Jon and Kate Gosselin have been through what’s possibly the most despair-ridden period of their entire lives.

But now they’re back. The divorce-postponed season of Jon & Kate Plus 8 resumes on Monday, and it promises to shine an unforgiving spotlight on a marriage torn apart by the pressures of fame. It will be bleak. It will be unrelentingly miserable. And yesterday we were given a tantalising hint at what dark scenes of emotional anguish we can expect from the Jon & Kate Plus 8 premiere.

Apparently Kate puts a tent up in a funny way. Oh, the agony! It’s too much!

If we had to pick one thing we enjoy about John & Kate Plus 8 over anything else, it’d probably be the show’s total obliviousness to anything that happens in the real world. Its production crew has access to one of the most gormless, never-ending soap operas in the entire world – magazines are constantly frothing on about Jon Gosselin’s purported infidelities or Kate Gosselin’s shrewish control freakery – and yet what does it actually broadcast? Interminable scenes of rollerskating children. It’s brilliant.

And it seems as if nothing will change when Jon & Kate Plus 8 returns to TLC on Monday. Look at all the things that have happened since the last episode was aired. Jon and Kate filed for divorce, causing Jon Gosselin to run away to Europe to dream up new ways of exploiting his children and possibly bang a load of pretty young girls on a yacht like some sort of sleazy, desperation-filled prematurely middle-aged pervert.

And that would make a great TV show – The Off-Puttingly Horny Adventures Of The World’s Most Utterly Average Man, they could call it. We’d watch. But that’s not going to happen, because yesterday the president of Jon & Kate Plus 8 network revealed exactly what viewers could expect to see when the show returns next week. People reports:

“You’ll see Jon struggle in the kitchen trying to make pizza for his kids,” TLC General Manager and President Eileen O’Neill said. “You’ll see what its like when Kate has to put a tent up for the first time for her kids, who love to camp in their backyard. And she gets a little advice from her daughter who doesn’t think she does it quite as well as dad.”

What? That’s it? No screaming? No moment when Kate Gosselin discovers that nobody wants to publish her book? No hard-to-bear scenes of eight distraught children failing to come to terms with why their parents don’t love them any more? No hilarious montage of Jon and Kate buying the kids a procession of ever-larger gifts in an effort to ease their guilt? That’s all we get? A chubby man trying to make a pizza?

Oh well, it’s better than nothing. And at least it maintains the tone of the show – which is bound to come in handy when Kate Gosselin loses the plot and hacks Jon to pieces with a medieval sword. That way it won’t look weird when TLC turns the incident into an episode that’s mostly about the best way to decorate fairy cakes or something.

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Despite all the headlines it’s been generating, people always forget one thing about Jon & Kate Plus 8.

It’s boring. Really boring. Have you ever tried to sit through an entire episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8? No? Well don’t. It’s rubbish. Ooh, some kids are baking some cakes. Ooh, some kids are going to the zoo. The only people who could truly enjoy Jon & Kate Plus 8 are heavily sedated pederasts, and even they wouldn’t love it.

TLC could spice up the show by making Jon Gosselin‘s alleged mistress a central character. But TLC says it won’t. TLC is rubbish.

One thing to come out of the Jon and Kate Gosselin divorce – apart from the fact that marriages between controlling, fame-hungry shrews and their put-upon sad-sack no-ball husbands never work – was the destructive effect that the media can have on a happy marriage.

It’s awful, and a timely warning that fame can often ruin everything. If Jon and Kate Gosselin had chosen not to make any episodes of Jon & Kate Plus 8 and just raise their children as normal parents then, sure, they wouldn’t have had as much material wealth – but at least they would have been happy. Now all they’ve got to show for themselves is a tattered marriage, a life of misery  and eight children who are all bound to grow up to be catastrophic screw-ups.

But you know what? It’s been a hard-fought lesson, but a lesson nonetheless. At least now Jon and Kate Gosselin know better than to drag their loved ones into the limelight, because of the tragic consequ… hang on a minute – Jon Gosselin wants to do WHAT?

According to reports earlier this week, Jon Gosselin is keen on involving his alleged mistress and new squeeze Deanna Hummel in future episodes of Jon & Kate Plus 8 – presumably the episodes entitled You’re Not My Mommy, Daddy Doesn’t Love Me Any More and I’m So Alone I’M SO ALONE. However, it turns out that TLC, Jon & Kate Plus 8‘s network, isn’t too crazy about the idea, as The Hollywood Gossip reports:

“There are no plans to use her,” a rep for TLC said of the Deanna Hummel rumors. “We are in hiatus and all future episodes haven’t even been planned.” The rumor was launched in today’s New York Daily News, which said “Deanna’s role isn’t expected to be big, but because she’s part of Jon’s life, she’ll be filmed.”

We actually can’t even tell if dragging Deanna Hummel into Jon & Kate Plus 8 is a brilliant idea or a terrible one any more. Yes, it would have been painfully awkward for Kate Gosselin to come face-to-face with the woman who possibly broke up her marriage on national television – but then again it would have boosted the show’s ratings, and more ratings means more money, and Kate Gosselin sort of gives off the impression that she’d eat some poo off the pavement for more money.

Yeah, actually she’d be alright with it. It’s a brilliant idea. TLC, you have our blessings.

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Jon & Kate Plus 8 is heartbreaking, isn’t it? Truly heartbreaking. Their divorce announcement just came out of the blue.

Well, alright, not quite out of the blue – thanks to every single magazine in the world banging on about all the affairs that Jon and Kate Gosselin have allegedly been having all the time, you don’t have to be a genius to see that their marriage has been in trouble for a few weeks now.

Well, alright, not quite a few weeks – according to divorce papers, Jon and Kate Gosselin have been separated for two entire years. Oh, divorce is hilarious.

Ask any Jon & Kate Plus 8 viewer what they make of all this Jon and Kate divorce talk, and they’ll tell you that it’s depressing. And that must mean that it’s really depressing – remember, these are people who can happily sit through week after week of an interminable reality TV show about a sour-faced woman making soup for her billions of children without ever feeling the urge to hurl themselves in front of a truck as a protest against the futility of it all, so we can assume that it takes a lot to get them down.

But still, whatever anyone thinks of Jon and Kate Gosselin, you have to admit that they gave it their best shot. They’ve been together through thick and thin – which, incidentally, we believe are the names of Gosselin children #4 and #6 – and they’ve refused to give up on their marriage no matter how many magazines publish stories about all the different women who Jon has reportedly been pushing his peeper into.

But now it’s over. On Monday night Jon and Kate Gosselin decided to inform the fraction of the world with enough time on its hands to care about this sort of thing that they were divorcing. It was a spontaneous decision, and one largely blamed on the evil media’s sick determination to rip them apart in recent weeks.

Which would be fair enough, except that the Jon and Kate divorce papers state that Jon and Kate Gosselin have been living apart for at least two years. It’s all been a lie! Every Jon & Kate Plus 8 episode made since 2007 has been a gigantic lie! The one where they went to Dutch Wonderland, the one where Kate reorganised her house, the one where everyone stayed at home and watched a film – God, we loved that episode! – they were all gigantic lies.

Unless, as it’s been claimed, ‘at least two years’ is legal mumbo-jumbo for ‘about a week’, which Jon Gosselin’s lawyer says it is. The New York Daily News reports:

Reality TV star Kate Gosselin said in divorce papers that she and husband Jon have been living apart for at least two years – but lawyers claimed that’s just legal boilerplate. “They have been living ‘separate and apart’ just within the last week or two,” Jon’s attorney, Charles Meyer, said after the filing became public Tuesday.

But even if Jon and Kate Gosselin have been separated for two years, surely we should be applauding their tenacity. Even though things clearly haven’t been well in their marriage, they’ve stuck together for the sake of their kids. And for the several million dollars they get for pretending to be a happy family on television. Mostly the several million dollars, now we come to think of it. Anyway, well done Jon and Kate Gosselin.

The moral of this story? We’re not completely sure, but let’s go with ‘never have children’. They are awful, after all.

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Oh boy, we didn’t see this coming. Remember when Jon and Kate Gosselin said they were making an announcement? Well, they’ve made it.

In our office Jon & Kate Plus 8 sweepstake, we put money on the announcement being about a new recipe for gooseberry jam. But no – in a move that literally nobody on Earth could have possibly seen coming, Jon and Kate Gosselin have stunningly revealed that they’re to split.

That’s split as in divorce, by the way, not split as in split open their kids’ skulls with a hammer if they answer back. Although that’s probably feasible too.

This is a sad day indeed. Jon and Kate Gosselin weren’t just the parents of eight overbearing attention-starved showbiz kids, they were everyone’s parents. And, just like our real parents, we didn’t even know that Jon and Kate Gosselin existed until about three months ago when they started pulling sad faces on the front covers of several magazines that we don’t read because someone had accused them of infidelity. It’s a universal story.

And now, like a flash, it’s all over. Last night in a special hour-long episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8, Jon and Kate Gosselin told the world that they’re splitting up. Or at least they told the portion of the world that a) knows who Jon & Kate Gosselin are, b) can somehow bring itself to care about either of them and c) hadn’t already worked out that the announcement was going to involve a divorce sometime in the middle of last week. So about three people. Jon and Kate Gosselin told about three people that they’re splitting up.

Nevertheless, Reuters reports:

“Kate and I have decided to separate,” Jon Gosselin said just over 40 minutes into a one-hour episode. “I don’t hate him, never have, never will,” Kate Gosselin said. “I don’t hate Kate,” Jon said. “We don’t have anything now,” said Jon, who criticized the media scrutiny the family has faced in recent years.

Wow, Jon Gosselin’s right – he and Kate really don’t have anything now. Except, you know, a massive house, millions of dollars of income and, oh, what was that other thing that they have? Oh yeah – eight bloody children that they still have to look after. And it’s perfectly fair of him to blame the split on the media, too. Stupid media and its stupid habit of reporting things that have actually happened. When will it learn?

But anyway, this news that Jon and Kate Gosselin are splitting up has probably left you quivering and inconsolable, so let’s do the sensible thing and let’s remember all the good times that they had together – like when they were accused of exploiting their children for monetary gain, or when they were investigated for animal abuse, or when they openly hit their kids in front of photographers. Golden moments, one and all. We’ll miss you, Jon & Kate Plus 8.

Wait, what’s that? This isn’t the end of Jon & Kate Plus 8? Jon and Kate will still live in their house with the kids during their time with them, and all interviews for the show will be conducted separately? We suppose that makes sense – this is bound to be a rough time for the kids, so it’s probably wise to stick to the same routine they’ve grown used to in order to protect them from emotional damage. Good.

Now, so long as neither Jon or Kate Gosselin decide to make creepy, heartless overtures hinting that the only reason they’re allowing the series to continue is because of all the money they’ll get from it, we think we’re OK with this. Isn’t that right, Kate Gosselin?

“How does the show go on? The show MUST go on!”

Oh you couldn’t sodding help yourself, could you?

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