After two decades, several free cars and enough weight fluctuation to sculpt a small cellulite army, Oprah is done.

Sort of done. Oprah Winfrey is leaving her show. But not until 2011. And then she’s going to immediately start a new show somewhere else. But it’s still sad news – without Oprah Winfrey around, where will we know which treacly, middle-brow books to read? Where will we discover what people look like after they’ve had their face torn off by monkeys? Where will we get our fill of needlessly excited women unintentionally screeching bizarre non-sequiturs at a roomful of strangers? Where will we be able to slowly lose the will to live?

What? Tyra Banks? Oh, OK.

At this point in time, Oprah Winfrey has accomplished everything she can with her show. She’s given away cars to her audience. She’s watched dumbstruck as Tom Cruise leapt around on her furniture. She’s hit out at French stores that don’t recognise her greatness. She’s mildly annoyed 50 Cent. And, as with any show that’s been running since the mid-1980s, it’s all become slightly formulaic.

We know that Oprah Winfrey will whoop and encourage her guests to sob and appear in a pair of skinny jeans to boast about how much weight she’s lost every 18 months, and then spend the following year gradually swelling up like an infected blister again. And so does she. And that’s why Oprah Winfrey has done the unthinkable. She’s decided to quit her show in September 2011. ABC News reports:

Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential and highly paid women on television, will announce on Friday she is ending her popular daytime talk show in 2011. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Inc, said on Thursday she would make the official announcement on Friday’s live program from Chicago and talk about the reasons behind the decision to end it after 25 years on the air.

Well good for Oprah Winfrey. She’s earnt all the money she could ever need, and it’s better for her to bow out while she’s on top. We wonder what she’ll do with all her free time – maybe she’ll focus on her charitable work or take up knitting. What’s that? She’s starting her own network? Christ alive, that’s terrifying.

But at least Oprah’s new network will be good for anyone who wants to catch up with Oprah Winfrey at any given moment of the day. Or anyone who loves watching dozens of touchy-feely celebrity interviews. Or anyone who wants to spend upwards of 16 hours a day staring slack-jawed at a giant image of Oprah Winfrey’s head that’s made out of fire and does nothing but scream the word “REPENT” at them again and again. Probably.

But we’ve got all that to look forward to. For now we just have to wait for the official announcement on Oprah’s show later today. We can’t imagine what it’ll be like. Actually, we can – Oprah will cry, there’ll be a 15-minute VT montage of celebrities describing how brilliant she is and then Oprah will repeat the phrase “You guys!” 48 times in a row – but we meant to say that we don’t want to imagine what it’ll be like. Subtle difference.

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With New Moon being released this week, there’s only one question that needs to be asked about the Twilight saga.

And that’s ‘for the love of all that’s holy, won’t somebody make it stop?’ Oh, and also ‘now that the saga has become so depressingly popular, will Stephenie Meyer ever write another Twilight book?’ That is a question that needs to be asked. It is. It is. Alright, it isn’t. But Stephenie Meyer has answered it anyway.

So will there be a new Twilight book? Maybe. One day. Unless she thinks of something better to do. Possibly. You’re welcome Twilight fans. You’re welcome.

At the moment, the Twilight saga has a perfect ending. Breaking Dawn – the book where Edward chews through Bella’s uterus or whatever – wraps things up nicely for everyone. Bella becomes a vampire, Edward finds love, Taylor Lautner decides that he wants to have sex with a baby or something and all the Twilight fans who read it end up soaked in their own wee to such a horrendous extent that even they realise they should probably start reading real books for once. It’s a perfect ending.

However, because the books are so popular – and definitely not because Stephenie Meyer wants enough money to submerge a giant coin mosaic of her own face at the bottom of her Olympic-sized heated swimming pool – there’s a chance that Breaking Dawn might not be the last Twilight book after all. Why, just the other day Oprah Winfrey opened an episode of her show with the burning question:

“Coming up, will there be a fifth book in the Twilight saga? Stephenie answers that later.”

Admittedly Oprah didn’t get round to actually asking that question – she was probably too busy prattling on about her feelings like some sort of awful ninny – but after the show some backstagers, probably rolling their eyes and muttering “She’s always doing this”, collared Stephenie Meyer and forced her to answer the question. Here’s what she said:

“I can’t answer it. The way I write, it’s what makes me happy. Like, I can’t write when people are looking over my shoulder. I am a little burned out on vampires right now. I think I need a little break. I might go spend some time with my aliens. I did envision it as a longer series. But I wrapped ‘Breaking Dawn’ in a way that I felt satisfied with, so if that moment didn’t come, I’d be OK.”

Brilliant! That means there’s definitely going to be a fifth Twilight book – Stephenie Meyer just needs to write an underperforming book about aliens that makes her realise that she’ll only have enough money to eat if she keeps joylessly churning out Twilight stories first. And you know what that means – a new Twilight book will eventually become a new Twilight film!

We don’t know what we’re more excited about – the thought of seeing a paunchy Taylor Lautner taking his top off with the kind of glee you only get when you’ve spent the last decade making direct-to-DVD erotic thrillers or the fact that, by the time the fifth Twilight film gets made, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson will have got married, had children and gone through the bitterest divorce in Hollywood history, making every scene they share toe-curlingly awkward for everyone involved.

But what to call the fifth Twilight book? We’ve already had Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn – what comes after that? Well, if our research is anything to go by, we can now comfortably predict that the next Twilight book will be called The Fat Lady Gets Another Jaffa Cake Out Of The Packet. We’re almost completely certain about that.

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There are a few no-fail aphrodisiacs in the world. Chocolate, for instance. And the Atta laevigata insect.

And Oprah Winfrey. Specifically the sight of Oprah Winfrey knocked out on sleeping medication inside her private jet. We’re telling you, whenever we think of Oprah Winfrey’s gigantic prostrate torso all unconscious and drooling several thousand feet in the air, we just have to run off and hump something.

It’s not just us – Corrine Gehrls, a flight attendant on Oprah Winfrey’s private jet, was fired for having sex with the pilot while Oprah slept. Except Gehrls is now suing Oprah, claiming it didn’t happen. So it is just us. Oh.

Seriously, we weren’t joking about the thought of Oprah Winfrey being fast asleep on an aeroplane being one of our top five sexual fantasies. It just ticks every box – especially if her comatose head tips backwards and she starts to snore and/or one of her massive arms slips off the armrest and impedes access up and down the central aisle. God DAMN that’s a sexy image.

But Corrine Gehrls definitely doesn’t think so. In June Corrine Gehrls was fired as a flight attendant on Oprah Winfrey’s personal jet because she allegedly had mid-air sex with pilot Terry Pansing while Oprah and other passengers were asleep. And who could blame her – we can’t even think about the needlessly large carbon footprint created by Oprah Winfrey while she was splayed out across a couple of seats like some kind of vast dormant wildebeest without wanting to rub ice cubes on our own nipples.

But – and this is the important part – Corrine Gehrls is suing Oprah Winfrey for wrongful termination. Gehrls says that no such bunk-up ever happened because at the time it was supposed to be taking place, the plane was actually on the tarmac refuelling. She’s also passed lie detector tests about the incident, but still won’t be rehired by Oprah. And that’s why she’s suing her. E! Online reports:

Also named in the Chicago defamation suit are fellow flight attendants Myron Gooch and Kirby Bumpus—who happens to be the daughter of Oprah BFF Gayle King. The canned stewardess says the two “falsely told Winfrey and Harpo” that she and Pansing “had been observed having inappropriate intimate contact outside the cockpit of the plane.”

Now, since we weren’t there, we obviously can’t say whether or not Gehrls and the pilot did have sex on Oprah Winfrey’s plane. All we know is that it’s definitely something that we would have done. Definitely. It just sounds like such a romantic setting – the way the moonlight glistened off Oprah’s dribbly chin, the irresistible rhythm of drowsy grunts and snorts as Oprah gracelessly shifted position mid-doze, the intoxicating aroma of Oprah’s bedtime farts – that it’s all we can do not to tear off our clothes and roll around on the floor pawing at ourselves right now.

Also, by our calculations, Oprah Winfrey is currently one flight attendant down. Our CV is in the post, Oprah. It might be a bit sticky.

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Whitney Houston got where she is today by following one rule – take so many drugs that you end up looking like wheezy cadaver.

Wait, no, that’s not right. What we meant to say was that Whitney Houston got popular by following one rule – give the people what they want. And this worked, because in the 1990s people wanted bad films and identical-sounding songs bellowed by idiots. And Whitney Houston still follows this rule.

Because Whitney Houston is still giving the people what they want – anecdotes about the time Bobby Brown went mental, spat on her and started drawing evil eyes everywhere. Splendid.

Thanks to the success of her new album Deliberately Familiar-Sounding Songs Performed In A Slightly Disappointing Way – or whatever – Whitney Houston is back on top. Well, alright, not completely back on top – when she sings live Whitney Houston still tends to sound like a octogenarian tramp having an asthma attack inside a metal dustbin – but it’s enough for now.

Because over the last few years Whitney Houston has faced a number of seemingly insurmountable personal problems. She was addicted to crack. She had to sell everything she owned. She was married to an idiot. She made a reality TV show primarily focused on the dehydrated faecal impactions wedged inside her rectum. Osama bin Laden wanted to hump her quite badly. You could pick any single one of those things and it’d be enough to wreck your life. But not good old Whitney Houston.

You see, Whitney has managed to drag herself out of the mire. She’s been gifted a second chance, a clean sheet upon which she can rewrite her life. Looking back on the bad old times would be preposterously ill-advised – sure, it might help Whitney sell a few more records, but the effect on her personal well-being could be devastating.

So, long story short, Whitney Houston has decided to look back on the bad old times. With Oprah Winfrey. On television. In forensic details. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Whitney Houston’s bad old times sounded hilarious! Especially the part where Bobby Brown became overwhelmed by a terrifying drug-induced paranoia and started painting evil eyes all over the house. Reuters reports:

Houston said that during the couple’s narcotics-filled days, Brown would break glass objects in their home, and at one point he began painting eyes in their bedroom. “Evil eyes that were looking at every point in the room… I’m looking at it and going, ‘Lord, what’s really going on here?’ Because I was getting scared.” … Houston recalled a time when Brown spat on her when he had been drinking.

And Whitney Houston gave all of that up to return to music? That woman is crazy, plain and simple. It’s Bobby Brown who we feel most sorry for – there he is, tired after a hard day of breaking glass, obsessively painting thousands of disturbing eyeballs across every available surface and spitting at things, and all he wants from his wife is a nice cooked dinner and a backrub when he’s finished. But is she there to do all that for him? No, because she’s too busy telling the entire world what an unsettling crackpot he is. For shame, Whitney Houston. For shame.

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If you were Chris Brown’s publicist, your advice to him would be pretty simple at the moment, wouldn’t it?

You’d tell him to shut up, wouldn’t you? You’d tell Chris Brown to shut up and – if he absolutely had to speak in public – to only express his profound remorse for what he did to Rihanna. What’s more, you’d spell it out to Chris Brown that under no circumstances should he use a national magazine interview as an excuse to lay into Oprah Winfrey for suggesting that he wasn’t very nice.

Because, yes, he did that. Chris Brown’s publicist must be rubbish.

Chris Brown has been right about so many things throughout his life. He was right when he decided that the music industry sorely needed a massive-toothed R&B singer who danced like a weeble with polio being pushed down a flight of stairs. He was right when he decided that ridiculous powder-blue bowties were due to make a sartorial comeback. And so he’s almost definitely right in believing that the world has got it in for him.

True, he may have been the one who repeatedly punched Rihanna in the head, bit her on the ear, tried to choke her unconscious and threatened to kill her during an argument about a text message – but you know who the real villains are here? That’s right, the evil media. Chris Brown has already gone on record to say that all blogs are liars, but that was too easy – anyone can mock a bunch of chubby loners who spend all day sitting at their laptops in their pants talking to their cats. No, to prove his point, Chris Brown has gone after the biggest kahuna of them all – Oprah Winfrey.

You see, Chris Brown and Oprah Winfrey go way back. For example, Chris Brown used to travel to Africa to perform at her school – which, in retrospect, could have been where they got the idea to abuse all the girls from – but that all changed right after Chris Brown was arrested for attacking Rihanna. For some reason that’s totally unclear to us, Oprah Winfrey decided to side with Rihanna and not Chris Brown in the matter. In fact, to make it worse, Oprah said that Rihanna should leave Chris Brown in case he attacked her again. The nerve of the woman!

And Chris Brown is just as offended by this as we are, which is why he used a big interview with People magazine to give Oprah Winfrey a jolly good telling off. Chris said:

“I commend Oprah on being like, ‘This is a problem,’ but it was a slap in my face. I did a lot of stuff for her, like going to Africa and performing for her school. She could have been more helpful, like, ‘OK, I’m going to help both of these people out.’”

A slap in the face? Why, that’s literally the worst thing that anybody can give to you. You, know, after several frenzied punches and bites in your face. But we’re sure Chris Brown already knew that.

It was an unfortunately-timed remark, too, coming just days after Chris Brown claimed that he couldn’t remember beating up Rihanna. Not only does Chris Brown look far less remorseful than he probably is as a result but, at this delicate stage of his career, making an enemy out of someone as powerful as Oprah Winfrey is an incredibly stupid thing to do. Oprah Winfrey could crush Chris Brown any time she wanted.

Seriously, she could literally crush him. Have you seen the size of her lately?

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Now that it’s holiday season, all the famous stars are coming out with their taut, muscular bikini bodies.

Some, like Scary Spice, got a little bit carried away, and now she’s got Peter Andre’s 1990s stomach, which resembles tight latex stretched over two giant packets of Wrigley’s Extra. It’s a weird look, especially with a set of womanly bosoms looming over the abs.

Other famous faces will be surfacing over the coming weeks, oiled and dainty in their trunks and cozzies, so we thought it high time to wobble our appreciative stomachs in the direction of some brilliant famous people who don’t seem to care that they are grotesquely fat…

1. Jack Black

Don’t be fooled by the hilarious gurning face, and the way he makes jokes by saying silly things really seriously, Jack Black would be nothing without his bulbous gut, and he knows it. Hence, when the rest of his peers are crunching their stomachs, he’s busily sloshing down burgers so that people will still find him hilarious. Without the food, he’d be just another thin guy doing a Jack Black impression.

2. Rik Waller

Like most gargantuan fat people, no one expected Rik Waller to be particularly good at anything. Cowell and his goons especially held out little hope when he stood before them on Pop Idol, already sweating quite badly, and panting heavily. And yet, when he opened his enormous mouth, out swept the voice of an angel sitting on a cloud. Unfortunately, as with so many fat people, Rik proved to be too lazy to make it as a pop singer, and made little dent on the charts.

3. Anne Diamond

Sometimes fat, sometimes not quite so fat, we prefer Anne Diamond when she’s really fat. Something about a thin Anne Diamond reminds us of a thin-lipped HR worker, who does everything by the book. But when she’s hit maximum weight, she looks like a barrel of laughs, and you can almost hear a comedy jazz band playing when she walks.

4. Gary Barlow

Of course, when we talk of Gary Barlow, we don’t mean the one that’s just recreated his 1990s dance act and made them suave, we mean the fat guy with the flat top from the first time around. Back then his astonishing lack of toning was only made worse by his standing next to a small mob of borderline athletes. Once given a chance to rest, he threw himself headlong into weight gain, and was probably the best he ever looked.

5. James Gandolfini

A thin Tony Soprano wouldn’t really have worked.

6. Oprah Winfrey

Like Anne Diamond, Oprah likes to keep everyone guessing by turning up to her television show looking a different shape every single day. And like with Anne, we prefer fat Oprah. The one who has made millions of dollars sitting around talking to people, then presumably running mouth first through a patisserie at the weekends.

7. Robbie Coltrane

Were Robbie Coltrane skinny and Scottish, people might think he was Billy Connolly or Sean Connery, so he cleverly spent the early part of his career bulking up to John Candy proportions. And now we know him as Cracker, so, yeah, it worked. It worked really well.

8. Jo Brand

Where would Jo Brand be without her jokes about being quite fat? Nowhere. Jo Brand would be nowhere. Then what kind of world would that be?

9. Alison Moyet

Dubbed by some as the original Michelle McManus, they couldn’t be more wrong. Alison was a terrific singer, making up one half – or perhaps two thirds – of the wonderful electro-pop act Yazoo. Throughout her career she appears to have stuck to her guns, and if anything, she might be growing. Good for her.

10. Marlon Brando

The greatest fat thespian to leave an almighty footprint on planet Earth. Famously made Francis Ford Coppola film him in the dark to hide the fact that he was so enormous, he was wearing a flowery woman’s dress.

This was a guest blog by the heroic Josh Burt of Interestment. Go visit!

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We apologise to sensitive readers, who may have brought a little bit of acid up when reading that headline.

It’s true, though. It’s been revealed that the beefy Caledonian lady has turned down an invitation to attend a White House party thrown by the new President, while accepting an offer from Oprah Winfrey to appear on her show, alongside Simon Cowell. We’re guessing they’ll be discussing the merits of underwiring in bras, or something.

Susan Boil. The Hairy Angel. The Bearded Lady. The Big Lass. Big Fatty Shagless Spinster. The blogosphere can be cruel sometimes. Completely accurate, but cruel nonetheless.

And poor Susan Boyle never asked for all this attention. Yes, she chose to audition for Britain’s Got Talent, knowing that Simon Cowell would henceforth own her voice, her name, and her massive collection of Staffordshire pottery statuettes of kittens peeking out of old boots. But still, she couldn’t have known quite how bonkers the world’s response to her not-too-bad singing would be.

And it could all even be for naught, as a child and a Frankenstein impersonator have arrived on the scene to try and wrestle the ‘Aah, look at that. And it can sing’ votes from Susan’s strong, meaty fingers.

It all seems to have gone to her head a bit, though. First, she went and got a trendy haircut, the likes of which won’t be seen in Scotland for another 30 years. And now she’s so drunk with the power of celebrity she’s only gone and snubbed the US President, Barack Obama. With an attitude like that, she’ll no doubt soon be wandering round the BGT studio shouting ‘Ah-Da-Da-Da-Da’ at the lighting crew.

What could have caused her to turn down an offer of dinner with the leader of the world? Nerves? Chronic flatulence? A comb got tangled in her eyebrows and now she’s waiting for new hair growth to release it? Almost certainly that one, although she’s going with the nerves thing as a cover story. A source has told The News of the World:

“She was shocked and thrilled by the invite – but it was all too much too soon for her, so she said no. She’ll have no doubt stayed in with her cat Pebbles, washed her hair and watched Britain’s Got Talent on telly.”

We don’t think the source meant that Susan spent the night washing her cat’s hair, but we imagine she would have at least had a couple of hours picking fleas off the beast, and popping them into her mouth.

Anyway, Barrack Obama is going to be pretty displeased to hear that Susan Boyle has managed to fit an appearance on the Oprah show into her busy schedule of eyebrow combing and manual cat defleaing. She’ll be on today, in a special edition called The World’s Got Talent, also featuring Simon Cowell and several Boylesque unknowns from around the planet. The Daily Mail tells us that:

Oprah’s production crew spent time with Susan at her home in Blackburn, Scotland, on Tuesday. The unemployed 47-year-old gave the crew a tour of her modest home.

A bit like MTV’s Cribs, though we presume there were fewer blunts and bongs to hastily throw into cupboards than when Snoop Dogg did his.

So Susan Boyle, who looks a lot like Stan Laurel in a fright wig, has achieved total world dominance: the US president and the undisputed heavyweight champion of chat are both fans. How best to mark this lady’s rise to global fame?

Ah, of course: by painting a picture of her singing for Obama, who is listening through ‘pancake amplification‘. We leave it to psychotic and probably certifiable American artist, Dan Lacey, to explain:

“My name is Dan Lacey. I used to draw a cartoon called Faithmouse, but now I paint people with pancakes on their heads and a continuing series of images featuring Barack Obama Nude On A Unicorn. I live in Minnesota.”

Oh, you terrible crazy, you. Minnesota’s shit.

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9 - You know how Oprah Winfrey is trying to lose weight? Yeah, she’s an idiot – Oprah

8 - Great, now that swine flu isn’t as bad as everyone thinks, we can all worry about catching this lot instead – Foreignpolicy

7 – Facial hair in movies: a retrospective – Unreality.

6 - A video of a boat. No, wait, it’s a good video – Flickr

5 - Seven places where you have pooed - Regretfulmorning

4 – We may have already shown you this, but it’s made us want to a) stop eating meat and b) never witness childbirth – Gizmodo

3 – Some people dressed as funny things for the London marathon. Look – Buzzfeed

2 - Want to draw a red fox in the snow? OK! - Instructables

1 - Missed seeing the abject terror on Britney Spears‘ face when that guy got up on stage with her? Then you’ll be needing this…

Some say that Kirstie Alley is a thin woman trapped in a fat woman’s body. She isn’t. That description is way off the mark.

No, instead it’d be fairer to say that Kirstie Alley is 15 dangerously obese women trapped inside a giant latex statue of the ‘two weeks’ woman from Total Recall. And that’s not cruelty – Kirstie Alley said it herself to Oprah Winfrey. Well, almost. We might have paraphrased a bit.

Anyway, Kirstie Alley is fat again. Maybe our dream of seeing a sweaty, massive-arsed, type-2 diabetic remake of Look Who’s Talking isn’t so far away any more.

Kirstie Alley and Oprah Winfrey have got so much in common. They both used to be famous actresses, they both share the same hopelessly wayward belief that the general public gives a toss about their personal lives and – most importantly – every couple of years they’ll both suddenly swell up like a pair of infected spider bites and waddle about looking glum until the nearest passing huckster offloads an implausible and possibly dangerous crash-diet onto them.

Everyone knows that Oprah Winfrey is fat again, partially because she seems determined to burn off all her extra calories exclusively by writing about how sad her fat legs make her feel. But Kirstie Alley? Surely not – after all, it was only a few years ago that she was on Oprah strutting around in a bikini like a middle-aged divorcee with an artificially inflated sense of self-worth.

But sadly it’s true. Kirstie Alley hasn’t so much porked out as eaten all the pigs, the farmer, the farmer’s tractor, the factory where the tractor was made, the county that housed the factory and the entire concept of regional land division. But don’t think that Kirstie Alley is happy about looking like Jabba The Hutt’s transsexual cousin – she’s not.

And yesterday Kirstie Alley appeared on Oprah to tell everyone watching – or at least those who weren’t convinced that they’d accidentally stumbled across footage of a new interracial female sumo league – just how unhappy she was. Access Hollywood reports:

“It’s humiliating,” she told Oprah. “The most painful thing for me is that I have all these people that I inspired and then I let them down… I do better if I have some pressure on me,” Kirstie said. “When I didn’t have that anymore … I just said, ‘I’m going to cut myself some slack.’ Big mistake… I’ve hated myself,” she continued. “You beat yourself up, and I [asked myself], ‘What am I doing?’”

Actually we do feel for Kirstie Alley a bit. She made such a big deal of shoving how thin she was down everyone’s throats a few years ago that gaining all her weight back must be fairly humiliating for her. Worse still, Kirstie Alley is only six months away from launching her brand new range of diet products, and she’s hardly going to make a convincing spokeswoman while she looks like a female Meat Loaf impersonator, is she?

It’s a shame, because we heard that Kirstie Alley’s diet plan was a great one – apparently she comes round your house and eats your dinner for you.

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We’re talking about an ego so freakin’ enormous that it operates like a gargantuan black hole, physically and spiritually swallowing up everything in sight – man, woman, child, baby back ribs, U.S. First Ladies – you name it.

Well, just when we thought that we understood the awesome light and matter-consuming force that is Oprah, she goes and does something completely uncharacteristic of someone whose personal fortune was not built on prattling on and on about Oprah. Turns out, Oprah has ushered in a brave new world where people other than Oprah are seen on the cover of Oprah’s magazine, O (for Oprah).

We have to admit that we were blindsided with the news that Oprah had magnanimously opted to share the front cover of O magazine’s April issue with someone not named Oprah. Turns out, the universe is also occupied by another sentient being named Michelle Obama. Huh. That is some messed up shit.

According to Oprah’s editorial, she decided to make room for the U.S. First Lady in an attempt to keep the cover of O “looking fresh”, and sure enough the feature interview is chock full of fresh, yummy details regarding Michelle’s shoes, exercise regimen and decorating style. Gloria Steinem, your head may explode now.

Oprah’s newfound inclusiveness however comes to a full, screeching stop near the end of the interview when Oprah returns to her favourite subject, Oprah:

Oprah: A reporter who once interviewed me ten years after she’d first met me said, “Gee, you’re the same person—but it feels like you’ve become more of yourself.”

Becoming more of yourself…hmmm…

A word of caution to the patrons of all-you-can-eat buffets everywhere. Never, ever approach Oprah when she is in the process of becoming more of herself. Just back away slowly, and discreetly gesture to the manager. Our prayers will be with you.

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And then her own army of humanity-destroying clone robots. But until then let’s concentrate on Oprah Winfrey’s network. Nobody knows what the Oprah Winfrey Network will contain – other than non-stop footage of Oprah complaining about her weight – but the hiring of Christina Norman as CEO takes us one step closer.

You see, Christina Norman used to be the president of MTV. And, from that, we can safely assume that the Oprah Winfrey Network will contain no music videos whatsoever.

As normally-functioning human beings, it’s probably safe to assume that you often find yourself frustrated at the lack of media outlets featuring Oprah Winfrey. Because, aside from the TV show, the magazine, the radio station, the books and the movies she’s producing, there really isn’t anything there for you.

But relax! Early next year Oprah Winfrey is getting her own TV network. A year ago it was announced that Oprah Winfrey was taking over the Discovery Health channel – home to much-loved shows such as Plastic Surgery: Before And After and the bellydance-fixated Shimmy – and rebranding it as the Oprah Winfrey Network or OWN, which we presume is the closest she could get to OBEY without having to change her name.

However, the question of what would actually fill the Oprah Winfrey Network was a mystery up until now. Because now, as the LA Times reports, Oprah has hired Christina Norman from MTV as her CEO:

Norman spent 17 years with Viacom Inc.’s MTV cable empire before stepping down last year as MTV president. Before that, she ran its sister channel, VH-1. Norman initially discussed the CEO position with the owners last spring, “but the timing wasn’t right,” she said in an interview. Then last Friday, she accepted the job. “It’s an incredible opportunity and a great time to be starting a new network when so much is changing.”

So, MTV, huh? That means, using our unstoppable logic, that the Oprah Winfrey Network is going to be exactly like MTV. And to prove our point, we’ve half-inched Oprah’s development slate for the channel. These are the shows we’ve discovered…

The Phils – An exciting reality TV show about the trials and tribulations of Dr Phil and his pack of upwardly mobile friends. Will Dr Phil ever forgive his bitchy best friend for trash-talking him at a recent party? Will Dr Phil finally bite the bullet and kiss Spencer Pratt on the lips with tongues? Watch and find out!

My Super Sweet 16 Stone – An aspirational documentary following planning an execution of a lavish party that Oprah Winfrey throws to celebrate the fact that she only weighs 16 stone instead of the usual 20. This will be a weekly show because of Oprah’s constant, dramatic weight fluctuation.

Fibs - Oprah Winfrey takes us on a tour of her lavish home – and in every room, chained to the wall, is a different person that has lied to her in the past. Look, there’s James Frey! Look, there’s that Holocaust guy! Oprah doesn’t even feed them! Fun!

Ah, that’s enough for now. We don’t want to spoil too many surprises.

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Seems it wasn’t that long ago that the Big O fell victim to the wily and deceitful James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. Oprah, as you may recall, quickly came to Frey’s defense upon hearing the news that much of the book had been, er, made up, actually.

You may also recall that Oprah, upon receiving a trillion or so rage-filled letters from her viewers, promptly and publicly ripped Frey a new arsehole.

Well, it’s happened again. What had been described by Oprah as the ‘single-greatest love story in 22 years of doing this show’ was in fact, a real nose-stretcher.

Herman Rosenblat, a survivor of Buchenwald, had appeared twice on Oprah’s programme, claiming that he had met and fallen in love with his future wife who saved his Iife by throwing apples to him over the Buchenwald barbed wire fence. “You have become the beautiful metaphor for what love can be,” Oprah burbled, “for endurance, and fate and destiny.”

Or not.

Although Rosenblat and his wife were indeed concentration camp survivors, Rosenblat has now admitted that this charming tale of love and sacifice at Buchenwald was completely fabricated out of his own noodle.

“That’s what happens with lies,” Oprah now says, “They get bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Like grocery receipts.

And rib orders.

What a jerk. Pass the sauce.

Now.

[story by McG]

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But not if you’re Oprah Winfrey. Oprah Winfrey knows that she’s turned into a lardy old gutbucket lately, and she’s determined to get slim again.

And Oprah Winfrey plans to do this by not abusing food any more. And by ‘abusing’ food, Oprah means ‘keeping it in her cupboard for any longer than she has to before stuffing it into her gob and rolling around the floor snorting like an animal’. We can’t see it working, to be honest.

Oprah Winfrey’s probably had her fill of abuse lately. First she had to deal with parental abuse when her dad wrote a book about her, then she had to deal with child abuse at her African school – and now she has to deal with food abuse, the very thing that’s caused her to swell up like a broken ankle over the last few months.

Oprah has always struggled with her weight – over the years she’s literally tried every diet known to man. Problem is, though, she tried them all at once, which meant eating 250 dinners every day. It was foolhardy in retrospect. But this time Oprah’s going to lose all that weight once and for all, just you watch.

Last month Oprah Winfrey wailed about how fat she was in her magazine – she says she weighs about 200lb now – and this month it looks like she’s going to be doing something about it. And, as MSNBC reports, step one seems to involve setting a number of targets for herself that are so woolly and impossible to quantify that nobody will ever know if she’s reached them or not:

“It’s about using food — abusing food. Too much work. Not enough play. Not enough time to come down. Not enough time to really relax. I am hungry for balance. I’m hungry to do something other than work. My goal is to be the weight that my body can hold and be healthy and strong and fit and be itself.”

We’ll admit to not being completely sure about what ‘food abuse’ actually is, but we sort of wish that Oprah would shut up about it. Honestly, if Bono hears that something called food abuse exists we’ll all have to endure an all-star summertime charity concert to raise money for it, and bloody Paul McCartney will get to finish it off by singing a poxy version of Hey Jude that goes on for 45 minutes and it’ll be terrible.

In all seriousness, though, good for Oprah Winfrey. It sounds like she’s not going to subscribe to another one of those faddy crash diets that she’s so closely associated with this time, and that can only be beneficial to her health in the long run.

And if it doesn’t work? Well, Oprah can always develop an eating disorder or two. We’d be totally fine with that, by the way, but only so long as Oprah promises to start every fifth show by bellowing “Everybody gets a sandwich bag full of my bulimia vomit!” at her audience like some sort of berserk, giddy sick-covered toddler. That’s a dealbreaker.

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But there’s one medium that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t dabbled in for a while – movies. Sure, she was nominated for an Oscar for The Color Purple, but that was over 20 years ago.

So it’s great to hear that Oprah Winfrey has just signed a deal to make mini-series, movies, documentaries and series. Best of all, she’s making them all for HBO, so she can either be like The Sopranos and be intelligent and groundbreaking or be like Entourage and be annoyingly smug. You know, for a change.

There’s so much more to Oprah Winfrey than the mistaken belief that we all care about how fat she is as much as she does. Wherever you look, Oprah Winfrey has it nailed down. She’s got a TV show, she’s got magazines, you can listen to her on the radio and she’ll soon have an entire network devoted to nothing but a close-up of her face with fire reflected in eyes that’s accompanied by the sound of distant crying babies.

But that’s not enough for Oprah Winfrey. Oprah isn’t going to stop this inexorable march towards global domination until every child born on this planet is named Oprah and learns how to screech about free cars from a pointlessly young age. Or at least until she gets to make some low-grade movies and TV shows for HBO.

Which, hey, happen to be now. Although as far as drama goes, Oprah Winfrey is probably best-known for her Oscar-nominated performance in The Color Purple, but she’s also pretty handy behind the scenes, too – producing films and TV shows like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Before Women Had Wings and The Great Debaters.

And now, thanks to the deal she’s just signed with HBO, there’s going to be a bunch more where that came from. Reuters reports:

Oprah Winfrey’s production company has signed a deal to make movies, documentaries and series for cable channel HBO, Harpo Films and HBO said on Tuesday. Kate Forte, president of Harpo Films, said HBO offered a unique blend of format and creativity on television, “and the quality and range of their subjects are extraordinary.”

And, what’s more, you can swear and take your clothes off on HBO too, which is why the first three projects we expect Oprah Winfrey to work on with HBO are remakes of her old hits, like Their Tits Were Watching Porn, Before Women Had Fannies and, obviously, The Masturbators.

Since Oprah Winfrey is involved here, we’ve no doubt at all that this HBO deal will be a success. Just don’t expect to see Oprah herself making an appearance in any of the new shows – these days, when people see an old fat black woman on TV they just assume it’s Tyler Perry dressing up again and switch off.

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So when Oprah Winfrey slimmed down, it hurt her power. “No I won’t read your book recommendations,” America told Oprah in unison, “because how will you punish me? By sitting on my chest? Pah! You won’t even shatter one of my ribs if you do that!” Oprah was doomed.

But fear no more, because Oprah has revealed that she’s fat again! She weighs 200lbs! It just goes to show that money can’t buy you power, but it can buy you lots of sausage rolls.

Oprah Winfrey has three main loves in her life: her power, the ability to change the world for the better with her power and morbidly shovelling fat handfuls of ice-cream into her mouth when she thinks everyone is asleep.

Actually, that last one’s a lie. Oprah Winfrey almost certainly doesn’t do that. She just looks like she might do, that’s all. Because Oprah Winfrey’s weight famously comes and goes like the tides. Specifically a version of the tides that crows relentlessly about how brilliant it is when it goes out, but then still slowly comes in again anyway until it has a bout of shame and goes on a terrifying liquid-only diet to make it go out.

Which is a kind of long-winded way of telling you that, by her own admission, Oprah Winfrey has got fat again. AP reports:

In January’s “O” magazine, Winfrey, 54, details her recent struggles with an out-of-balance thyroid and how the condition made her develop “a fear of working out.” She says she’s gained 40 pounds since 2006, when she weighed 160.  “I look at my thinner self and think, `How did I let this happen again?”‘ the talk-show queen says in the article. “I’m embarrassed,” she says. “I’m mad at myself.”

So now Oprah’s weight stands at around 200lb – about the same as 18 cats, half a female lion or 120 hardback copies of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. It’s not the fattest that Oprah Winfrey has ever been, but it does mean we’ll have to put up with the sight of her running around with a wheelbarrow full of lard in a few months after she’s crash-dieted and lost it all again.

But so what? It’s been a tough year for Oprah Winfrey, and she needed all that extra weight. Not only did her added heft make her more of an imposing figure when she was trying to stop all the child abuse in her school, but it was also because she did a big interview with Tom Cruise this year, and Oprah needed to know that if he started jumping on furniture again she’d have the upper body strength to knock him unconscious.

However, Oprah Winfrey didn’t get to where she is today by merely accepting her lot, so we absolutely don’t doubt her ability to knuckle down and shed all her excess weight through nothing more than intense willpower and perhaps a dangerously faddy new diet that no sensible doctor would ever approve in sound mind.

Before long, we’re positive that Oprah Winfrey will be slimmer than ever – and she’ll remain that way for approximately three minutes before her resolve buckles and she charges into the nearest Krispy Kreme mouth-first and we have to go through this whole bloody palaver all over again. We can’t wait.

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