Well, you’ll never guess what he thinks of them.

In an interview with The Today Show, Brad Pitt has announced that he hates the paparazzi, but he loves his family. Steady on there, Brad – much more of this controversial ‘good things are good and bad things are bad’ talk and there’s a decent chance that you’ll end up literally melting our mind. What? You like your family? That’s literally crazy. Video after the jump.

We’re starting to think that Brad Pitt is a lost cause. The poor man just doesn’t know how to promote a movie. Later this month, Brad’s new film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is released, and it looks like it could be one of the best films of the year. Or at least it would be if Brad Pitt could sell the ruddy thing convincingly.

Now, if Angelina Jolie was the star of Benjamin Button it’d be a different story. She’d be rolling out stories of how many weapons her children have and how much she hates Jennifer Aniston and seeing how many babies she could clip onto each tit and the end result would be, well, nobody would watch the movie because it’d be an Angelina Jolie movie and nobody’s that mental, but at least there would be loads of headlines about her. Sometimes that’s enough.

But Brad Pitt? His promotion of Benjamin Button is just wildly dull. It started badly – with a dreary anecdote about his kids – and now it’s inexplicably managed to get worse. Brad Pitt has been interviewed by The Today Show, and the two main thrusts of the outcome are that a) Brad Pitt loves his kids and b) Brad Pitt doesn’t love the paparazzi. First the quotes and then the video:

“I’m really proud of this family. I look at my sons and my daughters – one is from Vietnam, one is from Cambodia, one is from Ethiopia and here are these kids who were born in Namibia and in France, and they’re brothers and sisters… Truly, I feel rich being around them. Each one of them offers so much to the mix.”

“Let me be very blunt, I hate them. I hate these people. I don’t understand how they do that for a living. We have to make a distinction between people who photograph celebrities at events and people who climb over walls wearing camouflage… calling out your kids’ names as you try to take them to school so they’ll look that way. I have no respect for these people. There should be laws against it.”

Really Brad Pitt? You hate the paparazzi? We would have never guessed – all this time we thought you were ordering your security to hug them when they got too close. Hug them hard. By the neck.

Anyway, we can sort of see Brad Pitt’s point here – his family does deserve a base amount of privacy from time to time, if only because it’d keep them out of the poxy magazines once in a while – but come on, you’re promoting a film here! Can’t you dredge up some kind of huge inappropriately personal aspect of your life and endlessly drone on about that instead?

Jesus, it’s almost like Brad Pitt wants his potentially Oscar-winning movie to be judged on its merits or something. That’s literally disgusting.

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Thousands of women are killed every year from the latter offense. These battles are often epic, lasting for days on end  – victory only being claimed when one contender drops to the ground dead, possibly with large chunks of hair missing, and Lee Press-Ons lodged in different parts of their face & shoulders.

So it was, recently, in some island airport when two sub-D-list female celebrities crossed paths. In one corner it was Nikki Blonsky, the lead from the movie Hairspray. In the other corner it was Bianca Golden, an America’s Next Top Model cast-off. They actually fought – physically. Hate raged as their blood and spit intertwined mid-air, possibly pushed to and fro by a mediocre ventilation system. Also hate raged as the Top Model girl had her foot bitten by a human being. Hate also raged as somebody’s father beat somebody else’s mother to the point of hospitalization.

That’s all that hate raged though. We wouldn’t want to exagerate – and we haven’t.

Yet.

Picture it if you will – you were a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, you’re in an island-vacation airport somewhere, and you just want to sit down. You see a seat available, but the hefty lead from the Hairspray movie has her suitcase on it. What do you do?

You fight, apparently. And that’s just what happened. According to Monsters & Critics:

“Nikki Blonsky from the recent film, “Hairspray” and her father were arrested at Providenciales International Airport in Turks and Caicos. They were reportedly involved in a fight with Bianca Golden from America’s Next Top Model. UsWeekly.com reports that the Blonsky family had their luggage on the seat and refused to move it. The fight allegedly also started because Nikki’s family was also saving five seats and Bianca’s family wanted them. TMZ reported that one of Bianca’s family members bit Nikki’s foot.”

Bit a foot? Well you don’t get that big from abstaining, you know what we mean, gang? The fight involved far more than the two women who are questionably famous. Their parents got way into it too – to the point where Nikki’s dad gave Bianca’s mom enough injuries to send her to a Miami hospital. He’s still in jail, incidentally.

This reminds us greatly of hecklerspray’s last family vacation wherein our dad got head-konked by a coconut, lost consciousness for two minutes, then swam up a whale’s lady-parts to help it give birth. We took baby whale home but the 65 mph winds it experienced while strapped to our roof rack for the ten hour drive dried it up dead.

Our one sister still brings it up at least monthly. Possibly because for the last three hours she was strapped up there with it.

They weren’t – as soon as the show finished Hulk Hogan and Linda Hogan got divorced and took up with insanely young new partners, Nick Hogan wrapped his car around a tree and went to jail and Brooke Hogan… well that chin of hers isn’t looking any less weird, is it?

So what’s going on? Maybe we’ll never know – after all, the Hogans have sold themselves out to the media before and it’s ended in tears, so the sensible thing to do would be to close ranks and figure out their problems in private. Or, if you’re Brooke Hogan, you’ll just go on Access Hollywood and yammer on about it for ages instead. Which is much more fun. Thanks Brooke!

Looking at the Hogan family, it’s remarkable that they stayed together this long. One parent is a veiny, abnormally large brute with bad hair and skin the colour of a bruised testicle who runs around in tiny red knickers for a living, and the other one is Hulk Hogan.

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Linda Hogan filed for divorce from Hulk Hogan right after the family’s reality TV show Hogan Knows Best stumbled to a conclusion, claiming that the marriage was ‘irretrievably broken’ – which we think is code for ‘my husband just beat me in an arm wrestle for the first time ever and it’s affected my sense of self-worth’.

Meanwhile, son Nick Hogan crashed his car so badly that his passenger will remain in constant care for the rest of his life, and he’s ended up doing solitary in jail for it. It’s not a perfect state of affairs by any means, and you get the feeling that if the family ever made another reality TV show it’d probably be called something like Look At This Awful Bunch Of Clueless Dickheads.

But, anyway, what about Brooke Hogan? Now that her brother’s in jail, she’s left all by herself – torn between a father who had it off with one of her friends and a mother that’s currently having it off with a boy she used to go to school with.

What would you do in Brooke Hogan’s situation? Go on Access Hollywood and spout off about all your family’s darkest problems in front of an audience of millions for no constructive reason whatsoever? Good, because that’s what Brooke Hogan chose to do as well. MSNBC quotes Brooke:

“I don’t know it’s — it’s been pretty nuts… I have to admit I did have a little bit of a breakdown one time about that ‘cause my brother and I are inseparable… I do feel like if someone can see me slip up, you know, they would love it because it would complete the family craziness.”

Good for Brooke Hogan, we say. She’s seen the damage that a reality TV show can do to people and – regardless of how stupidly the rest of her family has decided to act in public in the wake of Hogan Knows Best – she’s determined to live the rest of her life with as much dignity as possible, keen never to repeat the past mistakes made by herself and those around her.

Congratulations, Brooke! We have nothing but respect for you!

Brooke Hogan’s new reality TV show Brooke Knows Best debuts on VH1 this Sunday. We’re not making this up. Christ, what a hopeless jizzpot that girl is.

So thank heavens that Janet Jackson has finally got broody – she wants a baby so badly that it's all she can do not to dress up as a nurse and snatch one from a maternity ward somewhere.

That's according to Janet's boyfriend Jermaine Dupri, anyway. He says that Janet is so desperate for babies that they're going to try for one the instant she finishes her upcoming tour. But why wait? if Janet Jackson wants a baby that badly she should throw caution to the wind and just cancel her shows. The fans won't mind – if they're Janet Jackson fans they'll have grown used to the crushing feeling of disappointment anyway.

We can't help but wonder what Janet Jackson would be like as a mother. On the one hand we can totally see the plus sides – she's already developed an offensively efficient breastfeeding technique – but we can't help feeling that she'd probably pass you off to relatives and then deny you were ever born the moment she gave birth to you. It's a tricky one. 

But we might just about be ready to find out. According to her boyfriend Jermaine Dupri, Janet Jackson is furiously intent on having a baby as soon as possible.

And since Jermaine Dupri loves Janet Jackson so much that he took the blame when one of her last albums fared traditionally dismally, he's decided to bite the bullet and help her out. MTV reports:

Janet admitted earlier this year that she was itching to have children… Dupri already has a daughter and explained that he’s not concerned whether he has a boy or a girl with Janet "It really doesn't matter. Janet would be a great mum. She was around so many brothers and sisters all her life, so she's got to know what that is (like)”.

Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. Janet Jackson will be a good mother because she knows what it's like to be part of a large, perfectly normal family that wasn't pushed into showbusiness by an brutal taskmaster of a father or grew up to become, variously, a spooky cross-dressing recluse surrounded by allegations of child abuse, a man who tried writing a book about how much of a paedophile his brother was, a Playboy model and a grown man named Tito. That Mother Of The Year award's as good as hers already.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here – Janet Jackson's actually got to have the baby first. And that might be a bit tricky. Not because of all the risks inherent in becoming pregnant at 42, you understand, but because we're not sure if she knows how it works. 

After all, Janet Jackson's technique to get people to think she's sexy is to just explicitly say the word 'sexy' over and over again in her songs, so there's a pretty good chance that she thinks people get pregnant just by repeating the word 'baby' in a mumbly cod-erotic way a bunch of times.

Think again – even though he’s probably going to be in prison for the foreseeable future and she doesn’t seem to be able to go more than a day without being in the papers for getting off with a variety of blokes who all look like infected bum scabs, Amy Winehouse and Blake Civil-Fielder are apparently planning to renew their marriage vows.

That’s the story, at least – in truth we’d imagine that Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil will opt for a slight retooling of their marriage vows. Since it’s fairly difficult to pledge ‘to have and to hold’ when one of them’s locked away in prison, perhaps Amy Winehouse can instead vow to keep her mangy genitals away from anyone out of Babyshambles for a nonspecific period of time. It’s the same wedding vows we’d want.

Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil are a bit like a soap opera. A really shit soap opera that seems to just comprise of one single episode repeated four times daily until the end of time even though people would rather watch kitten torture instead because it’s less harrowing.

But at least we thought we knew where Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil were going. Ever since Blake’s been in prison for allegedly perverting the course of justice all over some bloke’s face, Amy Winehouse has allegedly found comfort in the arms of other men.

Well, OK, not men exactly – little Ben Mitchell from EastEnders and Cousin Itt and someone’s grotty-looking grandpa to be more precise – but it doesn’t matter. To the casual observer, the signs were clear – Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil were on the outs.

Except now they’re apparently not. Apparently Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil have fallen in love again and want to renew their marriage vows in an effort to prove to the world that they’re committed to one another. It’s either a case of absence making the heart grow stronger or Class A drugs making the brain grow stupider, but we’ll let The Sunday Mirror carry on for us:

A source said: “Amy and Blake are more determined than ever to show the world they are together. As soon as he is out they will be renewing their wedding vows – they want to put two fingers up to those who want them apart.” The source added: “They want another wedding, a family and are even planning to set up a business together.”

Memorise that paragraph, everyone, because we don’t think a string of words has ever been put together more perfectly. You’d think that a quicker way of putting two fingers up to those who want them apart would be for Amy Winehouse to stop being romantically linked to a brand new man every couple of days, while the thought of them starting a business just beggars belief. Unless, of course, they charge people to stay at their house and experience a kind of perpetual retelling of the last few scenes of Requiem For A Dream in the flesh. There’s money in that, we’re sure.

And starting a family? Actually, that’s not such a bad idea. A baby, after all, makes the ideal unwitting drug mule. Maybe Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil aren’t so crazy after all.

Read more:

Exclusive: A second wedding for Amy Winehouse and Blake – Sunday Mirror

Because Heath Ledger didn't do that at all, which means his daughter Matilda has been left out of his will completely.

But rather than tear the Ledger family apart, as is usually the case when a celebrity dies with an out-of-date will, Heath Ledger's father has said that Matilda is the family's highest interest and that she will be 'looked after'. At least we think that's what he said. He was a little out of breath from shovelling all those shoe boxes of cash underneath the floorboards at the time.

If you ever want a perfect example of how to balls up your own death, look no further than James Brown. As sad as it was when James Brown died, it was nothing compared to the revelation that he had about 700 children and they all wanted a slice of his money. While they fought over the will, James Brown rotted away unburied in a corner of his house.

And, as Heath Ledger was often known as 'the white, Australian, young, unfunky, non-musical James Brown' before his death in January, it was only natural that he'd have an equally out-of-date will. As it turns out, that was completely the case. According to reports Heath Ledger's will was written in 2003, long before he got together with Michelle Williams or had his daughter Matilda.

As such, the will splits all of Heath Ledger's assets between his parents and siblings, missing out Williams and Matilda completely. However, knowing that raising a baby on the acting salary of Michelle Williams alone would result in starvation and probably death, Heath Ledger's father has stepped in to promise that Matilda will get her rightful share. MSNBC reports: 

After documents filed in Manhattan Surrogate's Court revealed that Heath Ledger's will left all his assets to his parents and siblings, the Ledger family is speaking out. "Matilda is our absolute priority and Michelle is an integral part of our family," Heath's father, Kim Ledger, said in a statement to the media. "They will be taken care of and that's how Heath would want it to be." … Ledger's rep quickly put to rest any speculation that Matilda and Michelle Williams would not be provided for, telling People, "The story is getting taken out of context and media is speculating that this means Matilda and Michelle will not be taken care of. I want to make it very clear nothing could be farther from the truth."

And that's it. No lengthy legal battles, no whispers of conspiracy, no reported videos of gay sex. Just a nice, normal, friendly agreement that makes quite a lot of sense for everyone involved. It's disgraceful. Everyone knows that when a celebrity dies, the surviving relatives should spend at least a fortnight tugging on the limbs of the corpse trying to get a bigger slice of the estate. That's the law.

And because that didn't happen, we're going to have to stop thinking of Heath Ledger as a celebrity at all. Not like Anna Nicole Smith who, according to our freakishly impaired logic, is now more famous than Jesus and Elvis Presley combined.

Read more:

Michelle Williams, toddler not in Ledger’s will – MSNBC 

This week: The Unexplainable

The problem with eighties architecture was that all the doors to buildings were far too formal. They were all very symmetrical, breeze-proof, and most had the overrated ability to open and close. That's way inside the box, man.

Imagine then, our surprise when the renovations we made to our family's west living-room wall with what was certainly an abandoned idling garbage truck went under-appreciated. We were in our room for millenia we tell you, and although we don't believe our father used guard dogs as an internment tool, there was a good chance the family poodle would have gone for the throat had we so much as cracked the door.

Still, that's nothing compared to Anatoly Titsky. He kept his wife and kids locked up in an isolated and haphazard prison camp modelled after Auschwitz for two years.

Anatoly Titsky is a 47-year-old Russian man who decided it would be beneficial for his entire family if he dug them a trench surrounded it with 20' high barbed wire fence. The immediate vicinity was patrolled by 20 guard dogs trained to kill any would-be escapees.

Those escapees could have been any of his five children aged 5 – 17, or his wife, age unknown. The camp was found by a local out picking mushrooms. This person described what they saw:

“When I happened across the prison it was like a concentration camp from Nazi Germany. There were red flags marking the limits and psychotic dogs foaming at the mouth while children stared out from behind the barbed wire.”

When police raided the place, Titsky ordered his family to run into the forest. An officer who saw their living conditions described the horror:

"The air was thick with the stench of rotting garbage and there was a pile of rags the kids used to keep themselves warm in winter. This family shared a 15ft-long shelter with geese and livestock. The dogs would start barking as soon as his wife and children approached the red flags. These prisoners had no chance of escape. When we got near, the dogs kept us at bay and we had to shoot them to avoid being torn to shreds. But inside we found only Titsky cowering underground. He told the kids to run off as we approached.”

Assuming you are a normal human being, the plight of these children probably offends you quite a bit. It shouldn't though, because he did it out of love. He said:

“Living in the forest isn’t savagery. I wanted to bring my children up in harsh conditions so they’d be ready for any challenge."

No word as to why he threw his wife in there too. As for the children though, there really is no doubt they'll be ready for the challenges life is sure to bring them. For instance, if they ever compete on Double Dare we're pretty sure they'll cream the green team.

And you know what? That is exactly what Titsky was preparing them for.

Read More:

Father Organizes Nazi Camp For His Wife And Five Children In Russia – Pravda

Nothing particularly unusual about that – Britney Spears seems to be contractually obliged to have a weird public meltdown every couple of weeks these days – but is Sam Lutfi really the steady hand that he's claimed to be?

Apparently not – it turns out that Sam Lutfi might be a weirdo with a bunch of restraining orders against him and a history of urging people to kill themselves. Which is, you know, inevitable.

It says a lot for the current state of Britney Spears that Kevin Federline is emerging as the most well-rounded character of the lot. And, seriously, the sight of the words 'Kevin Federline' and 'well-rounded' in the same sentence scares us as much as it does you.

Because look around at everyone else. There's Britney Spears' boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, a married paparazzo who immediately did all kinds of tell-all interviews about Britney when they split up for a day last week. Then there's Britney Spears' family – a slapper, a teenage almost-mother and some bloke respectively. And then there's Britney Spears' manager Sam Lutfi.

But Sam Lutfi is OK, because he's the man who phoned up Barbara Walters to tell her that Britney Spears is actually mental the other day. And even if that triggered off a public argument between Britney Spears and Sam Lutfi that ended up with Britney Spears crying on a pavement, Adnan Ghalib being refused entry to Britney's home, Britney's family trying to keep Britney away from Sam Lutfi and Sam Lutfi trying to keep Britney's family away from Britney, it was obviously the right thing to do because he's Britney's manager. Obviously.

And as Britney Spears' manager, it's Sam Lutfi's responsibility to protect Britney from danger, which mainly seems to involve telling people that Britney's family "have an agenda. Their agenda is jealousy," and texting Adnan Ghalib to tell him that he'll kill Britney. But despite his obvious sterling work at keeping Britney Spears on the straight and narrow, MTV has discovered that Sam Lutfi might be a teensy bit higher up the Creepy Weirdo scale than we thought:

According to three requests for restraining orders against him that have been obtained by MTV News — and are unrelated to Spears — Lutfi also has a dark side… Before Lutfi hooked up with Spears, he was a fixture in the life of Danny Haines, a former friend who claimed that their association turned sour when Lutfi allegedly sent nude pictures of him to his family, friends and employer, and tried to convince Haines to kill himself. "Seriously, sleeping pills, lots of them," Lutfi allegedly wrote to him, Haines told Blender magazine.

But, you know, other than the restraining orders and the whole suicide-convincing thing, we're sure Sam Lutfi is just lovely.

Seriously, though, we've looked at this from every possible angle and there's only one explanation for Britney Spears' current dire crisis – she has too many friends with shit facial hair. Honestly, both Sam Lutfi and Adnan Ghalib have those stupid little beardette things that run in a line from their bottom lip to their chin. Everyone – everyone – knows that people with beardettes are dickheads. So as soon as someone passes that memo onto Britney, we're sure everything will get straightened out nicely. 

Read more:

Britney Spears' Manager/Friend Sam Lutfi: Prior Restraining Orders Paint A Dark Picture – MTV 

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.

Read more:

Spears Family Slams Dr. Phil – Daily Dish