If there’s one thing that Madonna isn’t, it’s a retard. Old, gap-toothed, embarrassing, yes – but not retarded.

But tell that to Guy Ritchie. He was married to Madonna for several years, so if he says that Madonna is retarded then, yes, Madonna must be retarded. And since Guy Ritchie said that Madonna is retarded in this month’s Esquire, it must be true.

But it’s OK – Guy also says that he still loves Madonna. Aww, it’s just like Romeo & Juliet, isn’t it? A wildly offensive version of Romeo & Juliet where Juliet is about 150 years old and keeps thrusting her manky old genitals in people’s faces when they’re trying to eat.

It seems a little pointless to go over the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce again, because it happened a long time ago and both parties have moved on so effortlessly. In fact, they’ve both pretty much reverted to exactly what they were doing before they even got married – Guy Ritchie is back making disappointing-looking films and Madonna is busy having it away with men so young that it wouldn’t surprise you if she one day stopped them on the street and wiped their faces clean with a spitty tissue.

But just because their divorce is in the past, it doesn’t mean that we’ve heard the end of it. Guy Ritchie has a new disappointing-looking film coming out soon, you see, and he needs to promote it. But how? What could he possibly talk about? The film itself? No, because he wants people to discover how disappointing it is for themselves. His previous films? No, because there’s a very real chance that an interviewer would lean in and slap his face the moment he said the word ‘Revolver‘. What does that leave? Oh, right, his marriage to Madonna.

So, a full year after anyone stopped caring, what insights into Madonna’s life could Guy Ritchie offer to Esquire? Let’s see:

“She’s a manifester, if there ever was one. First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen. Put Madonna up against any twenty-three-year-old, she’ll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them. The woman is broad. And, of course, here you go: I still love her… But she’s retarded, too.”

Don’t feel bad for Madonna just because Guy Ritchie called her retarded, though – almost exactly a year ago Madonna called Guy an ‘emotional retard’ during a concert, so this is his comeback. We can’t wait to hear Madonna’s rebuttal, which is due at some point in October 2010 and likely to be formed around the phrase “No, you’re retarded.” At which point, obviously, Guy Ritchie will take the bull by the horns and repeat the entire phrase back to Madonna in a slightly sarcastic way sometime around October 2011.

In fact, this weird little backwards and forwards could rumble each year until Madonna and Guy Ritchie are old and grey. Well, until Madonna is old and grey. It’ll go on until next year, that’s what we’re trying to say.

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When Henry VIII wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story on the severed necks of his dead wives sometime in the 1500s, he likely had no idea how long his sleuth would endure.

Yet here it is, some 500 years later and we’re still making movies out of him. And how, you might ask, can this next incarnation possibly seem fresh after all these years? Why, as best as we can tell they’re tying in Iron Man or something.

Also – they’re bringing in Brad Pitt. Or they’re not. But they are. Or they’re not.

Well it’s official – Brad Pitt is playing the part of Sherlock Holmes’ winged, semi-robot nemesis James Moriarty. We know this because it was reported by the Mirror:

“[Guy Ritchie] got in a right pickle with movie execs when they clapped eyes on the rough cut of his latest film… and felt like re-titling it the Mystery of the Missing Moriarty. They ordered the director to reinstate the great Holmes’ evil nemesis, pronto…Desperate for help, Guy phoned his old mucker Brad, who had starred in his gangster flick Snatch. Fortunately, Brad, 45, had a couple of days free in his busy schedule to pop over to Blighty to play the evil criminal mastermind.”

Sounds like a great idea – after all, look what Pitt did for Benjamin Button. Yeah – we’re talking real class here. Another reason adding him as an entirely new character last minute is brilliant is because we’ve heard it’s a sign of tremendous greatness when a script gets completely overhauled after it’s been 90% filmed.

That’s probably why it ends up the Pitt rumour is false. E! News says:

“By Jove, Brad Pitt is not—repeat not—snooping around the set of Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros. is shooting down a widely disseminated newspaper report that the Hollywood hunk is planning to shoot a cameo as Moriarty, the archfoe of Robert Downey Jr.’s pipe-toking supersleuth. “The report in today’s London Mirror is completely inaccurate. Brad Pitt is not joining the cast of Sherlock Holmes and we’re extremely pleased with the production of the film,” a studio-sanctioned statement says.”

Well that’s too bad – because we’d already envisioned a terrific slow-motion bear fight Brad could have had in the end just as the credits rolled. The bear wouldn’t have been hurt, of course, but with the right CGI there could have been blood all over the place – now that’s a movie!

Actually, it’s probably best that Pitt doesn’t star with Downey on the film. After all, he’s a committed family man now, and the last thing anybody wants to hear is that he’s leaving Angie because a home-wrecking Robert is pregnant with Brad Jr.

That’s what happens on Pitt films, you know. Somebody always gets pregnant.

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Robert Downey Jr. is Sherlock Holmes…

Our inspectors are baffled by the mystery of it: somehow, our favourite Victorian hero was mistaken for Inspector Gadget. Guy Ritchie resurrects London’s drug-reliant super-detective and ditches his deerstalker hat for ninja skills and fruity dialogue. Accompanied by Watson (Jude Law), a plot involving the occult and other destructive powers sends Mr. Holmes on a mission fraught with explosions, bare-knuckle boxing and ridiculous acrobatics.

See him leap into the Thames from Westminster Palace, blow up half of London looking for criminals and get chained to a bed by a whore. Arthur Conan Doyle’s quick-witted 18th century legend is dragged, kicking and screaming into the box office of the future, making a name for cheesy one-liners and walking stick martial arts. A sense of humour failure is expected from the purists.

At one point in time, Madonna was a feminine woman who graced the charts without having to flex her arse at us.

Even perverts liked her – they got to see ropey porn featuring cars and candle wax. Now she’s bulked up so much that if you sticky-taped a drawing of a willy over her lady tunnel, she’d legally be classified as a bloke.

Over the years, she has moved on to other career paths. These include picking up an African child as her new plaything and divorcing Guy Richie. Someone captured their time together in a painting which we’d sum up as rubbish. Arty people seem to agree too – nobody bought it.

Now, it’s not like no-one stuck up their hand and offered £5.63, a Twix and their hat. A few bids were apparently recorded, but nobody wanted to piss away £15,000 on a painting of Madonna and Guy Richie.

Of course, we all know that everyone is being financially shafted and hardly anyone can afford to piss away money on total tat. Believe it or not, we aren’t expert art dealers and our invitation to appear on Cash In The Attic and Bargain Hunt haven’t arrived yet. But we know the following:

* The painting was done by Scottish artist Peter Howson who is meant to be quite good. Sadly 93.7% of the public don’t know who he is. If the auction house had lied and said Banksy painted it, some moron would have shelled out £100,000.

* We’ve never seen Guy Richie naked before, only his face. But it appears that he is the human equivalent of The Thing from The Fantastic Four in the portrait. Give him a fake tan to make him look orange and you’ve completed the look.

* Madonna and Guy Richie secretly created the monster from the Cloverfield movie. They both appear to be as tall as the building in the background and don’t really mind unleashing a beast to destroy New York.

*Sadly, the artist Peter Howson has done nothing to make Madonna look vaguely attractive. Surely his brief for the painting can’t have been “make her look as manly as possible, pregnant and strongly resembling something that farmers would use as an alternative as a scarecrow”.

* Just a little bit of work is needed on Madonna’s left tit. Her nipple looks a cherry stone and if you turn your head to the left to gaze at its ugliness, it resembles Pac-Man. We know you’ve just tried it.

But don’t worry dear reader! If you thought you’ve missed out on the opportunity to own a genuine piece of overpriced shit, then you are wrong. According to BBC News:

“The painting is still for sale and we would be delighted to hear from anyone who is interested in this much talked about piece of Scottish art history.”

There are two options here. We all chip in a pound, buy the artwork and stage a mass public burning of it in a randomly picked city centre. Or, the auction house will have to go for a rubbish bid such as £5.63, a Twix and a hat with fluffy clouds pasted all over it.

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Because that’s incontestable fact. Until recently Guy Ritchie was married to Madonna, whose bizarre mid-Atlantic accent made her sound exactly like Lloyd Grossman choking on grape skins – and now it’s been rumoured that he’s hooked up with Jemima Khan, the horsey aristocrat who used to go out with Hugh Grant.

And, as we all known, Jemima Khan is so furiously posh that her voice sounds a mouse stuck up a chimney who can only communicate in vowel-sounds. Well done, Guy Ritchie.

It’s good to see that after all the arguments, comparisons to butchery cast-offs and possibly having it away with steroid-using idiots, Guy Ritchie and Madonna have managed to move on from their divorce with the utmost dignity.

Well, you know, dignity only relative to two people who dress up like slutty 14-year-olds and make the worst films in the history of planet Earth respectively. Madonna is apparently going out with a boy named Jesus who could literally only be younger than he currently is if he was a test tube full of sperm, and Guy Ritchie is still cartwheeling after a woman so unrelentingly upper class that she probably employs a full staff of Indonesians just to keep riff-raff out of her eyeline in case one of them offends her delicate sensibilities.

You may remember that Guy Ritchie and Hugh Grant’s ex-girlfriend Jemima Khan were possibly but not quite a couple back in December. Well we’ve got some blisteringly hot news for you – Guy Ritchie and Jemima Khan are… still possibly but not quite a couple. Gigantic news, we know. Gather yourselves and read what the News Of The World has to say about it:

One close friend told me: “They’re taking things slowly as Guy doesn’t want to throw himself back into the dating world so soon after splitting with him. Jemima has been there to comfort him — they’ve become very good friends because of it. But everyone can see there’s clearly a connection between them and I don’t think anyone would be surprised if they take things on to the next level.”

Personally we’re hoping that Guy Ritchie and Jemima Khan do manage to take things on to the next level, because at this rate, the next level would be ’sharing a strand of spaghetti like in Lady And The Tramp except the strand of spaghetti is nine miles long and they’re both quite full up’.

Honestly, we’ve calculated that Guy Ritchie and Jemima Khan are moving so slowly that they’d need to take things on by about 300 extra levels before they actually become a couple, which we’d like to see because they’d probably split up a couple of days afterwards and then we’d actually have something decent to write about for once. People, let’s make it happen.

Read more:

A Guy Khan Look! – NOTW

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Or, to be more specific, they’ve opened him up to the possibility of love with immensely rich women whose plummy British accents are so ludicrous that they sound like aristocratic cats yakking up hairballs when they try to speak.

To demonstrate this, Guy Ritchie has apparently been seen ‘canoodling’ with Jemima Khan – a woman who’s basically just a singing career, an adopted African child and a wardrobe full of gruesome leotards away from actually being Madonna. Possibly.

The best thing about the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce – aside from the happy relief that we’ll never see Madonna star in a woefully-directed cockney gangster thriller about some nonces trying to turn over the Kabbalah – is that they’ve both managed to make a clean break of it.

It was simple – Madonna and Guy Ritchie decided to split up, Madonna handed Guy Ritchie an obscene amount of money and they both went on their merry ways. Since then, Madonna has been seen gyrating her crotch at Alex Rodriguez and, if today’s reports are true, a dancing teenage Jesus – although we’ll admit that we haven’t actually read today’s reports properly – and Guy Ritchie doesn’t seem to be doing too badly out of this either.

Not only has Guy Ritchie been romantically linked with a ginger girl from his new film, but he’s also apparently set his sights on Jemima Khan, the aristocratic ex-girlfriend of Hugh Grant, daughter of right-wing billionaire James Goldsmith and former wife of Star Trek villain Khan Noonien Singh.

Those of you with pointlessly long memories will remember that Jemima Khan is the woman who got the hump because Hugh Grant didn’t want to marry her and then left, and then went back to him, and then left, and then went back to him and blah blah blah forever until everyone died. And now it looks like it might be time for her to go through all that kerfuffle again with Guy RItchie. They’ve been canoodling, don’t you know. Monsters And Critics reports:

Guy Ritchie has a new squeeze, it has been reported. According to London’s Telegraph, the director was canoodling with British millionaire heiress Jemima Khan. The report says that Ritchie and Khan attended a U.K. dinner party together earlier this month, hosted by Matthew Freud and his wife, Elisabeth Murdoch.

Actually, we’re hoping this rumour is true. Guy Ritchie and Jemina Khan would be such a good match for each other. Jemima has lived her entire life in the shadow of powerful men, so we’d have to endure fewer of the ridiculous power struggles that Guy constantly had with Madonna. More importantly, though, Jemima Khan is bloody well loaded, so if Guy moves fast enough he can marry her and then divorce her by Easter and he’ll probably get another pub out of it.

Still, though – Guy Ritchie isn’t the only with a type, is he? First Hugh Grant and now Guy Ritchie? It seems like nothing turns Jemima Khan on more than British people who make rubbish films but are bizarrely lauded in America. If we were James McAvoy, we’d be investing in a decent pair of running shoes.

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Yeah, she’s not lovely. Madonna is an awful person. And, as a reminder, Madonna has rushed out a statement suggesting that she wouldn’t dream of giving a cloth-eared bellend like Guy Ritchie that much money.

However, both Madonna and Guy Ritchie have said they’re happy with the divorce settlement – Madonna because she can keep her money and Guy Ritchie because he doesn’t have a wife who looks like a pensioner’s scrotum wrapped around a set of antique dentures any more.

Oh, we thought it was all over, you know. Madonna and Guy Ritchie were divorced, Madonna did some weird pneumatic vaginal thrusts at a man at a concert – thereby making him her new boyfriend according to Madonna Law – and Guy Ritchie probably shagged an actress in Chatham. Madonna gave Guy Ritchie a ridiculously large pile of money as a settlement and, bish bash bosh, everyone could get on with their lives again.

Except no. No, that’s not the case at all. Madonna wants you to ignore all the reports saying that she’d given Guy Ritchie $76 million, a gigantic country pile and a London boozer in her divorce settlement, because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

And, yes, even though news of the divorce settlement seemed to come directly from Madonna’s own henchwoman Liz Rosenberg, it still isn’t true. The new story is that Madonna is big and mean and nasty, and all she gave Guy Ritchie in the divorce was a kick in the bum and a nasty case of the herpes. Or something else entirely. Nobody’s saying for sure. However, Madonna and Guy did release this joint statement:

“We have tried to maintain a dignified silence regarding the details of our divorce for the last few months whilst accepting the obvious media interest. A misleading and inaccurate statement, specifically in relation to the sums of money involved, was wrongly issued to AP this week. The financial details of the settlement will remain private, save to say that both of us are happy with our agreement. Our primary concern, like any co-parents, is the care and well being of our children.”

So fair enough, maybe Guy Ritchie isn’t getting $76 million from Madonna in his divorce settlement after all. It doesn’t matter – what’s important is that he still gets to keep the love of his children. Or at least a generic expression of their love in the form of a three-line acknowledgment of his existence that Madonna will grudgingly pay an orderly to type out once every year.

The bad news, of course, is that a $76 million divorce settlement would have easily been enough to ensure that Guy Ritchie never had to direct another film again. And now he almost certainly will. Thanks a lot Madonna, you massive bitch.

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It was about the children. And it was about having the freedom to do whatever he wanted. And it was about going to bed each night with a woman who didn’t feel like a half-chewed steak. But Guy Ritchie definitely didn’t divorce Madonna for the money.

Except now Guy Ritchie’s divorce settlement from Madonna has come through at close to $100 million, including a dirty great mansion and pub. It’s so much money that Guy Ritchie never has to work again. Guy, read that last sentence again. Read it!

Now that Madonna and Guy Ritchie are properly divorced, we can take off our rose-tinted glasses to inspect its carcass objectively and – you know what? – in hindsight, it’s obvious that, apart from his son Rocco, not one single decent thing was ever produced from that marriage.

It’s true. Madonna’s influence led Guy Ritchie to produce the most hamfisted movies of his career. Guy Ritchie’s influence led Madonna to start talking in the most bizarre stab at a British accent we’ve ever heard. Madonna released possibly her two worst albums ever in American Life and Hard Candy. An African kid got taken away from his father in the name of adoption.

And – worst of all – to try and cover up the cracks in their marriage, Madonna even wrote a song about having sex with Guy Ritchie. As if our lives weren’t horrible enough without the mental image of the withered corpse from the end of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade grinding away on Mr Potato Head’s lap to contend with.

Actually, we’re lying. There was one good thing to emerge from Guy Ritchie’s marriage to Madonna. And that’s the gigantic pile of money that Madonna’s just handed Guy Ritchie as a final divorce settlement. People reports:

Madonna has reached a divorce settlement with Guy Ritchie, according to the singer’s rep. The pop star will pay her ex between $76 million and $92 million, her spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg tells the Associated Press. Rosenberg says the figure includes the value of their country home Ashcombe, in western England, as well as the couple’s London pub, the Punchbowl.

That is a phenomenal amount of money. Guy Ritchie must be counting his lucky stars – eight years of standing slightly out of frame on red carpets with a handbag swinging from his arm while his elderly wife jiggled her genitals around in a special orthopedic leotard for the paparazzi and he gets almost $100 million? That’s incredible – even if most of that sum is in the form of property and will therefore only be worth about 50p by the middle of next week.

But Madonna is a canny businesswoman, remember that – this huge divorce settlement won’t come without any stipulations. Madonna and Guy Ritchie have yet to reach a formal agreement regarding child custody, for example, so don’t be surprised if Guy’s time with his son Rocco and adopted son David is greatly reduced now. In fact, for $100 million, don’t be surprised if Guy Ritchie’s only contact with the children is a single Christmas card each year addressed from Anonymous Father Figure B.

Still, what does Guy Ritchie care? He’s rich! Rich enough to buy his own children! Rich enough to buy 100 children and run through meadows tossing them all in the air like confetti.

Well, it’s what we’d do. Don’t judge us.

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And because of this, Madonna won’t be spending this Thanksgiving with rumoured new boyfriend Alex Rodriguez. Well, in truth it’s because Alex Rodriguez would rather spend Thanksgiving with his children in Florida than with the human equivalent of frozen giblets, but the bum-slicing thing just seemed funnier.

But anyway, contrary to several reports, Madonna and Alex Rodriguez won’t be spending Thanksgiving together. Which just goes to show, most men would prefer to spend a holiday with an ex-wife who’s bitter because she was dumped for Madonna and some children whose births were almost missed because their father wanted to go and meet Madonna than actually spend it with Madonna herself. That’s got to sting a bit.

This Thanksgiving will be the first one in ages that Madonna and Guy Ritchie won’t spend as a married couple. The knock-on effects of that are huge. It means that Guy Ritchie won’t have to eat a gigantic turkey dinner, and can settle for the 14 giant turkey dinners that he usually has at every mealtime regardless of the day, the greedy cockney fool.

And as for Madonna? Well, she’s free to spend her Thanksgiving with Alex Rodriguez, the man rumoured to have played some part in the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie split. You’ll remember, of course, that Alex Rodriguez is the man who apparently ran out on the birth of his second child to meet Madonna because Madonna brainwashed him into thinking that she was his ‘fucking soulmate’. He’s obviously a highly intelligent gentleman.

Well, now that her divorce saga is finally over, Madonna can make this Thanksgiving a celebration of her new-found freedom and the love that she apparently has for Alex Rodriguez. They can cook a huge Thanksgiving meal together that Rodriguez can eat and Madonna can lick a molecule of before whining to her personal trainer about it and then doing tantric sit-ups for nine hours to burn off the calories.

Except, despite what’s been reported, Madonna and Alex Rodriguez won’t be spending Thanksgiving together at all. People reports:

“He always had every intention of spending the holiday with Cynthia, the family, and his two daughters. There was never any intention of him flying back. The allegations regarding this trip to New York [to be with Madonna] couldn’t be anything farther from the truth”. A-Rod is planning on having dinner with Cynthia and their two children Tuesday night.

So, in short, something you didn’t know was happening isn’t happening. You may let this news affect your life in whichever manner you see fit.

But still, at least you know that however you are or aren’t spending Thanksgiving, at least you know yours will be better than Alex Rodriguez’s. Unless you happen to be spending it sitting around a table in icy silence with a woman who clearly hates every fibre of your body and some children who want to know why daddy doesn’t love them any more, in which case your Thanksgiving will be identical to Alex Rodriguez’s.

But don’t think that Madonna will be upset about this Thanksgiving shun because, as she so clearly stated, she works too hard to be upset about anything. And if she doesn’t happen to be working over Thanksgiving? When then she’ll be too busy, um, being a bit lonely to be upset. Does that work?

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That’s not particularly surprising – years ago Madonna had her brain removed to make space for more bicep and her tear ducts were cemented up because she didn’t weep holy Kabbalah water – so we’ve come to expect steely, robotic reactions to everything from her. However, Madonna has now finally decided to accept her divorce and mention it in public for the very first time.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Madonna has said how sad she is about the divorce, and how grateful she is that her heavy workload can distract her from it. Wow, sadness and gratitude? We’ve seen Swept Away and Body Of Evidence – that’s literally about six more human emotions than we thought Madonna was capable of.

When Madonna married Guy Ritchie almost eight years ago, there was a lot of speculation about why the world’s most famous woman had decided to move to England to live with a man who looks like a potato and can’t decide whether he’s Ray Winstone or Terry Thomas. And all the time it was staring us right in the face.

Madonna married an Englishman because she’s essentially English herself. She rides horses, she speaks in something that she believes is an English accent, she wears vastly inappropriate clothing for her age (see: Loose Women) and – most importantly of all – instead of expressing an emotion, Madonna would rather roll up her feelings into a little black ball and push them down into the pit of her stomach where one day they’ll surge out of control and prompt an act of staggering violence on someone who doesn’t deserve it. It’s the British way.

You can see this fear of emotion in Madonna’s professional output – she’s so lifeless in all of her films that often we have to be reminded that we’re not watching a film about a veiny ventriloquist’s dummy, and the most profoundly emotional thing she could come up with on her most recent album is “tick tock tick tock tick tock” – but at least her recent divorce from Guy Richie has yanked some feeling out of her.

Last week, after their divorce was finalised, you’ll remember that Guy Ritchie reacted by smiling and looking pleased while Madonna gave everyone the finger like a surly teenager would. But, of course, in reality Madonna is as raw and vulnerable as you’d expect her to be in this situation – all the posturing and aggressive defiance was just to paper over the cracks in Madonna’s broken heart. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

In an interview with the Associated Press, she says her intense schedule “provides a distraction that keeps me going,” adding, “I’m sad about my personal life, but I feel very blessed and very lucky that I have the opportunity to do what I do in my professional life. It would be horrible if I was just thinking about getting a divorce and had nothing to do.”

Look, we never said they were very big cracks, OK?

But now that Madonna has finally decided to allow herself to properly reflect on the divorce in a healthy and emotionally naked way, maybe she open herself to the remaining stages of being a 50-year-old recent divorcee, too.

For instance, first Madonna is bound to feel some resentment, then loneliness, then slowly she’ll come to terms with her loss. And then finally she’ll get shitfaced in a pikey disco in a small provincial town and end up wanking a frightened 18-year-old off in a toilet. That, too, is the British way.

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Just a few hours ago, Madonna and Guy Ritchie formally finalised their divorce once and for all, putting an end to almost eight years of happy marriage, unhappy marriage, rumoured affairs and possibly the most offensively inaccurate adopted British accent in the history of time itself.

While Madonna apparently reacted to news of her divorce by sticking her middle fingers up at her audience during a concert, Guy Ritchie is said to have merely sighed “Thank God.” But that’s not important now – the important thing is that Madonna won’t be involved in any of Guy Ritchie’s films any more, which should elevate them to ‘merely unwatchable’ from their previous status as ‘flesh-clawing suicidal thought-inducers’.

The world you’re in now is completely different to the one you woke up to this morning. It’s a world where, if you’re a boy, you run the risk of being accosted by a little old lady in an ill-fitting gynotard who’ll brainwash you into having sex with her. And, if you’re a girl, you run the risk of being accosted by a little old lady in an ill-fitting gynotard who’ll force her tongue down your throat, but only if enough people are watching.

That’s correct – Madonna’s on the loose again.

Yesterday we warned you that it was coming, but today it finally happened – at 10am, Madonna and Guy Ritchie finalised their divorce at the High Court in a quickie hearing that neither star attended. The hearing marked the end of divorce proceedings between Madonna and Guy Ritchie that were quite nasty, but not as nasty as people would have liked.

True, Madonna may have forced Gwyneth Paltrow to take sides, and someone may have mentioned something about gristle, but that’s about as intense as it got. Nobody accused anybody of stabbing them with a wineglass like in Paul McCartney’s divorce, there weren’t any weird mentions of dead prostitutes like in Charlie Sheen’s divorce – there was just a brief settlement, a quickie divorce, a profound sense of emotional detachment and that was that.

But how did Madonna and Guy Ritchie take the news that their marriage was officially over? Metro has more:

The pop star welcomed single life with open arms at last night’s Sticky & Sweet Tour concert in Philadelphia with a middle finger salute to her failed marriage… Meanwhile, a relaxed and happy looking Guy ushered sons Rocco and David into a waiting car outside La Vina restaurant in Liverpool. He told a newspaper: ‘Thank God! It dragged on much too long. It was never about money – never about her bloody art collection.’

Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into Madonna’s reaction – in the past she’s used her middle finger for everything from a hamfisted attempt at sexual provocation in her Sex book to an expression of her mild disgruntlement at third world poverty during Live 8. And since in those cases it neither put an end to poverty or made anyone feel even the briefest glimmer of sexual arousal, it’s probably best that we ignore it.

It’s Guy Ritchie who’s done best from the divorce – alongside his dignified response, all the big-money settlement offers that he allegedly turned down in favour of increased access to his children have almost made him seem like quite a nice man.

Weird. We wonder how else the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce will destroy our preconceptions about the couple? Will Madonna start being sexy again? Will Guy Ritchie stop talking in his preposterous cockney accent? Will Madonna make a film that doesn’t make us want to hurl ourselves down a concrete staircase? We’re scared.

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Which is to say that the divorce between Madonna and Guy Ritchie has been nothing but solid non-stop hilarity from start to finish. So laugh it up while you can, because it looks as though the divorce between Madonna and Guy Ritchie is going to be finalised at the High Court tomorrow.

The news comes after the revelation that Madonna and Guy Ritchie have quietly worked out a settlement. That’s likely to be kept a secret, but we assume there’ll be a fair split in terms of custody and ownership of property, and Madonna will get to keep the leotards. No! Guy Ritchie will keep the leotards! No! Madonna! No! Guy! No! Oh, we don’t know which outcome would make us feel queasier.

We don’t know about you, but it feels like the end of an era. A slightly improbable era where the world’s biggest female celebrity fell in love with the man behind the Channel Five hidden camera gameshow Swag. An era that led to one of the worst fake British accents that has ever been spoken. An era that, when we tried to imagine the act of physical love being performed by the two principle figureheads, made us dry-heave into a plastic bin like a cat with a hairball for 45 minutes at a time. But the end of an era nonetheless.

Madonna and Guy Ritchie – didn’t you almost have it all? Obviously by ‘it all’ we mean ‘a big house, a brown baby that wasn’t yours and the ability to brainwash athletes into sleeping with you‘, but that’s all by the by now. Because Madonna and Guy Ritchie are finalising their divorce tomorrow.

It seems like forever ago that Guy Ritchie and Madonna announced their divorce plans, but maybe that’s because divorce rumours had plagued them since almost the day they got married. And since the announcement we’ve been deluged with a tidalwave of new stories about divorce lawyers and friends taking sides and gristle, all of which might have given some of you the impression that the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce was going to stretch off into the horizon like the interminable Paul McCartney divorce.

But that’s not going to happen. Quietly, in private and with a level of dignity that’s left us feeling slightly incredulous, Madonna and Guy Ritchie have hammered out a divorce settlement and this time tomorrow it’ll all be over. BBC News reports:

Pop star Madonna and her film director husband Guy Ritchie are to be divorced at the High Court in London on Friday, according to court lists A notice of the couple’s decree nisi will be posted at the Registry of the Family Division. The couple are registered for the divorce hearing under the names Ciccione M and Ritchie GS. It will be heard before the High Court’s Family Division at 1000 GMT.

While details of the divorce settlement are being kept private, it’s thought that Madonna will keep the bulk of her fortune and the couple’s two children Rocco and David will split time equally between her and Guy Ritchie. The divorce itself will only take a couple on minutes, and neither party are expected to attend.

It’s all a very cold and clinical ending to the marriage, with no extremes of emotion being shown by anyone. Maybe that’s because both Madonna and Guy Ritchie are both rumoured to have moved on romantically since the split, but still, for a marriage between such huge personalities to squeak to a close like this is one of the saddest things imaginable.

Actually, no, we take that back. One of the saddest things would be if Madonna and Guy Ritchie both decided to attend the hearing tomorrow, realised that they were still in love and ended up humping each other on the steps to the High Court in front of all the news cameras. That would just be unbearably sad.

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This would have gone nicely with the bench press she found near the Dome of the Rock, the pull-up bar she bought at a Southern Baptist community auction, and the sauna she made from the inside-out skulls of over a dozen Lucifarians.

The Kabbalah water in the pool – well that’s actually true. She was gonna stand there with millions of imported plastic bottles and dump each individual one into the deep end until it was at least semi-swimmable.

Not any more though. Now she’s just getting divorced – and Guy Ritchie has decided that whatever pours out of his green garden hose is probably good enough. That’s why he just canceled her weird, massive water order.

Well, the Ritchies are divorcing. They’re both apparently boning their rebounds, and they are amicably dividing up every single one of their possessions. For instance, Guy will get the head and neck of Rocco, while Madonna’s nannies will care tenderly for all the family rabbits.

We’re totally ad-libbing here.

Also, Guy is apparently keeping the country house, and dang it all he’s gonna flood it with whatever liquids he sees fit. One things for sure though – he’s not gonna sacrilegiously fill his pool with water stolen from the lips of Xerxes as he sat in his golden cave atop Mount Olympus, which we heard is where Kabbalans get everything they ever drink. Ritchie probably wouldn’t mind using it, actually, but his wife is said to have wanted the Kabbalah pool so bad he may just be trying to stick it to her.

According to the Telegraph:

“Mr Ritchie, the film director, has stopped the order for the ’special water’ for the pool at their Wiltshire estate…The 40 year old has insisted that the pool should be filled with normal chlorinated water, not Kabbalah water as requested by the [Madonna].”

hecklerspray believes Ritchie’s water-cancellation to be a foolish move – one made by somebody who obviously doesn’t know how good that stuff is at healing old lady hands, arm flaps and really sizable dental gaps. When he finds the next senior-citizen love of his life, say Margaret Thatcher or something, he’ll surely regret it.

We’d also like to suggest a few water-replacement options if this other stuff is definitely out. For instance, why not install some under water electric-oven burners and fill the thing with thousands of copies of Hard Candy. Sure, the downside is he’d push her album up the charts, but think about how cool it would be to swim in thousands of those things all liquid and melty. When you got out of the pool you’d look like Agent Doggett in Terminator 2.

Plus, think of all the landfills he’d be able to keep just a little emptier. And really – isn’t that what Kabbalah’s all about.

What’s that? Guy Ritchie might be having it off with an actress he hired to star in his new Sherlock Holmes movie? Well that didn’t take long. According to reports, Guy Ritchie and actress Kelly Reilly have been shacked up in the same hotel since October 18 – just three days after Madonna and Guy announced their divorce.

Not much is known about Kelly Reilly at the moment, but since she’s a) a redhead, b) British, c) an actress and d) young, it’s fair to assume that she’s everything Madonna will never be. In fact, reports claim that Kelly Reilly is almost 20 years younger than Madonna. If that’s the case – great work, Guy Ritchie! Kelly Reilly looks quite good for a 68-year-old!

We sincerely hoping you’re keeping up with all the movements in the Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce so far, because the pair of them appear to be whipping through the stages of divorce at an incredible rate. Even though the divorce was only announced just over a week ago, we’ve already seen the divorce lawyers shifted into place, the indiscriminate hurling of gristle-based insults and the mighty Madonna endorsement of Gwyneth Paltrow.

That would probably be enough as it is, but hold your horses. There’s one divorce stage missing here – the stage where Madonna and Guy Ritchie both quickly shack up with brand new rebound lovers and parade around in front of the other with them in a childish and embarrassing attempt to invoke feelings of envy. But give them time – before they can get to that stage, Madonna and Guy Ritchie will have to work through their complex feelings of loss and betrayal and…

What? They’re doing it already? Well jigger us silly.

Madonna, of course, has been seen out and about with Alex Rodriguez – the brainwashed athlete who calls Madonna his ‘fucking soulmate’ and skipped out of hospital to see Madonna about 10 seconds after his then-wife had given birth to his baby. But now it seems as if Guy Ritchie has got in on the act too.

According to reports, Guy Ritchie has allegedly moved on from his divorce by repeatedly sticking it to Kelly Reilly, a pretty young actress who just so happens to be starring in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie. US Weekly reports:

A source tells Us Ritchie has already entered a relationship with British actress Kelly Reilly, who is starring in his upcoming drama Sherlock Holmes. On Oct. 18 – three days after he announced he and Madonna were divorcing – he sent his driver back to his $12 million home in London’s Marylebone district “very last-minute” to pack an overnight bag for a stay at a nearby Chatham hotel — where Reilly is residing.

OK, for the time being we’re going to take this report with a pinch of salt because there’s one thing that strikes us as fishy about it. Chatham.

Chatham is not the place for a romantic evening of physical lovemaking. A quick squalid WKD-fuelled two-pump bunk-up in the carpark between Toys R Us and PC World, perhaps, but not lovemaking. In fact, we’d even go as far as to say that nobody has ever ever ever ever ever considered Chatham to be anything other than a stinking chavpot that doubles as a production line for potential clueless Jeremy Kyle Show guests. Not even Guy Ritchie, in all of his potato-headed oafishness, would dare to consumate a relationship in somewhere as profoundly bleak and misery-soaked and flea-ridden as Chatham. Seriously, we’ve been there.

But anyway, if it is true then we can’t see this relationship between Guy Ritchie and Kelly Reilly working out. After seven and a half years together, Guy Ritchie will probably find it hard adjusting from the sinewy, muscular sex he enjoyed with Madonna, and we’re not sure that Kelly Reilly would be prepared to sellotape clumps of gristle onto her body to make up the difference just yet.

And we’re sure it was a hard decision to make – not least because given the choice of siding with an obnoxiously laddy potato-faced oaf like Guy Ritchie or his screechy, uncomfortably religious elderly man of an estranged wife, most normal people would just take the easy route out and throw themselves under a train.

But that’s not a problem that Gwyneth Paltrow has had to face – she’s stepped up to the plate and declared that she’s firmly on Madonna’s side when it comes to the divorce. This, we suspect, is partly because of the great friendship shared by Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, and partly because she’s scared of Madonna chokeslamming her through a brick wall. She could, you know. Look at those arms.

We sincerely hope that none of you are getting bored with this whole Madonna/ Guy Ritchie divorce thing yet. Because, trust us, this is only the beginning. The divorce is going to go on until… wait, we were going to say that the divorce was going to go on until both Guy Ritchie and Madonna are very old indeed, but Madonna’s already beaten us to the punch there. Let’s just say that it’s going to go on for a very long time.

And it’s going to be hard for both of them, especially now that Guy Ritchie has taken to comparing Madonna to scraggy dog food. But it’ll be slightly easier for Madonna, because Madonna has got Gwyneth Paltrow by her side.

Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow have both got so much in common. They’re both Americans living in London, for example, plus they’re both married to British celebrities. Plus they both love yoga and have vaguely nutty religious beliefs. Plus one’s a singer who wrongly thinks she can act and the other is an actor who thinks she can sing. Plus neither of them can pull off a convincing British accent.

Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, it’s safe to say, are like two peas in a special futuristic pod that makes one of the peas look several decades older than the other.

And because of all these commonalities, Gwyneth Paltrow has vowed to support Madonna in her divorce through thick and thin – which, incidentally, is what we used to call Guy Ritchie and Madonna. BBC News reports:

Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed she is “supporting” her friend Madonna through her divorce from husband Guy Ritchie. At the UK premiere of her film, Two Lovers, she said: “She’s a very good friend. I’m supporting her in all the ways that I can. I’m just there.”

We can’t help feeling that Gwyneth Paltrow will come to regret making that statement; if not immediately, then on the fourth or fifth time that Madonna has ordered her to daub ‘TINY-COCKED TWAT’ in giant letters across the front of Guy Ritchie’s house at 3am or poo in his shoes when he’s not looking or something.

Still, Guy Ritchie shouldn’t get too downhearted that a megastar like Gwyneth Paltrow has decided to side with Madonna in their divorce – he’s got plenty of famous friends too, and they’re equally as loyal to him. That’s why by tomorrow morning we expect to hear a full and frank endorsement of Guy Ritchie’s character by Dexter Fletcher from Press Gang. Beat that, Madonna.