Britney Spears is already having such a nightmare 2008 that she could use any crumb of good news that she can possibly get.

And last night Britney Spears got the best news of all - she got all the way through an extended cameo on How I Met Your Mother without crying or fighting anyone or pawing at herself or thrashing away at her hair with a pair of industrial clippers.

And now she's gained mostly favourable reviews for How I Met Your Mother, the sky's the limit for Britney Spears again. Who knows, if she can say about ten lines of dialogue sitting behind a desk for a mediocre sitcom, maybe next she'll be deemed legally capable of seeing her own children without frightening them again!

So far this year, Britney Spears has mainly communicated in garbled British-accented gibberish or a series of distressing shrieks.

But, unless Britney Spears will play a massively unstable bint from Nottingham who looks like she might have a bit of a drinking problem in her upcoming How I Met Your Mother cameo, that'll have to change soon.

Which is why Britney has got there first. To help viewers with the unexpected shock of seeing Britney Spears on TV talking full sentences in a normal way, Britney's released a statement about her time on How I Met Your Mother. True, Britney Spears' statement is so unrelentingly generic that it could be about anything, and we're almost completely certain that she had absolutely nothing to do with it, but it's a start.

It's never nice being the new kid at school, especially when you were asked to leave the old school for crying a lot and not being able to feed yourself properly.

So, that said, Britney Spears must be feeling a lot of pressure right now as she continues filming her sitcom cameo for How I Met Your Mother.

But it's OK, because Britney Spears seems to be coping well at her new job. That's partly because her How I Met Your Mother co-stars are being somewhat effusive with their praise for her, and partly because Britney Spears clearly doesn't have the self-awareness to realise that every last frame of her cameo is going to be scrutinised for signs of mental illness until it makes the Zapruder film look like a YouTube video of a kitten in a mug.

If you want to look prettier than you actually are, the old saying goes, then go and stand next to a disfigured old gargoyle of a sweatpig hag. We're paraphrasing.

It's a saying that the producers of sitcom How I Met Your Mother know only too well. In a desperate attempt to look funnier than it actually is, How I Met Your Mother has signed up the most harrowing, ashen-faced, unquestionably tragic celebrity in the world right now for a cameo in an upcoming episode.

Yeah, it's Britney Spears. How did you guess?