Great work, Kate Gosselin – your plan to appear on Dancing With The Stars and rehabilitate your image is going great guns.

Let’s have a recap. Kate Gosselin’s Dancing With The Stars partner hates her. The Dancing With The Stars judges hate her. The majority of the Dancing With The Stars viewers hate her. And Jon Gosselin… well obviously Jon Gosselin hates Kate Gosselin, but now he hates her enough to sue her for full custody of their children.

According to Jon Gosselin, by appearing on Dancing With The Stars Kate Gosselin has made herself an absentee parent and can’t care for the kids as well as he could – even though he’s now a professional layabout who lives in a two-bedroom apartment. Maybe they can reach a compromise and give custody of the children to a better-equipped third-party, like a rabid bear or the Stanley Tucci character from The Lovely Bones or something.

Now, look. We know this seems like a terrible news story. It’s about the Gosselins – the two reality show idiots who got famous by having a stupidly amount of children and now refuse to go away – and specifically it’s how their petty, needling behaviour towards each other is coming at the obvious detriment to the emotional stability of their children. We know that.

But let’s look at this in the long term. What’s happening at the moment is that Jon Gosselin is annoyed about Kate Gosselin’s continued appearance on Dancing With The Stars. The children live with Kate Gosselin, you see, but Jon Gosselin thinks that her current dedication to flapping about like a loose wound in a slash of sequined spandex on a TV show once a week means that she’s not committing enough time to their welfare. And that’s why he’s petitioning a court for full custody of them. UsMagazine reports:

An attorney for Jon plans to file an emergency petition this week in Berks County, Penn., for primary physical custody of his eight children with ex-wife Kate. The reality dad’s new lawyer Anthony F. List tells TMZ that Kate is “an absentee mom.” List says her current stint on Dancing with the Stars prohibits her from spending “quality time” with [her children].

We suppose we should congratulate Jon Gosselin for having the self-awareness to hire a lawyer called F List, but that’s beside the point. The point is that, yes, this constant back and forth about custody and parental suitability is bound to hurt the Gosselin children. Jon and Kate Gosselin have demonstrated a consistent inability to put their offspring ahead of their respective desires for revenge and fame, and so they’re effectively dooming the kids to a lifetime of misery, low self-esteem and emotional rootlessness.

But that’s a good thing. Because maybe Jon Gosselin’s petition will scare Kate Gosselin out of appearing on television any more, and Jon Gosselin will realise that Kate Gosselin will petition him right back if he ever appears on a TV show. If this happens, we’ll reach a stalemate situation where neither Jon or Kate Gosselin will ever appear on television again. True, eight children will become unbearably miserable in the process, but who cares about them? There’ll be no more Gosselins on TV! Whoopee!

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Do you wish the Tiger Woods divorce story had less money, glamour, points of interest and endearing characters?

Oh, what’s that? You do? Then do you also wish that the Tiger Woods divorce story had more bad clothes, hairplugs, ill-advised man-jewellery, demonstrably bad haircuts and children who will almost certainly grow up to be psychologically crippled destructive little monsters? You wish that too? Well then have we got some wonderful news for you.

Jon and Kate Gosselin are likely to have their divorce finalised this weekend, pending a judge’s solitary signature. You know what? This is going to be the best Christmas EVER.

If you want proof that there is a God, this may be it. Or if, as is more likely to be the case, you want proof that two juddering self-interested wazzocks don’t have the basic human function to even hold a marriage together because they’re both too busy being tremendously despicable titplanks to ever show an iota of compassion to another living being, then this may also be it.

Basically Jon and Kate Gosselin’s marriage is going to officially come crashing to a halt before Monday. The New York Daily News reports:

The Gosselin’s divorce is imminent – and Kate is reportedly “thrilled” with what she’s getting. The fractured reality family’s ongoing saga drew nearer to a close on Wednesday after an arbitrator dealing with the divorce proceedings finally made his decision on how divide the couple’s assets… The arbitrator’s decision has been forwarded to the judge presiding over the case.

This is undoubtedly good news. It means that we can consign all the nonsense that Jon and Kate Gosselin have put us through this year – the anaemic reality shows, the countless sobbing interviews, the revolving mental image of Jon Gosselin poking it up a nanny in a hot tub while his children were an another room – to the recycle bin of our minds and get on with our lives again.

True, Jon and Kate Gosselin’s divorce might have thrown up a bit of collateral damage – like the legal battle between Jon Gosselin and TLC and the fact that all of the Gosselin children will grow up to be emotionally stunted waifs whose developmental lack of self-esteem will force them into a series of deeply unpleasant, life-scarring episodes – but that doesn’t matter! Jon and Kate Gosselin are almost divorced! Wahey! Maybe we’ll never hear about either of them ever again!

Of course, this does mean that TLC has one massive family less on its books than it would ideally like. So if you’re a married couple with more children than you can possibly cope with, be sure to contact TLC directly. But make sure that you’re intrinsically both terrible people, though! That’s a dealbreaker!

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We’re thrilled to announce that this might just be the last thing we ever write about Jon and Kate Gosselin.

The signs are certainly good. The last episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 is broadcast tonight. Jon and Kate Gosselin have thrashed out a surprisingly amicable divorce settlement. That’s it. Now both Jon and Kate can fade into the background and we’ll never hear from them again.

That is, unless one of Jon Gosselin’s sexual partners sells their story to the press, or Kate Gosselin’s relentless desire for attention culminates in her taking out strangers from a clock tower with a sniper rifle. Both of which are quite likely to happen. This isn’t the last we’ve heard of Jon and Kate Gosselin at all, is it? Bollocks.

So much of the Jon and Kate Gosselin story is mired in such all-encompassing depression that even thinking of words that rhyme with their surname – like ‘nozzling’ or whatever – make us want to slash away at our wrists and throat with a set of nail scissors. Honestly, their life is just a never-ending catalogue of misery. There’s the divorce, the televised breakdowns, the slow collapse of their TV show, the fact that their children are going to grow up to hate them, Kate’s stupid hair – the gloom simply refuses to let up.

Having said that, two tiny chinks of sunlight have broken through the clouds today. First, today marks the final-ever episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8. True, this is only a partial victory because it’s likely to be replaced by a show called Kate Plus 8 or, failing that, Kate Gosselin: I Can Do This On My Own or, failing that, Some Other Awful Bastards With Too Many Poxy Children, but let’s soak in what little pleasure this gives us while we can.

Secondly, Jon and Kate Gosselin have finalised their divorce settlement. This means that they won’t insist on weeping into the nearest camera about how unreasonable the other one is all the time. People has divorce details:

“This was the proceeding that essentially ended their marriage,” says the source.”Kate is just relieved that a very painful chapter of her life is nearly over, and she is looking forward to building a better, brighter future for herself and her kids.” During the hearing, Jon “didn’t dispute Kate having primary custody of the kids,” says the source, which came as no surprise to Kate.

So Kate’s getting primary custody of the kids, huh? That makes sense – if that kiss and tell story from a few months ago was anything to go by, then Jon’s idea of considerate parenting is closing the bathroom door before having it off with the nanny in the hot tub. Meanwhile Kate only hits her children, deprives them of water and scares the living daylights out of them with her dreadful haircut, which is markedly more considerate.

But quality of parenting doesn’t matter any more. The only thing that matters is that this is the full stop that the Jon and Kate story needs. Or, if not a full stop, then an asterisk that’s followed by a footnote reading ‘Then they were all eaten by lions. Nobody cried.’ One or the other.

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Gosselin birthdays are fun. True, there’s just as much shrieking anguish as there is every other day.

But sometimes they get to wear funny hats. Yesterday marked the ninth birthdays of Gosselin twins Mady and Cara, and so Jon and Kate Gosselin decided to give them the greatest gift of all. No, not a promise to stop making Jon & Kate Plus 8. No, not a course of hypnotherapy to help them regain the childhood that their parents snatched from them. Jon and Kate gave the twins an afternoon of no fighting.

And a birthday cake that couldn’t spell their names right. Obviously.

Right now, from looking at the headlines they generate, you might think that Jon and Kate Gosselin are famous because they’re objectively the most awful people ever to walk the Earth. Which, admittedly, is a viewpoint grounded in the truth – but they’re not famous for that. Jon and Kate Gosselin are famous because they’re objectively awful people and because they’ve got an impractically large number of children.

And with all the fighting about money and public bitching and endless constant whining that’s been going on between Jon and Kate lately, it’s easy to forget the Gosselin kids. They must be going through hell at the moment, watching their parents attack each other in full view of the world like this. How they must long for the blissful, sun-dappled pre-split days where every waking moment was a joyous carefree kaleidoscope of physical assault and child exploitation investigations. It was a happier time.

However, just because Jon and Kate Gosselin have devolved into a couple of malicious, ridiculously-dressed arseholes with history’s two worst haircuts, at least they can get it together for long enough to celebrate the birthday of their twins in relative peace, as they did yesterday. Admittedly they couldn’t get it together to remember how to spell the name of their own daughter, but that’s by the by. People reports:

“I’m staying until the kids go to bed,” [Jon] said during a break in the visit. “We’re trying to be cordial for Mady and Cara.” Jon, 32, arrived at the celebration with a vanilla cake from New York’s upscale Cupcake Café that had his daughter’s name misspelled “Maddy” with an extra “d.”

Now, a basic misunderstanding of how to spell his own daughter’s name might suggest that Jon Gosselin is a terrible, terrible father. But it’s important to remember that he doesn’t know how to spell his own name, either. And that means he’s not a terrible father at all – just a legitimately ridiculous excuse for a human being. Which is fine, because we all sort of knew that anyway.

Anyway, maybe some good will come of Jon and Kate Gosselin coming together to celebrate the birthday of their twins like this. Maybe some of the animosity between them will lessen after they’ve been face to face. Maybe they’ll even rediscover the spark that attracted them to each other in the first place. Maybe they’ll fall in love again and make hundreds of episodes of a new show entitled Jon & Kate Plus 26, named because Kate will spend the rest of her life in a constant state of pregnancy thanks to all the red-hot lovemaking sessions that they habitually close each episode with.

No. No, we’ve gone too far. We prefer things as they are, thanks. Forget we ever said anything.

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Remember when Jon & Kate Plus 8 was fun? No, of course you don’t – it’s only either been tedious or depressing.

And now it’s both. But somehow even more so. But still, at least the personal lives of Jon and Kate Gosselin are hilariously tragic, so that’s something. Both Jon and Kate have been whining to the media over the last few days – Kate because she’s lonely and Jon because he hates Jon & Kate Plus 8. It’s sad.

No, wait, not sad – what’s the word for when you want to start cutting yourself because someone won’t shut up? Anyway, it’s that.

Do you know what the best thing about Jon & Kate Plus 8 is? Nothing. Not even under a veil of irony and sarcasm can we say anything even remotely good about Jon & Kate Plus 8. Watching it makes you feel like you’re being lobotomised by someone’s foot, and all the off-camera shenanigans are just a miserable reminder that people are both greedy and colossally stupid. It’s the all-time low-point of humanity, and science can probably back that claim up.

Just look what Jon & Kate Plus 8 has done to the Gosselin family – it’s ruined their lives. It’s torn apart a presumably once-happy marriage, and created a small army of emotionally needy, potentially drug-dependent kids in the process. Actually, now we come to think about it, that’s probably the best thing about Jon & Kate Plus 8, isn’t it?

Those with an upsettingly meagre amount of things to do with their lives may remember that police were called to the Gosselin residence recently, because of a fight between Jon and Kate. Well, the fallout to that incident has happened – and the bad news is it’s a bit whiny.

Let’s take Jon Gosselin first. Jon & Kate Plus 8 might have given him a massive house, a clothing line and a string of girlfriends who wouldn’t pay a fat, beaten-down pushover like him the time of day if he wasn’t on the telly, but that hasn’t stopped him from whining about how much he hates it. Jon told Usmagazine:

“I wish I had a 9 to 5 job instead of the nightmare I’m living. This is 24/7. I don’t even want to do taping for the show anymore.”

And what about the Gosselin kids? This must be an incredibly upsetting time for them – how are they reacting to the schism between their parents? Says MSNBC:

Jon and Kate Gosselin’s 5-year-old sextuplets and 8-year-old twins are starting to rebel against the constant taping of their lives. “The kids staged a sit-in — a revolt,” Jon Gosselin told Life & Style on Aug. 13. “They didn’t want to work today.”

This all looks pretty conclusive, doesn’t it? Jon Gosselin doesn’t want to keep making Jon & Kate Plus 8, the kids don’t want to keep making Jon & Kate Plus 8 – that just leaves Kate Gosselin. Surely, more than anyone else, Kate understands the corrosive effect the show has had on her life. Because of Jon & Kate Plus 8 she’s split up with her husband, had a cookery book canned and become one of the most reviled women on TV. So obviously she wants the show to end as well, right People?

“Everyone works. Everyone has a job… Myself and the kids will continue the show. I signed my name to a contract and I am going to do my best to make that work as long as it is healthy and safe for myself and the kids.”

Now that might sound a bit heartless, but you need to understand that people have varying definitions of the phrase ‘healthy and safe’. You, for example, might think that the profoundly negative effect of being filmed around the clock in the wake of their parents’ traumatic divorce would make them neither healthy or safe. And that’s fine. But Kate Gosselin is their mother, and she knows that the kids are healthy and safe right up to the point that one of them sets themselves on fire and leaps off their roof screaming “Why mummy? Why?” And that’s fine too. Sort of.

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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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