Husband in jail, painful cold turkey crack rehabilitation, funny haircut – things are just about as bad as possible for Amy Winehouse at the moment, right?

Nope. Because Mika wants to get in on Amy's plans for a Christmas album.

Mika seems to be under the impression that an Amy Winehouse Christmas album would be much better with him in it because she's Jewish and he's partly related to someone who's been to Lebanon once, or something. But, hey, anything that exposes Mika to a career-threatening hard drug addiction is fine with us.

It's been a year since Mika got to number one with that Grace Kelly song of his, and what a year it's been. Not only did he release Grace Kelly, but he also released a bunch of other songs that not even Mika's biggest fans could hum if you held a gun to their heads. True, Mika helped stall a Boyzone reunion – so fair play to that – but unless he gets his act together sharpish, there's a good chance that Mika will become another quickly forgotten, funny-haired one hit wonder.

So what can Mika do? Piggyback around on someone much more famous to remind everyone that he's still alive? OK!

Mika has caught word that Amy Winehouse is going to temporarily switch smoking crack for singing soon, to record an album of Christmas and Hanukkah standard. Now, yes, we know that the Christmas album is basically an admission of creative bankruptcy, but ask yourself this – would you rather listen to a recovering crack addict singing Little Donkey or a double concept emo-jazz album entitled Requiem For My Blakey? Quite, so shut up.

Anyway, that's not the point. Mika's heard about Amy Winehouse's Christmas album and now he's so desperate to join in that he probably let a little bit of wee come out. You see, Mika doesn't just think that combining his camp gonk-pop and Amy Winehouse's thousand-year-old roar would make a perfect Christmas present – he thinks that it'll bring peace to the Middle East forever. The Sun reports:

The flamboyant singer revealed: "I heard Amy will be recording an album of Jewish music once she gets well and I’d like to make a contribution to it. I really like her music. Think about this – me, a part-Lebanese artist working on a Jewish album. I think that’s a nice statement. I’d like to make a statement some day."

Unless that statement is along the lines of "I'm giving up music forever to become a penniless hermit, plus I'm sewing my mouth up," then we expect that there's going to be a lot of profoundly disappointed people around. 

Although maybe there is something to Mika's comment. Perhaps world peace can only be achieved by a hokey cash-in carol-singing album by a drug addict and a gay-looking man with a Freddy Mercury complex. After all, if painstaking negotiation and flat-out violence hasn't worked, then it's probably worth trying to unite the Arabs and the Jews through a united sense of crippling shame.

Read more:

Mika makes Amy a kosher offer – The Sun 

Take That, the group of four 50-year-old men who get paid to sing the soundtrack to TV ads for low-rent supermarkets – have got a lot of Brit Award nominations.

In fact, all the acts that scooped the most Brit Award nominations are just sugar-free versions of older performers. The three biggest Brit nod-getters were Mika (Freddie Mercury lite), Leona Lewis (Whitney Houston lite) and Take That (Take That lite).

But don't worry – the Brits also had something for you indie kids too. The Eagles are up for Best International Album. That's The Eagles.

The Brit Awards are traditionally the jewel in the crown of the British music industry calendar, when everyone gathers together to celebrate the best music that this grey little island can produce and then goes home mumbling that it wasn't as good as last year.

And although they're wrong – the worst the Brits ever got were whenever Ben Elton was allowed to be the host – this year looks set to be the best ever because the Osbournes are hosting! Yeah! That means danger and excitement and rock and roll, even though the Osbournes are actually a shaking, forgetful old man, the star of a Saturday teatime singing contest, some girl from a musical and a part-time rock climber. Danger!

However, it doesn't matter how dangerous the Osbournes are because the Brits nominations have just been announced and the likely winners are all so doggedly personality-free that the evening promises to be less fun than a regional barometer convention.

Don't believe us? OK – let's look at the acts that got multiple Brits nominations. There's Take That, the greying reformed boyband up for Best Group, Best Album and Best Live Act. Thought Gary Barlow was a wildchild when he was a kid? Well you should see him now that he's in his mid-thirties! There's Mika (Best British Male, Best Album, Best Breakthrough, Best Single), whose biggest ambition seems to be to write songs for gruesome hen-night parties to screech at full volume on their way to Wetherspoons in a tatty white rented limo.

Then there's Kate Nash, up for Best British Female, Best Breakthrough and Best Single, which means that hopefully she'll be able to give up her day job as a monotone Claire's Accessories Saturday girl. And then there's Leona Lewis (Best British Female, best Album, Best Breakthrough, Best Single) who somehow managed to make the UK's fastest-selling debut album ever, even though no living human has ever heard her say more than three words in a row.

Still, there are a handful of decent acts with Brits nominations, like Arcade Fire and Jamie T and PJ Harvey, so maybe the Brits won't be as completely boring as we're expecting them to be. But, let's face it they won't win. It looks a lot like the 2008 Brits will go down in history as the most grimly professional Brits ever.

Joss Stone, we've never needed you more. Start drinking now.

Read more: 

The Brits – The Nominations - Sky

Have you heard the news? Boyzone are reforming because they've put aside their differences and not because Take That and the Spice Girls have got rich doing it and nobody cares about Ronan Keating's solo career any more.

Yes, Boyzone – the most famous elderly Irish boyband after Westlife and Murtagh Fitzpatrick And The Clodpoopers – are reforming, but there's a hitch. Boyzone wanted their comeback single to be I Gave It All Away, a song written by inexplicably popular annoyance Mika – but Mika's not having it. That's a good thing, because when a band interprets a songwriter's work, the result is often a brand-new, unique piece of music spliced equally from each party's DNA like a baby – and we can all agree that a part-Mika/ part-Boyzone baby would probably end up looking and sounding a lot like the disfigured genetically-deformed mutant puppy from The Fly II.

Although the reunions of Take That and the Spice Girls have shown that there's definitely a market for cacky old past-it pop groups transparently trying to make a quick buck for as long as they can bear looking at each other for, the failure of the All Saints comeback and the East 17 comeback proved that it's just as easy for these comebacks to fail.

So right now it could go either way for Boyzone, the Westlife-inventing Irish boyband responsible for Ronan Keating, that bloke who used to be on Coronation Street, him out of Love Island, the one who looks like he's spent the last decade sobbing, The Other One and – to a lesser extent – Louis Walsh. This week Boyzone reported that they were reforming after what seems to be a painfully short amount of time. We would have reported it, but we were too busy crying.

But the Boyzone reunion isn't without its obstacles. And not the obvious obstacle, either – the obstacle of Ronan Keating being so completely punch-worthy that the other Boyzone members would be so busy thinking about slapping him in his stupid smug face that they'd never get any work done – but another obstacle. It's been reported that Boyzone wanted to use I Gave It All Away, a song written by infuriating one-hit wonder Mika, as their lead comeback single with a performance on Children In Need to promote it. However, Mika has refused to let Boyzone release it because he apparently thinks that Boyzone are 'too cheesy' – a little like Dr Harold Shipman chiding Fred West for being 'too murdery.'

The Sun quotes an 'industry insider' as saying:

"Mika wrote the song and made it available for other artists. Boyzone loved it. They thought it was perfect to launch their comeback so they recorded it and it sounded great – a certain No 1. Just like the track, Mika gave it all away. But then he took it back again."

While in the short-term this is an obvious win-win for all involved – because the end result of a Boyzone/ Mika hybrid would invariably sound like a gang of dullards trying to mimic a twelfth-rate Freddie Mercury impersonator with a keychange in the middle where everyone stands up, and almost certainly the very worst thing your ears would have ever heard – it might be worth taking all this with a pinch of salt.

Because, after all, Boyzone's manager used to be Louis Walsh – a man who'd happily feed any old bullshit to the press so long as he got a speck of publicity out of it – so the truth is probably that Mikey Graham from Boyzone just saw Mika from his cardboard box outside Woolworths and asked for some change, to which Mika replied "I gave it all away. Plus I need the money I do have for when people work out I'm rubbish and stop buying my records in a few months' time."

Or something.