It’s christmas. Woopdeedoo and loop de loop and all that. Yes, that’s right, since you all asked so fucking nicely, we didn’t bother to do a video this week as it’s the festive season and is therefore all about building up your hopes in order to dash them.

In fact, we’re so set on driving you all to distraction that we’re going to have Christmas specials every week now because that’s exactly what christmas is all about. Incessant disappointment until you eat so much chocolate and drink so much cheap sherry that you may as well check into Dignitas on Boxing Day.

Still, euthanasia aside, it’s always best to start the Christmas period as early as possible because that’s where you make the most money and since all of you dribbling gits out there in internet land believe that the Christmas period can only officially begin when the Coca Cola advert has tugged its way around your heartstrings, we decided to start as soon as they do.

Really early.

Christmas adverts take a few very set, very distinct and very dull paths. They either play to your sentimental side like Coca Cola or John Lewis, they play it for laughs like DFS (no, they really are) or they traipse out some washed-up celebrities in order to point at them and shout, “LOOK! THESE CELEBRITIES ENJOY CHRISTMAS AND THAT MEANS IT’S OKAY FOR YOU TO HAVE A NICE TIME AS WELL!”

That is unless you’re a child, in which case the advertising is still shouting at you but it’s more likely to be saying, “YOU WILL FORCE YOUR USELESS PEON PARENTS TO BANKRUPT THEMSELVES BUYING THIS TOY THAT YOU WILL PLAY WITH A MAXIMUM OF FIVE TIMES BEFORE IT BREAKS AND IS FORGOTTEN ABOUT IN A BOX! THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! BUY OUR PRODUCTS!” It’s a tough lesson but it’s one that children should learn from an early age.

Some adverts actually go out of their way to combine all these elements into 30 second mini-dramas with a narrative and a heart and real, genuine drama. Step forward, Very.co.uk.

Drama. It opens with a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone duel close-up. The forlorn strings of a guitar warble out in the distance. The slightly odd sight of two television presenters going up against the Il Duce of Christmas himself is completely offset by the sudden sense of tension…

…oh, what’s that hyper-irritating version of ‘Anything You Can Do…’ doing there?

In an effort to explain the sudden appearance of this jaunty brainworm, spokesmorons and celebrity bum-chums Holly & Fearne are quickly shown beating Santa at his own game of counter-intuitive housebreaking. Where Santa seems to fail is that he can’t just wander through someone’s front door at 8 in the evening.

Why?

He’s not bloody famous, that’s why.

Besides Fearne thinking she can ‘bring back’ a hairstyle that looks like a ploughed field, they’re showing him up by interacting with a family. It’s cosy, it’s sentimental. That’s where TV presenters and Santa Claus differ you see, Santa Claus isn’t a self-praising narcissist. If they really wanted to do Santa’s job better than him then they could do worse than to disappear from existence in a puff of smoke, becoming a lie that parents tell their kids so that they don’t grow up to be self-involved twat baskets.

Look at that family mocking santa claus. “He’s not even real!” they mockingly cry as the poor old bastard tries to stuff a wooden train under their smart-price christmas tree. Holly and Fearne look on with derision. Humour. Sick, sick humour. How can he ever hope to gain the thanks of millions of children all over the world with his paltry offerings of wooden toys, handmade with love and affection by tiny little people than Ricky Gervais thinks are hilarious? None of these things are a Nintendo 3DS (CHILDREN! YOU WANT A 3DS!)

Dirty tactics! That’s what it is. Holding back the poor, decrepit old man who just wants to finish his annual paper route without being held back by two tarts with a glorified catalogue. Sure they might have more presents than ol’ Sanity Clause himself but do they have the magical powers to skoot round the earth delivering presents like they’ve just inhaled a kilo of amphetamines and broken the face of Bernard’s watch?

Of course they don’t. They’re bloody TV presenters! TV presenters can just smile and read from an autocue. They can’t even drive that van. They had to get the cameraman to move slightly to the left because Fearne Cotton just sat staring at the pedals like a brain-damaged horse. There’s no magic there.

So what’s the outcome? Have the spokesmorons actually managed to upset the balance of Christmas forever? Will the festive season ever be the same again? Does their defeat of Santa mean that Fearne Cotton & Holly Willoughby will become an ethereal, fictional presence that children make macaroni images of in primary schools?

FIND OUT IN PART TWO!

Pete Doherty’s prison adventure has been cut dramatically short – not by a horrific stabbing injury as some had hoped, but by early release.

Released less than a month into his 14-week jail sentence, Pete Doherty is now a free man once again, much like Ronnie Barker from Going Straight except a bit less funny and/or dead.

Still, even 29 days in jail is long enough for someone to become institutionalised, which means in the next few days you might see pictures of Pete Doherty stumbling around looking a bit confused and unwashed. Don’t worry if you do – it means he’s completely back to normal. Thanks folks, we’re here all week.

By our understanding, Pete Doherty being sent to jail for 14 weeks meant that he’d be released on July 15. But Pete Doherty has been released and it’s not anywhere near July 15 yet. It had better not be, anyway, because if it was, that’d make tomorrow St Gondulphus’ day, and we haven’t even started making our traditional anti-Gondulphus hate banner yet. Talk about an oversight!

But anyway, back to Pete Doherty. You might not have realised it, since the dreary trickle of stories about him hasn’t dried up at all, but Pete Doherty has been in jail for the last 29 days. And this morning he was released, a full 70 days earlier than he was supposed to.

Nobody really knows why Pete Doherty got such an early release from prison – although hopefully it was because wardens caught him writing more rubbish prison poetry and chucked him out before he had enough to turn it into an actual book – but Pete knows one thing, and that’s he’s not having any of this jail cell heroin addiction talk. The NME quotes:

“I managed to stay clean. I got my certificate. I was going to Sellotape it to the wall, but they wouldn’t give me any Sellotape. Did I take heroin inside? Complete rubbish. The prison didn’t release statements – it’s their policy to ignore it rather than acknowledge it [media reports]. I was in segregation for the last three weeks. The call it the block. Supposedly I was in debt to loads of big time drug dealers. All I’ll say to that is: chance would be a fine thing.”

And if Pete Doherty didn’t take any heroin in jail, perhaps we can effectively rule out any other stereotypical prison behaviour from his as well. Maybe Pete didn’t get any tattoos, maybe he didn’t nurture an injured bird back to health, maybe he wasn’t anally brutalised in a washroom at any point, and maybe he didn’t learn his lesson and vow never to reoffend ever again. Who knows?

All that we can be sure of is that Pete Doherty is a free man, and he’d be wise to use this extra time to get his life back in order as quickly as possible. Unless or course that involves making a new album or singing in public again. If that’s the case, maybe he should consider getting back into a self-destructive spiral of drug abuse or something instead.

Read more:

Pete Doherty: ‘I stayed clean in prison’ - NME

It's outrageous – all Michelle Rodriguez wants to do is find beauty in a jail cell and the sods keep setting her free before she can properly find it.

Although Michelle Rodriguez started her 180-day jail sentence for probation violation just over a fortnight ago, it has been reported that she was last night set free for good behaviour. In total Michelle Rodriguez served just 17 days of her six-month sentence.

Michelle should count herself lucky – one day longer and she'd have had to suffer through a full 10 percent of her sentence. Imagine how hellish that would be.

Remember when Michelle Rodriguez went to jail for six months a couple of days before Christmas? Aside from the fact that it meant policeman could work over Christmas without a lairy mannish-looking woman from the Dominican Republic stumbling up to them and ordering them to put a gun to her fucking head, what do you remember most about it?

Was it, say, that Michelle Rodriguez was found to be ineligible for either work furloughs or house arrest and had to – absolutely had to – serve out the entire six months of her jail sentence, all of it, from beginning to end, with not even a sniff an early release?

Funny that, because that's what we remember about it, too.

Not that anything like that matters, though, because Michelle Rodriguez's 180-day sentence for skipping community service from a previous conviction and drinking with a SCRAM anklet has been cut to just 17 days, and she was released last night. People reports:

Michelle Rodriguez was released from the Lynwood, Calif., jail Wednesday night after serving just 17 days of her 180-day sentence… The 29-year-old actress got out at 7:50 p.m., according to her official web site.

17 days? 17 measly days? That's rubbish. Honestly, what's a decent self-respecting female inmate like Michelle Rodriguez supposed to accomplish in 17 poxy days? That's only enough time to get you a brown belt in shiv-fencing at best, plus it's nowhere near the amount of time that Michelle Rodriguez's body needed to build up an immunity to the biro-ink tattoo performed with a spit-sterilised needle that she was planning to give herself. 

Still, Michelle Rodriguez's early jail release hold an important moral for all of us – if you're going to break the law, then do it in Los Angeles. And it helps if you're the shit one from Lost as well.

Read more:

Michelle Rodriguez Out of Jail – Early! – People