There’s just one thing missing – the grovelling atonement for all of her wrongs. But, wait, because that’s coming too – Britney Spears has announced a 90-minute MTV documentary all about her personal upsets, to be called something like but not necessarily Britney Spears: Yeah, Sorry About Shaving My Hair Off And Screaming About How I’m The Devil And Stuff.

It’s hoped that the documentary will be Britney Spears’ way of describing all the terrible mental anguish she’s been through in past through years, so that hopefully everyone can understand her side and put it behind them. Well, not all of Britney Spears’ mental anguish, obviously – it’s only a 90-minute documentary and she’ll probably want to spend more than a fifth of a nanosecond describing each of her individual character flaws.

There’s only one thing we want in our stockings this Christmas, and that’s a copy of Circus, the new album by Britney Spears. We want one because if it’s anything like the new Britney Spears single Womanizer, then it’ll consist of what sounds like Professor Stephen Hawking’s broken voice-machine repeating the word ‘circus’ monotonously for 50 or so minutes that was recorded while Britney Spears was out, say, terrorising a child or something.

But whether anyone else wants to buy the new Britney Spears album is another matter. For the bulk of people it’ll all depend on how Britney chooses to promote it. And to be honest, we’re not sure that she’s quite got the hang of it yet.

Remember the last Britney Spears album Blackout? Britney only did two pieces of promotion for that – one involved mumbling on a phone to Ryan Seacreast on her bed for 90 seconds, and the other involved the worst stage performance ever given by a human being. Needless to say, the promotion didn’t really work.

So for Circus, Britney Spears is pulling a new trick out of sleeve – the harrowing televised 90-minute exploration of mental illness.

For some reason, Britney Spears is under the impression that the only way she can sell albums these days is if she discusses her recent brushes with psychiatric despair in uncomfortable details for an hour and a half. And that’s what Britney Spears: For The Record is all about – to be shown on MTV on November 30, For The Record will be Britney’s way of wiping the slate clean about everything from her failed marriage to her loss of child custody to her stints in mental hospitals earlier this year. In the film, Britney states:

“I’ve been through a lot in the past two or three years, and there’s a lot that people don’t know. Sometimes I think I get kind of lonely because you don’t open the gate up that much, you know I mean? You’re guarded. You have to be that way, so I’m kind of stuck in this place and it’s like: How do you deal? And you just cope, and that’s what I do. I just cope with it, every day.”

For a young woman like Britney Spears to be forced to keep herself gated up like that is incredibly sad. At least until you remember that, on the rare occasions she does let her guard down, Britney tends to do things like smash up cars with umbrellas or babble relentlessly to herself in a made-up language. Hey Britney, maybe uptight repression is the way ahead, after all! It works pretty well for us!

Anyway, will Britney Spears: For The Record convince us that Britney’s worth taking a chance on again? Hard to say. Personally it all depends on what Britney apologises for. We’ve been burnt like this before, and so we’re only prepared to accept Britney Spears back into our lives if she says sorry for all those times she got her vagina out.

And she has to mean it too. That’s a dealbreaker.