Jon Gosselin is a tool for emptying his joint account with Kate Gosselin. Not because he did it, mind you.

But because of what it meant. Deep down, Jon Gosselin must have known what would happen when he took all that money. He must have known that Kate Gosselin would rush to the nearest television studio and bellyache about it in such a sustained, high-pitched, self-pitying whine that everyone who watched it assumed that they were suffering from a particularly unpleasant bout of tinnitus.

And, unsurprisingly, that’s what Kate Gosselin did on the Today show yesterday. We hate you so much, Jon Gosselin.

You know, the other day we came indecently close to liking Jon Gosselin. It was when he banned cameras from filming his children because he’d been sacked from Jon & Kate Plus 8. True, he was only doing it because he was being a colossal tit, but anything that puts an end to Jon & Kate Plus 8 – and the prolonged nightmare of having to write about Jon and Kate Gosselin for a living – was OK in our book.

Conversely, anything that forces either Jon or Kate Gosselin to keep making television shows out of financial necessity is a bad thing. No, scrap that, it’s the worst thing. If we were in charge of the law – and God knows there isn’t a second that passes where we don’t wish that – then we’d make the crime of forcing either Jon or Kate Gosselin to keep making television shows out of financial necessity at least as serious as genocide. And so would you. So would you.

So it’s a good job we’re not in charge of the law, because if we were then Jon Gosselin would be going down for a long time. Yesterday we told you how Jon Gosselin had reportedly cleared out nearly quarter of a million dollars from the joint account he shared with Kate, leaving her and the kids with $1,000 between them. And in the world’s most depressingly inevitable retaliation, Kate Gosselin went on the Today show to explain exactly what that meant in much more detail than anyone would ever really need to hear it in. People reports:

“When you’ve left your children and their mother without the funds to pay for the roof over their head, it’s not acceptable,” Kate, 34, told the Today show. “I need that money to provide for them. We were in the position after our sextuplets were born that we could not pay our bills. We did the show to provide a better life for them. Never did I think I’d be back in the same position.”

You arsehole, Jon Gosselin. Do you know what this means? It means that Kate Gosselin will now be forced to make as many reality TV shows as she can just to keep a roof over her head. That means more Kate Plus 8 episodes, a special spin-off charting the day-to-day exploits of Kate Gosselin’s haircut and all manner of separate shows about each individual Gosselin child, including The Adventures Of The Third One From The Right and Quiet Gosselin Child At The Back: It’s Complicated.

It also means that Jon Gosselin will almost certainly appear on television before sunset to insufferably bleat his rebuttal to Kate Gosselin’s insufferable bleating. Which is obviously worse.

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The set-up of Jon & Kate Plus 8 is simple – he’s a chubby pushover, she’d kick a donkey in the face for cash.

That’s how it works. Kate Gosselin is the one who wants to pimp out her kids in TV shows and books and anything else that’d make her a quick buck, and Jon Gosselin is the one who mooches around silently in the background like a lost testicle. Isn’t it?

Nope – apparently Jon Gosselin is designing his own line of kid’s clothes. And his children will model it – especially the ‘Mommy Is A Heartless Shrew’ range of cotton dungarees.

The parallels between Jon and Kate Gosselin and Jordan and Peter Andre at the moment are slightly uncanny. Both couples were on television together all the time. Both couples are getting divorced. Both are famous despite their total lack of any discernible talent. Both relationships had an uncomfortable dynamic that involved the woman verbally putting the man down in a disinterested robot monotone at every opportunity. And you definitely, definitely wouldn’t like to spend even a single moment trapped in an enclosed space with any of them.

Crucially, though, it also seems like both sets of men are going to leave their relationship much more famous than they were when they entered it. Before he split up with Kate, Jon Gosselin was happy enough to play the put-upon, ambition-free loser to her evil, peacock-headed Terminator – but that’s all changed now.

People have grown so tired of Kate Gosselin that she’s not even allowed to publish her new cookbook, but Jon Gosselin? He’s on an unstoppable ascent. For instance, Jon spent last weekend frolicking about on a St Tropez yacht with a pretty young plastic surgeon’s daughter called Hailey Glassman, and now it’s been announced that he’s going to design a brand new range of kid’s clothes. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

The newly separated “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ dad will create a line of children’s clothing with Christian Audigier. “Everyone knows this family. And everyone will know our clothes,” the French designer said. “They’ll be fun, easy clothes for kids.”… Glassman will “have a lot of input with Christian,” Gosselin said. And he said the eight kids from his 10-year marriage to Kate will model the clothes in ads.

OK, great, that sounds completely fine to us. No problems with letting your brand-new girlfriend – the one who’s directly related to the man who your ex-wife employed to make her look prettier – help to design a range of clothes that your own children will model in a series of high-profile adverts. That can absolutely not backfire on you, your ex-wife, your new girlfriend or any of your children in any way, shape or form whatsoever.

And, on the slightest off-chance that it does, at least it wouldn’t all be filmed for an internationally-broadcast television series that would act as a lasting reminder for you children of what a pair of utterly clueless parents they had, would it?

Oh, wait.

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Jon & Kate Plus 8. It’s the show that nobody knew existed until it was in some magazines and crap, and now everybody loves.

And thanks to the tedious allegations of infidelity that have been rocking the Gosselin family since, oh, let’s say the dawn of time, the first episode of the new Jon & Kate Plus 8 season has drawn in record viewers for its network TLC.

In total, 9.8 million rubberneckers tuned into Jon & Kate Plus 8. That’s 9.7 million higher than TLC’s record – an episode of Mystery Diagnosis about a woman who thought she was being followed around by a goat.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that misery sells. It’s why people wouldn’t have gone to see The Dark Knight if it was called Mr Flopsy’s Enchanted Rainbow, it’s why people have suddenly remembered that Jordan and Peter Andre are still alive, and it’s why everybody tuned into the season premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8 on Monday night.

You know the Jon & Kate Plus 8 story by now. It goes like this – boy meets girl, boy knocks girl up more times than is really necessary, boy and girl spend two years making interminable TV shows about their stupid family that nobody cares about, boy possibly sleeps with someone else, girl literally turns into a monster, everybody starts watching their show. It’s a good story, really. No, wait, did we say good? We meant awful. Our mistake.

But because everyone cares about Jon & Kate Plus 8 all of a sudden – partially because they’ve been on the front cover of every single magazine in America over the last month pulling a succession of more and more harrowing facial expressions, and partially because Kate Gosselin has yet to grasp the irony of complaining about media intrusion when you’re the star of a reality show – a total of 9.8 million people saw the first episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 season five on Monday, approximately double the amount who saw the season four finale.

And what happened in Jon & Kate Plus 8? Not a lot. Some kids had a birthday party and Kate looked a bit sad briefly. But that didn’t stop Jon and Kate Gosselin from releasing this statement directly after it finished:

“As many couples do, we are navigating a very difficult time. Our current situation brings us together around the children and some times sets us apart. We keep our faith that we will make the right decisions for our family.”

A joint statement full of bland words that barely mean anything? Oh no, this means that Jon and Kate might have put their trouble behind them! This is going to be terrible for the Jon & Kate Plus 8 ratings. Quick, kids, it’s time to break out that emergency misery procedure we discussed! Kid 2, start smoking! Kid 7, accidentally drown yourself in a pond! Kid 5, catch meningitis! The rest of you, self-harm! For the love of God, self-harm for everything you’re worth! We need these numbers!

But let’s say that Jon and Kate Gosselin do manage to move on from their relationship woes. It’s not the end of the world – we can always move on to one of TLC’s other reality shows about exceptionally large families, like Table For 12 or 18 Kids And Counting or I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant or I Literally Just Shat Out A Baby, Just Now, Right Out Of My Arse, And Oh God Here Comes Another One.

See? There are plenty of options.

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