There’s just one thing missing – the grovelling atonement for all of her wrongs. But, wait, because that’s coming too – Britney Spears has announced a 90-minute MTV documentary all about her personal upsets, to be called something like but not necessarily Britney Spears: Yeah, Sorry About Shaving My Hair Off And Screaming About How I’m The Devil And Stuff.

It’s hoped that the documentary will be Britney Spears’ way of describing all the terrible mental anguish she’s been through in past through years, so that hopefully everyone can understand her side and put it behind them. Well, not all of Britney Spears’ mental anguish, obviously – it’s only a 90-minute documentary and she’ll probably want to spend more than a fifth of a nanosecond describing each of her individual character flaws.

There’s only one thing we want in our stockings this Christmas, and that’s a copy of Circus, the new album by Britney Spears. We want one because if it’s anything like the new Britney Spears single Womanizer, then it’ll consist of what sounds like Professor Stephen Hawking’s broken voice-machine repeating the word ‘circus’ monotonously for 50 or so minutes that was recorded while Britney Spears was out, say, terrorising a child or something.

But whether anyone else wants to buy the new Britney Spears album is another matter. For the bulk of people it’ll all depend on how Britney chooses to promote it. And to be honest, we’re not sure that she’s quite got the hang of it yet.

Remember the last Britney Spears album Blackout? Britney only did two pieces of promotion for that – one involved mumbling on a phone to Ryan Seacreast on her bed for 90 seconds, and the other involved the worst stage performance ever given by a human being. Needless to say, the promotion didn’t really work.

So for Circus, Britney Spears is pulling a new trick out of sleeve – the harrowing televised 90-minute exploration of mental illness.

For some reason, Britney Spears is under the impression that the only way she can sell albums these days is if she discusses her recent brushes with psychiatric despair in uncomfortable details for an hour and a half. And that’s what Britney Spears: For The Record is all about – to be shown on MTV on November 30, For The Record will be Britney’s way of wiping the slate clean about everything from her failed marriage to her loss of child custody to her stints in mental hospitals earlier this year. In the film, Britney states:

“I’ve been through a lot in the past two or three years, and there’s a lot that people don’t know. Sometimes I think I get kind of lonely because you don’t open the gate up that much, you know I mean? You’re guarded. You have to be that way, so I’m kind of stuck in this place and it’s like: How do you deal? And you just cope, and that’s what I do. I just cope with it, every day.”

For a young woman like Britney Spears to be forced to keep herself gated up like that is incredibly sad. At least until you remember that, on the rare occasions she does let her guard down, Britney tends to do things like smash up cars with umbrellas or babble relentlessly to herself in a made-up language. Hey Britney, maybe uptight repression is the way ahead, after all! It works pretty well for us!

Anyway, will Britney Spears: For The Record convince us that Britney’s worth taking a chance on again? Hard to say. Personally it all depends on what Britney apologises for. We’ve been burnt like this before, and so we’re only prepared to accept Britney Spears back into our lives if she says sorry for all those times she got her vagina out.

And she has to mean it too. That’s a dealbreaker.

Well, we say ‘a’, we should really say ‘the’ fame casualty. Yes folks, it’s Britney Watch day 35,598 – what’s going to happen?! Not much really, but still – the conservatorship that has been in place since February of this year has been extended for another five months.

Meaning what, exactly? Well, that daddy gets to tell little Miss Spears what to do, how to do it and how to spend her money until the end of the year, as well as being in control of, well – everything.

And we bet he’s loving every second of it.

But it’s not all bad for the former pop queen of the universe who is now head-mental, as these orders aren’t set in stone and can be rescinded at any given time. We’re willing to bet the orders stay just as they are, seeing as the person likely to be contesting them the most will be the woman who claimed she was the devil, married Kevin Federline and then got her kids took off her (there’s no point in linking to all those stories again again again, so let’s go wiiiiith… this one).

She just doesn’t have much of a good case, frankly.

At least we can rest easy in hecklerspray towers knowing that James Spears – papa – isn’t too much of a controlling, fame-hungry cretin hell bent on making his kid live out his missed opportunities vicariously. We hope. Good crikey we hope.

Britney should see this in a positive light though – sure, she has no real control over her own life, has a succession of failed relationships, isn’t allowed to look after her own kids and has had a mental breakdown in front of the whole world.

But which 26-year-old wouldn’t want to go home and sit around doing nothing for a year, being looked after by their parents and not having to lift a finger? Which is effectively what has happened here, let’s not split hairs.

In fact, screw all the sympathetic press Britney’s been getting – she’s bloody lucky to be in this situation. We bet she never runs out of bog roll and there’s always food in the cupboards. Plus if someone she doesn’t want to talk to comes round she can just send her dad to tell them to piss off, instead of having to politely put up with them for a couple of hours, as you do when living in your own place.

Plus there’s no worries about bills, TV licensing, dodgy landlords and the like.

Britney Spears really is the luckiest person in the world right now.

Maybe when she gets this legal freedom back – possibly later this year, though likely the beginning of next year – she’ll opt to stay at home, eventually becoming one of those complete embarrassments to pops, living in the basement, eating nothing but pasta and trawling the internets all day long.

Yes: she’ll become a hecklerspray writer. The irony would be too delicious to handle.

Damn – someone should have told Britney Spears this before she started her relationship with British photo-jockey Adnan Ghalib. See, keeping one's enemies closer does work in many situations, but when your enemy's sole purpose in life is to get as close to you as they legally can, you should probably opt for 'running away quite fast and keeping your enemy at a few arms' length'.

Alas, our poor, maybe quite mental Britney wasn't warned, and now she's supposedly trying to stop another wonderful celebrity sex tape from being released to the baying public. If only people would help to look after the girl.

Just when things were getting back on track for the young pop-tart, something has to come along and send things royally tits-up. She of 'Toxic' and latterly 'mental' fame had seen the shattered pieces of her life being slowly put back together. First with some trepidation, but soon enough there was something resembling normality entering the Spears household – she had recently regained overnight access to her kids and was on her way (and probably still is on her way to) building a new home for said kids. Figuratively building, that is, not literally. She's not also become a builder, unfortunately.

And then, blammo, out of nowhere, it happens – allegations of a sex tape start flying around. Allegations that put Britney in a position – or possibly numerous positions – on some tape, having some sex, with the scu… paparazzo man. Of all the people she'd decide to record herself shagging, why choose a journalistic parasite that is a member of the British paparazzi? hecklerspray knows full well that the girl has had some problems, but come on – she can't be that stupid can she?

Really?!

For now, at least, it would appear that the sex tape allegations are remaining exactly that – rumour, speculation and non-fact. Not that we'd begrudge watching Miss Spears engaging in the act, hair or no hair (on her head you sick freaks), but it's hard to feel anything but a weary sympathy for the girl. She really has been put through the wringer over the last couple of years. We all need to take a step back from the poor thing, let her recuperate and then really stick the boot back in.

Torture can be used for entertainment, it would seem.

At least Britney can rest easy in the fact that, if the tape does turn out to be real, she has carte blanche to run over Ghalib's feet as much as she wants. In a way. She'd definitely get our blessing for that courageous act, and it would certainly do a great deal to get her back to the realms of normality she so clearly craves, as well as potentially taking out one of those useless, cretinous, morons.

And those are precisely the two things that Heather Locklear has got. You'd think that Heather Locklear would be the happiest woman on the face of the earth, wouldn't you? Well you're wrong. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that Heather Locklear is one of the saddest.

Heather Locklear's just checked into an Arizona medical facility for psychological treatment as she's said to be suffering from anxiety and depression. And who can blame her – an actress of her calibre must be exhausted from taking on so many different personalities over the years. Sometimes Heather Locklear mustn't know if she's the woman who made one generic cameo appearance in Two And A Half Men, or the woman who made two generic cameo appearances in Ally McBeal. We feel for her, we really do.

You know which celebrity offspring we're most jealous of? Little Ava Elizabeth Sambora. Life must be so great for her – not only does she have a father who lulls her off to sleep at night by humming the guitar solo from Bad Medicine, but she knows that if she watches episodes of bad American sitcoms for long enough, her mother will inevitably pop up and do a rubbishy cameo before too long.

Sure, there are downsides to being the daughter of Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear – it must have been awkward when mummy and daddy divorced and daddy almost instantly ran off and shacked up with mummy's best friend Denise Richards, for example. Plus you'd never know when daddy would get drunk, lock you in his Hummer and recklessly career across several lanes of highway. And mummy might try and kill herself now and again. But our point still stands – Ava Elizabeth Sambora has the old 'drunk father/ mentally unbalanced mother' childhood that we always wanted and we hate her for it.

And it looks like Heather Locklear really is mentally unbalanced as well, because she's checked herself into a psychological hospital for treatment. Reuters reports:

"Heather has been dealing with anxiety and depression," Locklear's spokeswoman Cece Yorke said in a statement to Reuters. "She requested an in depth evaluation of her medication and entered into a medical facility for proper diagnosis and treatment." Yorke said the matter was confidential and no other statements would be released. 

It just goes to show that nobody is safe from depression, not even Heather Locklear – a woman who's experienced the giddy heights of starring in two episodes of Scrubs as well as two episodes of Boston Legal, and has managed to have sex with not only the bad-haired guitarist from Bon Jovi but also the bad-haired blonde midget from Just Shoot Me. How could that possibly be depressing, apart from the all the irregular soul-destroying bit-part work and the sex with unattractive men?

Still, we're not exactly surprised by any of this – if we heard that certain hecklerspray writers probably masturbated to pictures of us quite a lot in the 1980s, we'd currently be in an Arizona getting our brain looked at, too.

And, according to OK! Magazine, upon their return, Britney presented Kevin with a belated £69,000 30th birthday present.

Sixty-nine thosand pounds! Wow, what did she get him? A small house? A big car? A new and improved genetically modified brain that can come up with better lyrics than: “I’m not your brother, I’m not your uncle, I’m Daddy do, Steppin’ in this game and y’all ain’t got a clue?” Nope, none of those things. Can you guess? That’s right; a watch.

A fucking £69k time-keeping device. Why not just take a look at the position of the sun? It’s completely free of charge!

For that same amount of money K-Fed could listen to the talking clock for about 200 years. Honestly, there was us saying last week that she’s back on track, and then she goes and pulls off the most mental move of her life.

Britney has been throwing away the cash recently. Earlier this week she donated £12,500 to the ‘Idol gives back’ charity, because – as a source told CMR: “she watched the show and cried for like two hours over the children in Africa with malaria”. Meaning the idea of K-Fed being unaware of the time is over five times as traumatic as African kids dying of malaria. Sort of.

And all this at a time when she can only get access to her millions by convincing her daddy, who’s in control of financial affairs, that it’s a sensible purchase. A source close to James, Britney’s father, said yesterday:

“He personally approved the mini-vacation and birthday present purchases. There is nothing more he and Brit’s mother, Lynne, would love than for her and Kevin to get back together. Kevin’s whole attitude to his ex-wife has changed. He can see she is responding to treatment for her bipolar disorder, staying sober and trying to rebuild her life and career. Though she is becoming again the woman he fell in love with, they both know rushing into remarriage too soon could be dangerous. So they’re taking baby steps and it seems to be working. Kevin believes she’s almost ready to be a full-time mom again. They are both anxious to put all that behind them and start afresh. They deserve to find happiness and they feel their happiness, as well as that of their children, hinges on them being a family – a proper one this time round.”

Good luck to them. And Britney, if you’re reading this and wondering what to ask your pop to let you spend your money on next, hecklerspray has it’s very own malaria-ridden African child who has been told by the doctor he has just three hours to live.

Trouble is he hasn’t got a watch to count away the seconds. That’s got to be worth at least 150,000 Britney pounds. Make the cheque payable to Paul Sorrenti (his legal guardian) and, please, hurry up.

Read More – Britney And Kevin Back Together? – OK! Magazine

And that might not be new – we guessed that the moment Britney shacked up with Kevin Federline – but Britney Spears' manager Sam Lufti has apparently told Barbara Walters that Britney suffers from "mental issues" that she's seeking treatment for.

And how did Britney Spears celebrate this news? By having a gigantic fight with Sam Lufti and then sobbing on a pavement in front of the whole world. In case we didn't already get the message.

Aside from being that play where Harry Potter got his winky out, Equus is actually a meditation on the role of psychiatric treatment that raises the question 'is it really morally acceptable to entirely change an individual's personality with medication and treatment just because they don't fit society's definition of normal?'

And, in the case of Britney Spears, the answer is 'Yes. Yes, it's absolutely acceptable and frankly we wish that she'd get a bloody move on with it because she's getting right on our sodding tits.'

But finally it looks as if Britney Spears might actually be seeking out help because, according to Britney's manager Sam Lufti, Britney Spears has realised that she's mental. Yes, look, we know that this makes Britney Spears literally the last person in the entire world to realise that, but at least it's a start.

Lufti's assertions that Britney is crazy were revealed by Barbara Walters yesterday on The View. Reuters reports:

Veteran broadcast journalist Walters said she spoke with Lufti by phone after he reached out to her. "He said that Britney is suffering from what he describes as mental issues which are treatable," Walters said on "The View." "He said that she has been to a psychiatrist and that she, I assume, is starting some kind of treatment." Walters said Lufti has been staying with the singer "constantly" and added that Spears has been having "mood swings, she's been having trouble sleeping." Walters said she did not know whether Lufti was indeed telling the truth.

Now we're not sure what exactly made Britney Spears admit to her mental problems – could it be the emotional stress of losing her children, the shocking realisation that she's become a petty shoplifter or the way that, ten months after she called herself the devil and tried to hang herself with a bedsheet in rehab, she got topless, locked herself in a bathroom with her kids and started in yelling in an inexplicable British accent until an ambulance came to take her away? – but she's getting there.

Or at least she would be if it weren't for the gigantic fight that Britney Spears had with Sam Lufti last night that ended up with Britney Spears slumped on a pavement crying her eyes out and clutching her dog until the police, Britney's family and her boyfriend Adnan Ghalib all turned up to turn it into the gigantic circus it was promising to be. But, hey, at least she's getting better. 

And whether Britney Spears is only seeking treatment for these "mental issues" because she wants to convince a court that she can see her children, or whether she's solely invested in getting help for her own sake, Britney has at least admitted that she's got a problem. And don't they say that admitting your problem is the first step on the road to recovery?

Yes they do. However, the second step on the road to recovery is 'put some knickers on for Christ's sake darling, your tatty minge is bringing our lunch up', and we all know how difficult Britney Spears is going to find that. She's not out of the woods yet.

Read more:

Spears' manager says singer has "mental issues" - Reuters

So with that in mind, thank Christ that Dr Phil has taken it upon himself to personally wade in and resolve to fix Britney Spears' broken mind forever. According reports, Dr Phil managed to accompany Britney Spears home after her weird little episode on Thursday evening that ended up with her being wheeled to hospital in a stretcher for psychological tests. And Dr Phil is so hell-bent on sorting out Britney Spears' life that he's even going to do a TV show all about it tomorrow. And quite right too, because if anything's going to set Britney onto the straight and narrow it's the sight of a chubby bald man pointing at a photo of her and shouting "Let's do it! Get real!" 350 times on the trot on daytime TV.

A few days have passed now since Britney Spears was taken to hospital in a stretcher following a ridiculous standoff with Kevin Federline over custody of her children that saw six police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters, a vanload of paparazzi, those stop-motion skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts, Digby The Biggest Dog In The World, the cast of South Pacific and Batman get sent to her house in a frenzy, and finally things have started to become clear about what went down.

Apparently – based on reports of the incident that we've read from various sources – the whole malarkey started when Britney Spears refused to hand over her children to Kevin Federline at the court-appointed deadline. At that point Britney Spears either barricaded herself in a room with one of her children, both of her children or none of her children and then either took a bunch of illegal drugs, took a bunch of prescription drugs, drank some alcohol or didn't consume anything and then either threatened to kill herself, kill her children, kill her ex-husband or kill none of the above with a gun, some other sort of weapon or no weapon at all. We hope this helps.

Anyway, after whatever the hell is supposed to have happened, Britney Spears was taken to hospital for a mental evaluation to see if she suffers from a tragic mental illness or not. Since she was released from hospital on Saturday morning, we can take it that Britney Spears doesn't actually have a mental illness – meaning that she's just a bit of a twat – but that hasn't stopped Dr Phil from diving in and trying to get his face noticed.

Apparently Dr Phil – the one-time Oprah acolyte who routinely cures idiots of all sorts of life problems on his TV show by shouting bland self-help nothingisms like "This relationship needs a hero!" and "This is going to be a changing day in your life!" at them again and again like a pudgy parrot – escorted Britney Spears home from the hospital. And the experience was so moving for Dr Phil that he's going to base an entire TV show around Britney tomorrow because he loves her and not at all because he thinks that more people will watch his show if he fills it with lots of photos of Britney Spears dribbling in a stretcher. According to Dr Phil:

"My meeting with Britney and some of her family members this morning in her room at Cedars leaves me convinced more than ever that she is in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention. She was released moments before my arrival and was packing when I entered the room. We visited for about an hour before I walked with her to her car. I am very concerned for her." 

There's no mention of whether Britney Spears will appear on tomorrow's edition of Dr Phil – probably because she won't but more people will watch if they think she will – but maybe some direct televised Phil-isms will be what Britney Spears needs to change her ways in any case. And if that fails, it'll be time to bring in the last-ditch heavy artillery to set her straight – we're talking Maury.

Read more:

Britney Spears Leaves Hospital After Visit From Dr. Phil - MTV 

So what more do we know now? Well, the main news is that Britney Spears has gone to hospital for tests. Not maths or spelling tests – it's far too early to put a strain like that on someone as fragile as Britney Spears – but psychological tests. After a run of weird behaviour that's lasted long over a year, doctors will soon check Britney Spears' system for drugs and alcohol and then begin to assess her mentally to see if she's a danger to herself, her kids or anyone else around her. This process might take anything up to three days, which means by Monday morning we'll know if Britney Spears is a heartbreaking sufferer of a mental illness of just a bit of an overdramatic numpty.

It was the news that shocked the world. No, we take that back – it was the news that the world had been waiting for since some point in the middle of 2006. Last night the Britney Spears/ Kevin Federline custody bitchfight came to an ugly head when Britney's apparent refusal to follow court orders and hand her sons Sean Preston and Jayden James back to their father led to fighting and an overzealous response by the emergency services including six police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, helicopters, a First World War tank and the Tyrannosaurus Red Dragon Thunderzord out of Power Rangers, and ended with Britney Spears being wheeled into an ambulance.

According to some reports, Britney Spears was strapped onto a stretcher and taken away because she was thought to be under the influence of substances. What those substance are – if any – remains to be seen. It could be drugs, alcohol, some kind of violently undiagnosed wheat intolerance, other drugs. We'll find out soon enough after doctors at the Los Angeles Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles have carried out their tests.

More worrying, though, is the notion that doctors could invoke a Californian law that would hold Britney Spears in hospital on suicide watch for up to 72 hours while psychological examinations are carried out on her. And the worst case scenario following that would involve Britney being taken to a secure mental facility.

We'll just have to wait and see what the outcome of Britney's tests are and hope that there's nothing seriously wrong with her. But it doesn't look good – over the last year Britney Spears has shaved her head, flashed the world her genitals, gone to rehab, called herself the devil, made a feeble attempt at a suicide and, perhaps worst of all, released an album that sounds like Dr Stephen Hawking blasting over an electrified cattle grid covered in amniotic fluid. And we have 72 hours to wait before we officially know whether this is all a sign of genuine mental illness or just a slightly overenthusiastic way of getting rid of your children. 

Still, that'll teach Jamie Lynn for briefly becoming more famous than her sister.

Read more:

Britney Spears taken to hospital for tests – CNN 

But Jack Jordan certainly wouldn't, no sirree. And that's a shame, because he's the man who was arrested and stands accused of recently doing both of those things to Uma Thurman. But there's a lifeline – prosecutors have offered Jack Jordan a plea deal that would mean he'd get a reduced sentence if he admits guilt to the charges of stalking and attempted coercion. The only problem there is that Jack Jordan would be spending the reduced sentence locked up in a mental institution. And since he claims he isn't mental, Jack Jordan has decided to reject it. But, come on, liking Uma Thurman? And he claims he isn't crazy?

We've always judged the scale of crazy obsession to be a little bit fuzzy, and much of it depends on the object of the obsession. For instance, if the object was the French bra-girl from the Marks & Spencers advert, then ordering everyone in the room to be silent so you can lick the TV screen like a dog in peace each time her commercial comes on can't possibly be classified as obsessive. Everyone does it. There's nothing wrong with doing that.

But Uma Thurman, on the other hand, is different. For example, anyone who paid money to go and see Uma Thurman in My Super Ex-Girlfriend at the cinema or on DVD clearly suffers from a dangerous clinical obsession and should be locked up forever immediately. Or drowned. Or both.

With this in mind, you'd need to be completely doolally to even attempt to do any of the following to Uma Thurman: 1) Sleep in your car dangerously close to Uma Thurman's house, 2) break into Uma Thurman's trailer and leave cartoons of yourself walking along a razorblade while she digs your grave, 3) Threaten to kill yourself if you ever see Uma Thurman with another man, 4) Entertain the thought of watching the Uma Thurman movie Be Cool, even for the briefest of moments.

Sadly, 35-year-old Jack Jordan is accused of three – tragically maybe even four – of these things. In October Jordan was arrested and charged with stalking, aggravated harassment and attempted coercion, and last month his court appearances even inspired a haiku or two.

Things don't look great for Jack Jordan – if he's convicted of the charges he'll be sentenced to four years in jail – but prosecutors still want to cut him some slack. They want to reduce Jordan's charges, but to do that he first has to agree to plead guilty to slaking Uma Thurman and then spend a year in a mental facility.

However, Jack Jordan has dismissed the plea deal on the basis that he doesn't want a criminal record, and will now run the risk of being hit with the full force of the charges.

We can understand where this rejection came from, though – imagine spending a year in a mental facility. It'd be horrible – and almost impossible to draw any more razorblade/ grave pictures of you and Uma Thurman. And, really, isn't that what this case is all about?

Read more:

Uma Fan Says No To Nuthouse - E! Online