy housewives to dress like sluts.

So it goes without saying that Britney Spears would have to be the world's most cloth-eared nobsack to not want to listen to the advice of the almighty Dr Phil. Which is funny, because she doesn't. She really doesn't.

This might come as a surprise to some of you, but Britney Spears was recently in hospital getting her brain looked at following a custody stand-off with police and Kevin Federline which may have involved some sort of drug or weapon and almost certainly involved all kinds of fairly annoying attention-seeking shrieking. 

On hearing about this, Dr Phil rode the fireman's pole down to his Advicecave, hopped into his Advicemobile and shot off to the hospital to scatter his life-changing advice seeds over Britney Spears' heart. After leaving hospital with Britney, Dr Phil vowed to help her by devoting an entire episode of his show to Britney Spears, not because he wanted to get bigger ratings by chasing a sensationalist headline while it was still warm, you understand, but because he wanted to help.

And, as you know, this incensed Britney Spears' family so much that they forced Dr Phil to cancel the episode. And quite right too – the Spears family have obviously done such a sterling job of raising Britney Spears and her pregnant 16-year-old sister so far that the last thing they need is an outsider sticking their oar in with their high-falluting 'ideas' and 'qualifications'.

And now they've revealed why they're all so furious at Dr Phil. According to family spokesman Lou Taylor, Dr Phil only took an interest in Britney Spears to serve his own purposes:

"What's wrong with Dr. Phil's statement is that he made a statement. The family, basically, extended an invitation of trust for him to come in as a resource to support them, not to go out and make public statements. He was not invited to make this part of a public display or part of the media."

Yes, how dare Dr Phil – a man who Britney Spears' family contacted because they saw him on TV – discuss Britney Spears on TV. It's appalling, although maybe the family should think about looking through the Yellow Pages for help next time rather than calling up the first person they happen to gawp at dancing around in the flickering box in their living room.

We're speaking from experience here – when our dishwasher broke we called Tim Allen after seeing him on an episode of Home Improvement. We won't be doing that again. Not because he hilariously destroyed our dishwasher, you see. It's because he's a dick.

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Spears Family Slams Dr. Phil – Daily Dish 

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?

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

So with that in mind, thank Christ that Dr Phil has taken it upon himself to personally wade in and resolve to fix Britney Spears' broken mind forever. According reports, Dr Phil managed to accompany Britney Spears home after her weird little episode on Thursday evening that ended up with her being wheeled to hospital in a stretcher for psychological tests. And Dr Phil is so hell-bent on sorting out Britney Spears' life that he's even going to do a TV show all about it tomorrow. And quite right too, because if anything's going to set Britney onto the straight and narrow it's the sight of a chubby bald man pointing at a photo of her and shouting "Let's do it! Get real!" 350 times on the trot on daytime TV.

A few days have passed now since Britney Spears was taken to hospital in a stretcher following a ridiculous standoff with Kevin Federline over custody of her children that saw six police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters, a vanload of paparazzi, those stop-motion skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts, Digby The Biggest Dog In The World, the cast of South Pacific and Batman get sent to her house in a frenzy, and finally things have started to become clear about what went down.

Apparently – based on reports of the incident that we've read from various sources – the whole malarkey started when Britney Spears refused to hand over her children to Kevin Federline at the court-appointed deadline. At that point Britney Spears either barricaded herself in a room with one of her children, both of her children or none of her children and then either took a bunch of illegal drugs, took a bunch of prescription drugs, drank some alcohol or didn't consume anything and then either threatened to kill herself, kill her children, kill her ex-husband or kill none of the above with a gun, some other sort of weapon or no weapon at all. We hope this helps.

Anyway, after whatever the hell is supposed to have happened, Britney Spears was taken to hospital for a mental evaluation to see if she suffers from a tragic mental illness or not. Since she was released from hospital on Saturday morning, we can take it that Britney Spears doesn't actually have a mental illness – meaning that she's just a bit of a twat – but that hasn't stopped Dr Phil from diving in and trying to get his face noticed.

Apparently Dr Phil – the one-time Oprah acolyte who routinely cures idiots of all sorts of life problems on his TV show by shouting bland self-help nothingisms like "This relationship needs a hero!" and "This is going to be a changing day in your life!" at them again and again like a pudgy parrot – escorted Britney Spears home from the hospital. And the experience was so moving for Dr Phil that he's going to base an entire TV show around Britney tomorrow because he loves her and not at all because he thinks that more people will watch his show if he fills it with lots of photos of Britney Spears dribbling in a stretcher. According to Dr Phil:

"My meeting with Britney and some of her family members this morning in her room at Cedars leaves me convinced more than ever that she is in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention. She was released moments before my arrival and was packing when I entered the room. We visited for about an hour before I walked with her to her car. I am very concerned for her." 

There's no mention of whether Britney Spears will appear on tomorrow's edition of Dr Phil – probably because she won't but more people will watch if they think she will – but maybe some direct televised Phil-isms will be what Britney Spears needs to change her ways in any case. And if that fails, it'll be time to bring in the last-ditch heavy artillery to set her straight – we're talking Maury.

Read more:

Britney Spears Leaves Hospital After Visit From Dr. Phil - MTV