In fact it’s fair to say that so much of the Britney Spears documentary has now been leaked that the only new footage that’ll come as a surprise to anyone watching the whole thing next week is a three-second snippet of Britney Spears gazing into the middle distance and wistfully humming the theme-tune to Animal Hospital.

For instance, People magazine has now seen an exclusive preview of Britney: For The Record, and the most exciting bit left to review seems to be when Britney Spears starts crying and says of her life “It’s bad. I’m sad.” Bad? Sad? That’s the most eloquent you can be, Britney? Disappointing. We just expected something more profound from the poet behind “Womanizer womanizer/ You’re a womanizer/ Oh/ Womanizer/ Oh.”

If there’s one thing we hate it’s a spoiler. Honestly, when people told us that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense, or that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, or that Dumbledore is going to die in the next Harry Potter film, it really took the shine off our day.

So imagine how bummed out we were when people started blurting spoilers about the new Britney Spears documentary Britney: For The Record all over the place. We were furious! Apparently Britney Spears gets sad and cries a lot in it, which is absolutely the last thing we expected from a recovering psychiatric patient who’d had a high-profile mental breakdown, and now our enjoyment of it is going to be totally ruined!
We already knew that Britney Spears thought her life was like a prison sentence, only worse because never actually got to kill anybody and she still has to look after those poxy kids of hers (or something). But in case that wasn’t enough, People has seen a special preview of the documentary and seems determined to blab about it until its jaw falls off. Here’s what it said:

Spears takes topics ranging from her failed romances with Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline (”I never really faced it, and I just ran,” she says of divorcing him) to why she let “bad people” into her life. Her excuse: “Because I was lonely.”  At one point, Spears – whose father has permanent legal conservatorship over her affairs – bursts into tears while discussing her situation. “It’s bad,” she says. “I’m sad.”

As well as this brief rhyming extravaganza of unrestrained misery, Britney Spears apparently uses the documentary to lament of her loss of focus and control in recent years, how she isn’t cool any more and that she only agreed to be filmed because she didn’t like how she was being portrayed.

Which is good – judging by what we’ve heard about this documentary so far, if Britney Spears wanted to be portrayed as a hollowed-out constantly-sobbing paranoid depressive forced to perform against her will by a league of shadowy all-controlling authoritarians, then she’ll be super pleased with how it turns out.

In fact, Britney: For The Record might just go down in history as one of the most berserk marketing ideas ever. Two days after it gets broadcast, Britney Spears’ new album Circus is released, and that’s something that Britney wants to promote by being as uncomfortably miserable as possible on camera. What sort of circus is this anyway? One of those creepy European ones?