This year’s American Idol was amazing for one solitary reason – we’re looking at you, Kara DioGuardi!

That’s right. It wasn’t down to Adam Lambert’s uncompromising talent, nor was it because show kick-started a giant about sexuality. It was because of Kara DioGuardi and the way she just sort of sat around not really doing anything for vast tracts of time.

So clearly when Kara DioGuardi decided to get married, we knew the wedding would be infused with this same rock and roll spirit. And it was, if quietly marrying a contractor before hardly anybody counts as rock and roll now.

Kara DioGuardi has, let’s face it, had a hell of a year. Nobody even knew who she was at the start of the year, but American Idol has changed all that – now the whole world knows that Kara DioGuardi is the woman who isn’t as entertaining as Simon Cowell or as gregarious as Randy Jackson or as flat-out berserk as Paula Abdul and doesn’t really do a lot except upset the perfectly good three-judge dynamic for no good reason whatsoever.

In short, Kara DioGuardi has hit the bigtime.

And it’s because of this that Kara DioGuardi’s contractor boyfriend Mike McCuddy realised that he’d be legally entitled to half of her American Idol earnings if he married her. No, that’s not right. We meant that he realised how much he loved her. No, that’s not right either. The first one. The first one’s right. Oh, look, Kara DioGuardi married her boyfriend on Sunday, that’s the point. AP reports:

Kara DioGuardi had a busy Fourth of July weekend: The “American Idol” judge married her beau, contractor Mike McCuddy. DioGuardi’s publicist, Danica Smith, says the couple tied the knot on Sunday in Prospect Harbor, Maine. Smith says 30 guests witnessed the ceremony at the Prospect Harbor United Methodist Church.

And that’s literally all we know about this mysterious Kara DioGuardi wedding. Did any of Kara’s fellow American Idol judges attend the ceremony? Unlikely – Kara’s already fallen out with both Paula and Simon, and Randy can’t go to weddings because of his compulsion to shriek either the word “DOG!” or “HOLLYWOOD!” during the bit where you’re supposed to say why the couple shouldn’t get married.

Did noted songwriter Kara DioGuardi compose the music that was played during the ceremony? Again, unlikely – if the American Idol winner’s single was any indication of her songwriting ability, then it would have meant that she’d have to walk up the aisle to a piece of music which sounded like every Gillette advert ever played at once, on the bagpipes, by an army of crying pensioners with shattered ribcages. And nobody wants that at their wedding, do they?

Are we only writing about Kara DioGuardi’s wedding because it’s just about the only thing we can find that hasn’t got anything to do with Michael Jackson today? Well, yes, obviously. Duh.

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Even though American Idol finished long ago, one question remains. That question is ‘Seriously? No Boundaries? What were they thinking?’

Oh, and the other question is ‘Is Adam Lambert gay?’ It’s still a hot topic of conversation – in fact, internet research shows that when it comes to things that are nobody’s business about a man we’ll never hear about again from a TV show that’s already ended, Adam Lambert’s sexuality is one of the highest-trending subjects.

At least that was before Kara DioGuardi inadvertently told everyone watching The View that Adam Lambert is as gay as can be yesterday. Whoops.

In all of television history, there’s never been an individual quite as tragic as Kara DioGuardi. Cursed from birth to resemble the photographer from Just Shoot Me so closely that people routinely approach her to say how much they loved her bitpart as The Murderer in AI, becoming the fourth judge on American Idol was supposed to be Kara’s big break.

In reality, though, it’s been one giant mess after another. First Kara Dioguardi started fighting with Simon Cowell, then she started fighting with Paula Abdul, then she wrote the American Idol winning single No Boundaries – an improbably bad car-crash of a song that sounds like a direct amalgamation of all the music from every single tacky aftershave commercial from the 1980s, only worse – and now it’s time for her to put the cherry on the cake. The gay cherry on the cake of humiliating indiscretion, that is.

We’re talking, of course, about Adam Lambert. Throughout American Idol Adam Lambert has tried to keep his sexuality as ambiguous as possible, in that he’s never explicitly declared himself to be gay even though he interprets all of his songs like a man desperate to elbow his way onto the Caligula soundtrack and he’s probably got a boyfriend. But Adam Lambert’s refusal to state his sexuality is his choice, and that choice should be respected by everyone.

Everyone except for Kara DioGuardi, that is, because she went on The View yesterday and blew the whole stinking thing wide open. MSNBC reports:

Barbara Walters asked if she felt Lambert’s perceived sexuality had an impact on “Idol” voters. “I don’t think that Adam was ever in (the closet),” [Kara replied] “I think he was always openly out.” Walters reportedly pressed DioGuardi about her comment that Lambert “was always openly out.” “I think he was,” DioGuardi answered. “I mean, from what I’ve seen … I do. I never thought he wasn’t.”

There’s no word about how Adam Lambert reacted to this sudden outing by Kara DioGuardi, but we can’t imagine that he’ll be pleased – after all, Adam’s deliberate mystique over his sexuality is just about the only thing keeping him from second-place obscurity right now, and Kara’s clumsiness has probably just put an end to that. That means, in effect, that Kara DioGuardi has turned Adam Lambert into the new Justin Guarini.

And that’s a nightmare. Have you ever tried to accessorise a pair of shoes with a haircut like Justin’s? Nightmare.

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How much the judges hate each other. Balancing their egos has always been a tricky job – especially when one of those egos is as shrieky and scattergun and genuinely incomprehensible as Paula Abdul - and now it’s all come to a head.

Paula Abdul has told a magazine that she doesn’t really like American Idol now that new judge Kara DioGuardi is on board, and Kara has responded by saying how ‘hurt’ she is. Boy, this is going to be one funny-looking catfight.

If Paula Abdul divides her American Idol memories into seasons – which we don’t think is true, by the way, due to the sneaking suspicion that Paula Abdul fears time as a work of malevolent witchcraft – then this season is easily her worst. Yes, even worse than the season where she broke her face on a dog. It’s that bad.

Of course, having a dead woman turn up on your doorstep will do that to you, but now Paula Abdul is suffering through something far worse – there’s another woman on the American Idol judging panel, and it’s made Paula Abdul so angry that she might actually pop.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike new American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi – currently our two favourites are that she looks like a Norbit version of Enrico Colantoni and that she doesn’t seem capable of saying anything that you wouldn’t find as a message inside a cheap birthday card given to you by someone who doesn’t like you but feels dutybound to send you a card nonetheless – but Paula Abdul seems to dislike Kara DioGuardi just because she exists. Paula told OK! magazine:

“Kara and I have known each other for years and we get along great. But we tried four judges before and it doesn’t work. It takes up so much time for each of us to give our opinion that it slows down the pace of the show.”

You can tell that Paula Abdul means business about this, because that entire speech was full of separate and distinct words rather than one burbled mess punctuated with the occasional cackle and/or manic dolphin squeal. But if that’s what Paula Abdul thinks of Kara DioGuardi, what does Kara DioGuardi think of Paula Abdul?

“Paula has a right to her opinions, but I was disappointed by her comments, and hurt that she did not address them to me in person.”

So what sparked off Paula Abdul’s rampage? As well as the glaring obvious explanation that it’s because Paula Abdul is a gibbering crackpot, some are pointing to comments elsewhere in the OK! interview where Paula suggests that this will be her last American Idol because “I have so many other things I want to do.” Which is a fair thing to say – those few months on American Idol each year really cut into the time that Paula Abdul sets aside for crying and babbling and shrieking into telephones about bowel disorders and turning into a poltergeist in public and generally creeping people out so much that they want to run home and scrub themselves clean immediately after seeing her.

But one thing’s for sure – this American Idol judge-feud is definitely not about ratings. Definitely.

Ahem.

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You see, American Idol viewers loved the previous ‘idiot idiot arsehole’ judging dynamic. And roping in a vowelly nobody to be the superfluous fourth judge seemed like folly. Or at least it did, until this week’s American Idol, which mostly seemed to be about Kara DioGuardi fighting with Simon Cowell in an argument that can only end with bloodshed and grisly death.

Or lots of angry sex on the American Idol judging desk. God, we hope it’s the death one.

American Idol needed to change this year, everyone could see that. The show’s previous ‘laugh at the potentially disabled’ angle sort of wore itself out when that Paul Abdul fan topped herself in November, which is why everyone promised that this would be the nicest American Idol ever.

Trouble is, American Idol thrives on nastiness. Take away American Idol’s nastiness and what have you got? Four million hours of wet-faced nimrods trying to fit as many notes as they can into an arbitrarily-chosen Stevie Wonder song, that’s what. And, seriously, who’d be stupid enough to watch that?

So if the American Idol judges can’t be nasty to their glaringly subliterate contestants, who can they be nasty to? Why, each other of course. Or at least they would be, were it not for the fact that two-thirds of the American Idol judging staff find nastiness impossible because Randy Jackson still seems to be buzzing from a childhood Tartrazine overdose and Paula Abdul has never used a fully-coherent word in her entire life.

And that’s why this season of American Idol has introduced a fourth judge in Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter who appears to have got a bit greedy on her last trip to the vowel factory. Up until this week’s American Idol, Kara seemed like a genuinely pointless addition to the judging panel – she’s actually nice to people, plus she keeps insisting that they follow their dreams, which always tends to make us involuntarily bring a little vomit up into the back of our throat.

But on this week’s American Idol auditions in San Francisco, Kara DioGuardi finally started to make sense. That’s because, as People reports, Kara DioGuardi quite clearly hates Simon Cowell:

Kara (frustrated by one of Simon’s decisions): “You have a heart of COLD.” Simon (unmoved): “I have a REALISTIC heart.” It reached a peak of sorts with the bizarre audition of Akilah Askew-Ghoulston. She hung on for so long… Kara finally hugged her and gently but firmly shoved her in the direction of the door. Then she turned on Simon: “How can you yell at certain people and then certain people you let run on?”

Actually, this inter-judge bickering might be just what American Idol needs. After all, Simon Cowell does love strong women, which is why he always surrounds himself with people like Sharon Osbourne, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh.

And also, if this sniping continues to escalate, there’s a very good possibility that one of the live American Idol shows will end with Kara DioGuardi disemboweling Simon Cowell with an axe. And, you know, if you’re going to be dragged into a police van cackling like a maniac about anything, it may as well be that.

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Not to stretch that metaphor, but it would be fine if the fourth dog leg was as famous as the other three dog legs, but it’s not – it’s a weirdly anonymous dog leg that you wouldn’t even recognise if someone hacked it off and waved it around by itself away from all the other dog legs. Understand? Good.

Anyway. Kara DioGuardi, the new fourth American Idol judge, has now been formally introduced to the public. We could have just said that instead of banging on about dog legs and saved everyone a lot of time and confusion, we suppose. Oh, will we ever learn?

We’re gigantic American Idol fans and we literally treat the show like a God-figure, following its every command. For instance, every time we see the Coca Cola logo on American Idol, we drink two litres of Coca Cola. That’s why, if you ever meet us, we always need to go to the toilet and our teeth are brown and soft.

And because of our serf-like American Idol obedience, this week’s announcement that the new fourth American Idol judge would be songwriter/producer Kara DioGuardi sent us scurrying to the shops to buy every single CD she’s ever worked on. And boy oh boy are we ever glad we did that.

Honestly, we can’t imagine how we survived for so long without knowing the majesty of I Am Me by Ashlee Simpson, nor the eloquent magnificence of Dignity by Hilary Duff. And, just so this is out in public, when we die we want Take It Away by Becky Baeling from the album Ultra Dance 04, perhaps the pinnacle of Kara DioGuardi’s professional achievements, played at our funeral.

But just because we already know so much about Kara DioGuardi that we could probably become fairly proficient stalkers, you don’t know anything about her at all, do you? That’s why it’s lucky that the American Idol gang have formally introduced her to the world during the American Idol auditions in New York.

This is your big chance, Kara. Show everyone what a sparkly, effervescent and charismatic wundergurl you really are! People reports:

DioGuardi admits it was initially intimidating to join the judges’ panel, especially due to Cowell’s notorious reputation for being Idol’s resident meanie. “I was a little bit,” DioGuardi confessed, “but I’m going to hold my own.”

Kapow! Now that’s charisma if ever we saw it. Viewers will be able to see Kara DioGuardi on American Idol when the new season starts in January. Our advice to Kara? Wear clothes that contrast with the chair you sit on. We wouldn’t want people to forget you’re even there, would we?

So when the American Idol producers decided to shake up the holy trinity of Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul and hire a fourth judge, they aimed as high as they possibly could. So who did they pick? Michael Jackson? Madonna? The resuscitated zombie corpse of Elvis Presley? The T-Rex out of Jurassic Park? No. The American Idol producers picked Kara DioGuardi.

What? Don’t look at us. We never said we knew who she was.

They say that a triangle is the strongest structure known to man, and that’s certainly true of the American Idol judging panel – even if that triangle is made of a smug man with tits, a man whose vocabulary is solely comprised of the words ‘dog’ and ‘Hollywood’ and the only woman alive who can break her nose on a dog.

It just works. Randy Jackson, Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul are basically American Idol’s good cop, bad cop and splutteringly incoherent cop. You’d have to be a gigantic fool of epic proportions to meddle about with that line-up. Which is why someone from American Idol has done exactly that and announced that, as of next season, Kara DioGuardi will become the fourth American Idol judge.

Oh, come on. You know. Kara DioGuardi. She’s that woman who did that thing. You remember. She’s got that haircut. Possibly wears make-up sometimes. Come on.

Oh, alright. We haven’t got the foggiest idea who Kara DioGuardi is either. But Wikipedia knows, and it says she’s a songwriter and producer responsible for hits like Spinning Around by Kylie Minogue, Rich Girl by Gwen Stefani and Ooh Ooh Baby by Britney Spears. You just can’t argue with a pedigree like that. Unless you have ears, in which case you can go right ahead.

We can’t help feeling that this is a massive misstep on the part of the American Idol producers. Sure, Kara DioGuardi might know her way around a song, but when has American Idol ever been about songs? Everyone knows that it’s about wet-mouthed little turds belting out the occasional bad karaoke standard to punctuate the constant sadfaced retelling of their tragic backstory. And we’re fine with that. But songs? Urgh. How crass.

But why has American Idol suddenly decided to hire Kara DioGuardi as a judge anyway? We think we know why – the new season of X Factor has seen its audience boosted by about a million percent because Cheryl Cole out of Girls Aloud is the new judge and, since American Idol’s ratings have dropped slightly in recent years, it clearly wanted to pull the same trick.

But here’s the thing – people didn’t watch X Factor to see Cheryl Cole give considered feedback to people’s singing ability. They watched it because her footballer husband shagged a load of other women and they hoped that she’d start crying about it.

So we’re doubtful that Kara DioGuardi will make much of an impact on American Idol. That is unless her boyfriend once got so drunk that he puked on a slag while having sex with her. We’re not idiots.