Our favourite part of watching American Idol has always been crying under the couch with our fingers knuckle-deep in our ears anytime someone holding our remote control decides to check it out.

Our least favourite part of watching the show has always been the aural bleeding. Admittedly that’s probably because our un-filed fingers had just been jammed in there, but still, in our head we blamed Paula Abdul.

Now that blame will have to shift to Ellen DeGeneres. She, apparently, is Abdul’s new full-time, permanent replacement.

Ellen DeGeneres is a very busy woman. She’s already got the world’s number one talk show of all time as ranked by women with boy haircuts, she hosts the Oscars pretty much everybday, Cover Girl thinks she really speaks to their desired 50-year-old woman demographic – and now she’s gonna be putting in an extra 40 hours per week telling children to please “For the love of all that is now or ever has been holy, slit your vocal cord before the sun sets another day. Your mother probably hates you.”

That, we figure, will be her catchphrase.

Surely you remember that Paula Abdul up and quit her job recently. When we first heard this we thought it meant she was no longer an expired 80s pop star. No, no she’s still that. It’s not really a job, but she is still that. She quit American Idol. At first the rumours were flying that she was gonna be replaced by MC Skat Kat. Although this would have been a tremendous step forward, talks fell through when Pixar refused to climb on board.

So Idol had to settle for second best.

Second best is Ellen DeGeneres. No – not that Ellen DeGeneres. The other one. The one with the talk show. Reuters says:

“Fox television executives and the producers of the hit singing talent show had been searching for a permanent, new judge to sit in Abdul’s seat when the ninth season of the show returns to TV in January 2010. “As the new judge, Ellen will offer her own unique perspective to the contestants throughout the competition,” Fox said in a statement. DeGeneres, whose award-winning talk show “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” is in its seventh season, described herself as a longtime fan of the show.”

This comes as harsh news to Abdul’s ardent fan who was desperate for her to make a triumphant return to the show. Possibly on a parade float or something. That fan died a while back though. Everyone else seems rather indifferent.

Well, everyone except DeGeneres seems indifferent. Here’s what she says about joining the judges:

“So getting this job is a dream come true, and think of all the money I’ll save from not having to text my vote.”

Well that’s that. There is no longer room for Abdul at the long table. There’s some question as to what she’s gonna do next. If any of you know of a job opening wherein a person can lay around comatose sobbing about how she could be so stupid, and why won’t Simon call her back, get that to her agent, won’t you?

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

We knew it was a good idea for Paula Abdul to leave American Idol! The big time is hers for the taking now!

And it certainly doesn’t get any bigger than VH1 Divas! True, you might not have ever heard of VH1 Divas, but that’s only because it’s so big that it’s completely invisible to the naked eye, like oxygen or God or whatever. Or because it’s embarrassingly small and nobody cares about it except the people directly involved with it, and even then it’s only because they’ve been paid. One or the other.

Anyway, Paula Abdul’s hosting that. Woo!

When you think of a diva, who automatically springs to mind? No, not Mariah Carey. And, no, not Whitney Houston either. Come on, think harder. No, not Beyonce. And not Oprah Winfrey. Come on, this is easy, you just need to think. No, not Paris Hilton or Jennifer Lopez or Naomi Campbell or Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Mary J Blige or Diana Ross. Look, we’ll give you a hint – her name rhymes with Maula Babdul. What? Bette Midler? That doesn’t even rhyme, you idiots.

Jesus, the answer we were looking for was obviously Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul is the person who automatically springs to mind when you think of a diva. Idiots.

Or maybe she isn’t. Because, although she fits the diva bill in that she’s a woman and she sometimes makes ludicrous monetary demands of people, Paula Abdul falls down at the part about a diva needing to do other stuff than just stagger around garbling gibberish into the sky and occasionally just bursting into tears for the hell of it.

But that’s a minor detail because, following on from her American Idol departure a few weeks ago, Paula Abdul has been signed up as the host of the forthcoming VH1 Divas benefit concert in New York. The New York Daily News reports:

She announced her latest gig, how else, via Twitter. “I’m really excited [to] announce I’ll be hosting this year’s ‘VH1 Divas!’” Abdul wrote late Monday night. “Divas” executive producer Lee Rolontz was ecstatic Tuesday when the network made the official Abdul announcement. “We are so lucky, we are thrilled!” Rolontz told The News. “It was perfect timing.”

This Rolontz chap is right – it was perfect timing for everyone involved. For Paula Abdul, the gig came up exactly at the point in time where she realised that she wasn’t going to get on Dancing With The Stars or So You Think You Can Dance or Good Morning America or one of those 30-minute informercials about orthopaedic cutlery for old people, and for VH1 Divas Paula presumably came along just as someone more famous and capable backed out of the job.

Oh, we’re just kidding. Hosting VH1 Divas will be a cakewalk for Paula Abdul. So long as, you know, it doesn’t involve moving and speaking at the same time. Or speaking at all, for that matter.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Paula Abdul’s bad decisions have included singing with a cartoon cat, marrying Emilio Estevez and speaking in public.

But quitting American Idol? That was her worst decision of all. And we don’t say that lightly – this is a woman who deliberately got married to Emilio Estevez, for crying out loud.

Anyway, it seems that the flurry of interest that swamped Paula Abdul’s departure from American Idol has now crawled to a trickle, And Paula now reportedly wants her old job back. Phew, it’s good that Simon Cowell is so famously compassionate, isn’t it? This could have got pretty awkward otherwise.

We’ve all been there. You’re in a relationship that turned stale long ago, so you decide to make a clean break and move on. Then, after the first rush of breathless excitement, you realise that being single doesn’t involve having crazy, borderline-illegal sex with a procession of supermodels – it mainly involves eating beans on toast in a damp flat and weeping because you’re watching a Holby City DVD boxset on your own.

Meanwhile you start to hear rumours that your ex is doing fine without you. More than fine, in fact – they’ve replaced you with someone new, someone prettier, someone less likely to interrupt important conference calls by screeching loudly about diarrhoea for no reason whatsoever. Suddenly you wish you’d never bloody left.

And that’s precisely the situation that Paula Abdul finds herself in at the moment. Sure, when Paula Abdul quit American Idol there was talk of her rapidly jumping ship to another equally-prestigious reality show where she’d be taken more seriously – a show like Dancing With The Stars. But when Dancing With The Stars announced its new line-up this week and Paula Abdul wasn’t on it, the alarm bells started to go off. Not real alarm bells, obviously. We get the impression that sudden loud noises make Paula Abdul kind of jumpy.

This all means that despite leaving American Idol, and then Twittering relentlessly about her decision to leave American Idol, Paula Abdul isn’t sure if she wants to leave American Idol after all. TMZ reports:

Sources connected to Paula Abdul say Miss Paula wants back on “American Idol”. Our sources say Paula’s Twitter is retracted — at least in her mind – if the price is right. The magic number is $10 million… She doesn’t want to do “Dancing with the Stars” — we’re told, because she wants to be able to jump on a plane on a moment’s notice to rejoin her fellow judges on “Idol.”

Wow, so Paula Abdul doesn’t want to join any other TV shows in case she’s mysteriously invited back to American Idol in the middle of the season, perhaps during a time when her reappearance would have the most impact on ratings. How completely unexpected.

It’s Victoria Beckham who we feel most sorry for here – she’d been drafted in as Paula’s American Idol replacement and now it looks like she’ll be jettisoned from her dream job before she can even get comfortable. We certainly hope Victoria Beckham and Paula Abdul don’t fall out about this. Or have a fistfight about it. A fistfight that results in both parties sustaining equally critical injuries. That would be a very bad thing indeed.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

Paula Abdul has always been a free agent – you can’t constrain her with things like rules or basic human logic.

But now she really is free. She’s free of the American Idol machine, with its cynical attitude to creativity and willingness to give her millions of dollars for doing hardly anything.

Apparently Paula Abdul could now be snapped up by So You Think You Can Dance, although she’s probably holding out for So You Think You Can Stare Off Into Space For Great Stretches Of Time While Softly Giggling At A Joke That Only You Can Hear. She’s got expertise there.

We probably owe Paula Abdul an apology here. When it was announced last week that Paula Abdul was quitting American Idol, we thought that – if she really was quitting at all – she’d end up being boiled for glue. Not even televisually speaking, either – we literally thought that someone would club Paula Abdul over the head and actually boil her down for glue. In real life.

But we forgot something important about Paula Abdul. People actually seem to like her. No, we don’t know why either. But they do. People like Paula Abdul so much that they’re quite happy to fill their cars up with pictures of her and then kill themselves outside her house. And you’re lucky if people even remember when it’s your birthday. She’s in a different league.

So it’s no surprise to see that Paula Abdul probably won’t stay unemployed for long. According to reports, both Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance are mad keen for Paula Abdul to contribute some of her trademark dribble-flecked non-committal craziness to their shows, too. The Chicago Tribune reports:

ABC chief Stephen McPherson had contacted Abdul to say that he’d love to see her at ABC. “We would love to have her on ‘Dancing [With the Stars],’ as a contestant, participant or judge. I think she’s a huge talent… We have no formal plans,” he explained. Nigel Lythgoe, producer of the Fox show “So You Think You Can Dance,” has said he would welcome her “without question.”

It makes perfect sense for Paula Abdul to scooch over to a dance-based version of American Idol – after all, she knows the format inside-out and she calls herself a choreographer. Admittedly she’s a choreographer who worked on a film based on a line of freakishly sexualised, giant-headed plastic dolls for a few weeks until she was inevitably sacked, but that still sort of counts. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t that count?

But anyway, whether Paula Abdul decides to opt for Dancing With The Stars or So You Think You Can Dance, it’s important that she doesn’t allow her new management to enter into a fatally hard-line contract negotiation after a couple of years. Because if she screws this up, Paula Abdul had better hope that someone invents a reality TV show about women who sing duets with animated cats who – it’s heavily implied – they’re engaged in a graphic sexual relationship with. Because that’s literally the only other thing she can do with any level of competency.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter here!

Replacing Paula Abdul on American Idol will be tricky – producers need to find someone vivacious, warm and emotional.

But for now they’ll stick with Victoria Beckham. She’s not really any of those things – in fact she’s a sour-faced android, so she’s the precise opposite – but she is available. We can’t overstate that enough. Victoria Beckham is always available for work. Always.

Victoria Beckham will temporarily replace Paula Abdul on the new American Idol. So will Katy Perry, in what appears to be a stipulation on Victoria’s part to ensure that she isn’t the crappiest thing about the new American Idol.

If there’s one thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a silhouette that doesn’t look exactly like a toffee apple. And if there’s another thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a speaking voice that doesn’t make her sound like a recruitment consultant from Basildon who detests life. And if there’s another thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, it’s a haircut that didn’t start off as ‘Tinkerbell’ but end up as ‘malnourished pederast’. Or a cleavage that doesn’t look like a human scrotum trapped in a glass vice.

More relevantly, though, if there’s one thing that Victoria Beckham longs for more than anything else, its to break America. But up until now, all her attempts have gone down in flames. Her reality TV show was cut down to one episode. Her guest spot on Ugly Betty saw her inexplicably adopt the speech patterns of an infant John Merrick having an asthma attack. And her efforts to befriend Katie Holmes were dashed when Katie tripped on a pavement and Victoria discovered that she was full of nothing but wires and bleeping circuit boards.

But now Victoria Beckham’s dream may finally be realised, and it’s all thanks to Paula Abdul. Because Paula Abdul quit American Idol so close to the new season’s audition stages, it left the producers in a bit of a bind. Should they keep the American Idol judging panel as a threesome? Should they hire a permanent judge straight away? Or should they plug the gap with whichever vaguely music-related celebrity had the least amount of real work on at the time?

Luckily for Victoria Beckham, they went with the last option. God bless sweet desperation. People reports:

As the dust settles on the shocking departure of Paula Abdul, 47, from next season’s American Idol, now comes confirmation from Victoria Beckham’s publicist that the former Posh Spice, 35, will make a “one-off appearance” as a guest judge on the top-rated FOX show.

Even though it’s only for one show, it’ll be sort of exciting to see how Victoria Beckham fares on American Idol. Not because we’ll get to see her utilise the culmination of 15 years of music industry knowledge or anything, but because she might get to say “You’re going to Hollywood.” That’s a seven-syllable sentence, which will break her personal best by around four syllables. Exciting!

Retweet this post or follow hecklerspray on Twitter

You probably felt a surge of conflicting emotions when Paula Abdul revealed that she was leaving American Idol.

First there was shock. Then incredulity. After all, American Idol had reportedly offered Paula Abdul $5 million a year to stay – who’d turn down a sum like that? And then came begrudging acceptance. After all, this is Paula Abdul we’re talking about – a woman whose modus operandi seems to be ‘how could I make the least possible amount of sense here?’

So maybe Paula Abdul really is stupid enough to turn down that sort of money. Or maybe it’s all a publicity stunt…

It didn’t really make a lot of sense when Paula Abdul quit American Idol this week, did it? Admittedly, coming from a woman who routinely punches herself in the face with dogs and shrieks about diarrhoea during important conference calls, it’s actually one of the most sensible things she’s ever done – but from the perspective of a normal human being, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Because if Paula Abdul leaves American Idol, it leaves everyone effed. It’d mean that the American Idol judging panel would be staffed by three glowering humourless nimrods – well, two glowering humourless nimrods and a babbling A.D.D-addled toddler – and it’d fling Paula Abdul back into semi-remembered obscurity.

No, really – it would. What has Paula Abdul done aside from American Idol over the last decade? Released a woeful single that she hopelessly mimed at the Super Bowl, taped a reality TV show that made her look like a cast-iron lunatic and got kicked off an underperforming movie about over-sexualised plastic fashion dolls. American Idol is literally the only thing that Paula Abdul can do, and she can’t even do that very well.

And that probably explains the number of conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds. We half-jokingly hinted at it ourselves yesterday, but some people are now seriously suggesting that Paula Abdul has in fact signed a new American Idol contract, and that this is all part of some giant ratings-grabbing bait and switch ploy whereby Simon Cowell realises two episodes into the new season that the show can’t go on without Paula Abdul, allowing her to come back in a blaze of glory.

It’s got everything – drama, a strong soapy element, a sort of happy ending, plus Simon Cowell has a history of doing this sort of thing – and maybe that’s why Ryan Seacrest and Randy Jackson are being unusually cagey about the whole affair, as E! Online reports:

On his radio show this morning, Seacrest said Abdul’s departure was real—”as far as I know.” Jackson, meanwhile told Extra, “It looks to be true [emphasis added].”

Alright, it’s not exactly Area 51 territory, but it does give us hope that maybe – just maybe – Paula Abdul will return to American Idol. We’re praying that she does. Not because we’re big fans of Paula Abdul, you understand – in fact we’re fairly sure that we’d end up punching ourselves unconscious within seconds being in her proximity – but because if this really is a ploy to win ratings and it works, it’d open American Idol up to a world of hacky fake storylines that we’d be desperate to see.

Just imagine – this year it’s ‘Has Paula left?’ but next year it could be ‘Kara’s unborn child – is Randy the father?’ or ‘Ryan gets secretly replaced by a robot trained to destroy humanity’ or ‘Simon Cowell pulls a face so smug that it causes the universe to implode’.

That last one’s not really that hacky or fake, but you get the picture.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

That’s it. American Idol has lost its heart. Well, maybe not its heart – more like its atrophied cerebellum.

Anyway, look, Paula Abdul has left American Idol. That was our point. And Paula Abdul’s American Idol departure is a shock – for all the threats and posturing from her management recently, we were certain that Paula was just angling for a bigger salary. But no – first Paula Abdul Twittered her resignation and then Fox confirmed it.

We can’t overstate what a loss this is. Without Paula Abdul around, the American Idol contestants will now be forced to sleep with each other. Disappointing.

American Idol has been good for Paula Abdul. It was the show that finally got people to stop seeing her as the hasbeen who did that awful song with a cartoon cat and start seeing her as the boogly-eyed, desperately incomprehensible, painkiller dependent woman who’d somehow lucked her way into a high-profile job that she seemed vastly underqualified for.

But that’s all in the past now. Paula Abdul has decided to quit American Idol for good, either because contract negotiations broke down or because of tense interpersonal relationships between the judges or because Paula wanted to dedicate more time to her hobby of quacking like a duck at her own reflection for hours at a time. We’re sure that a clearer picture will emerge in the next few days, but all we have for now is the Twitter message that Paula Abdul wrote to the world yesterday:

“With sadness in my heart, I’ve decided not to return… I’ll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all being a part of a show that I helped from day 1 become an international phenomenon.”

And Fox’s confirmation that Paula Abdul was a goner:

“[Paula was] an important part of the ‘American Idol’ family over the last eight seasons and we are saddened that she has decided not to return to the show.”

This announcement had been coming for a while, ever since Paula Abdul threw a tantrum because she wasn’t getting paid as much as Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell. At the time it looked like a canny negotiation tactic on her part, but now that it’s backfired it seems more like greedy petulance. It seems unlikely that Paula Abdul will ever score such a high-paying job again, unless of course planet Earth is invaded by an army of shrieking, easily-distracted aliens and she’s employed by the government to communicate with them. Which could happen.

So what happens to Paula Abdul now? Well, it’s time for her to wistfully reflect on all the amazing opportunities that American Idol has given her – like the opportunity to allegedly sleep with an American Idol contestant, the opportunity to disfigure her face on a dog, the opportunity to be an international laughing stock and the opportunity to see what it’s like to have a crazed fan commit suicide on her doorstep. Golden moments, one and all. It’ll be sad to see Paula Abdul go.

And it’ll be crushingly inevitable when, two shows into the new American Idol season, Simon Cowell dramatically and spontaneously realises on camera that he has to immediately re-hire Paula Abdul, just like he did with Louis Walsh on X Factor a few years ago. Probably.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

Yesterday we said that Paula Abdul was probably going to leave American Idol. And she really was, too.

She was going to leave. It wasn’t just a dimwitted bluff to make American Idol pay her more money. Paula Abdul was definitely leaving American Idol. Unless the show decided to pay her a lot more money, in which case she’d consider staying. But it’s not about money. Its about being treated with a basic level of human decency. And money. It’s mostly about money.

Anyway, Simon Cowell has revealed that he wants Paula Abdul to stay. That was probably our point.

When Paula Abdul threatened to leave American Idol yesterday because Ryan Seacrest was being paid more money and Simon Cowell was being paid more money but she wasn’t being paid more money, many simply dismissed it as empty posturing. But those people don’t know. They don’t know the sacrifices that Paula Abdul has made to appear on American Idol.

Paula Abdul had plenty of work before American Idol came knocking, you know. Sure, her pop career has stalled a little, but she still had her choreography work. And she was, um, the answer to the pub quiz question “What’s the name of that pop star who did that rubbish song with the dancing cartoon cat and then stopped being famous to the extent that most people assume she’s now dead?” And sprawling around your house off your chops on painkillers takes up more time than you’d expect, you know.

So Paula Abdul is quite happy to walk away from American Idol to further pursue her hobbies of crying in public and smashing up her face on tiny dogs. But she might not need to, because her knight in shining armour has arrived. Now, yes, the armour is only shining so that the knight can only look at his reflection in it while licking his lips in a creepy way, and he’s riding a horse that’s been reinforced to cope with the awesome weight of his hefty manboobs, but Paula Abdul isn’t in a position to be choosy at the moment.

That knight, if you hadn’t already guessed, is Simon Cowell. And he wants Paula Abdul to stay on American Idol, damn it. People reports:

“She’ll be fine. She’ll be on the show,” judge Simon Cowell told Extra on Monday. “I don’t get a lot of say. I’ve just made it clear that I want Paula on the show. Full stop.” Meanwhile, host Ryan Seacrest expressed a similar sentiment. “I think as far as I know you’ll see everybody back,” he told the TV show. “I hope so.”

It’s beautiful to see the American Idol family pull together for Paula Abdul like this. They love her, they don’t want to see her go and their display of unity is bound to sway the bean-counting producers into giving her exactly what she wants.

Unless, you know, what she wants is more money than Simon Cowell. Because then the bitch can walk. Seriously, she’s gone. And she’d better not Simon Cowell in the eye on the way out, either. He knows people. You hear him? HE KNOWS PEOPLE!

Retweet this post or follow hecklerspray on Twitter here

As far as American Idol goes, Simon is the brain, Randy is the mouth and Kara is like the appendix or something.

And then there’s Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul is American Idol’s beating heart. Admittedly it’s a slightly terrifying heart that seems to be drunk a lot of the time and often shrieks to itself for no particular reason, but it’s still a heart. What would American Idol be like without Paula Abdul? It’d be professional and consistent. And rubbish.

But we’ll see that next year, because Paula Abdul is about to quit American Idol in a pay dispute.

Even though fewer and fewer people are watching American Idol – perhaps because the whole show is essentially three months of bad karaoke followed by a nightmarish Gillette ad of a winning single – it seems like the principal American Idol stars are about to have their wildest wishes granted in the show’s current contract negotiations.

Ryan Seacrest, for example, is going to get $45 million to present American Idol for the next three years. Simon Cowell is apparently after $100 million for the same period of time. And Randy Jackson – well, actually Randy Jackson has just been given a ball of scrunched up tin foil because that’s what he thinks money is. But what about Paula Abdul, the woman so beloved by American Idol viewers that some of them occasionally will kill themselves in slightly misguided demonstrations of their adoration for her?

Nothing. Not a peep. Apparently nobody has even begun to talk about granting her wildest wishes. Why? We just don’t know. Maybe it’s because Paula Abdul’s wildest wishes involve fairy tears and unicorns that can poo gumdrops. Or maybe it’s because whenever anyone tries to negotiate her American Idol contract with her, she gibbers on incomprehensibly for 45 minutes, then starts applauding something that only she can see, then falls over. Feasibly it could be either of these two things.

But whatever the reason, Paula Abdul is furious. So furious, in fact, that her longtime manager of three weeks David Sonenberg has told the media that Paula Abdul will leave American Idol unless her demands are met. Essentially it’s the plot of Die Hard 3, except it probably won’t end with Paula Abdul dying in a helicopter crash. The New York Daily News reports:

“She’s not a happy camper as a result of what’s going on. She’s hurt. She’s angry. I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual; I think unnecessarily hurtful. I find it kind of unconscionable and certainly rude and disrespectful that they haven’t stepped up and said what they want to do. Very sadly, it does not appear that she’s going to be back on ‘Idol.’”

So there it is. Paula Abdul is the Kim Jong-Il of American Idol. While producers are busy sorting out Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, she’s threatening to bomb Hawaii because people have stopped taking her seriously. She’s bluffing, of course – like Kim Jong-Il she probably won’t carry out her threat, accept whatever meagre scraps are thrown her way and then, um, develop the early stages of pancreatic cancer.

It’s not really a comparison that stands up to much inspection, is it? Sorry.

Retweet this post or follow hecklerspray on Twitter here

Great, American Idol’s over. We’re thrilled. No more talking about American Idol for another… what’s that?

Simon Cowell’s ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour was allegedly choked by someone who appears to be a nutbag outside the American Idol studios on Tuesday night, you say? Oh great. Thanks very much. There we were, thinking we were all done with writing about American Idol for 2009, but oh no – Terri Seymour’s stupid throat had to get in the bloody way, didn’t it? Well screw you, Terri Seymour’s idiot windpipe. You’ve ruined everything. EVERYTHING.

Terri Seymour is OK, by the way. We’re not monsters.

Whatever you might think of the man, Simon Cowell is obviously a catch. He’s loaded, for starters, and it wouldn’t matter if you were having a bad hair day because his teeth are so alarmingly white that anyone who saw you together would instantly have their retinas permanently scorched out by their dazzle. Plus we once read in Cosmo that women get really turned on if you continually bombard them a protracted and withering critique of their lack of ability to do something they obviously enjoy.

So with that in mind, it’s obvious that everyone wants a piece of Simon Cowell. And, if that’s not immediately possible, they want a piece of Simon Cowell’s ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour. In particular the piece of Terri Seymour that they want is the skin that directly covers her trachea.

That’s if the alleged actions of Janice Thibodeaux are anything to go by, of course. Because it’s claimed that Janice Thibodeaux choked Terri Seymour outside the American Idol studios on Tuesday night. MSNBC reports:

The alleged incident occurred when Thibodeaux reportedly approached Seymour and asked if she was the “Idol” judge’s girlfriend. Thibodeaux then allegedly attacked Seymour and attempted to choke her. Thibodeaux has been booked on felony battery and is being held on $52,700 bail.

Now that seems a little harsh. You shouldn’t choke Terri Seymour just because she used to be Simon Cowell’s girlfriend. No, at a push you could probably get away with choking her for co-presenting Wheel Of Fortune with gruesome sex tape star John Leslie for a year at the turn of the decade, but even then it’d probably be frowned on and shouldn’t be attempted.

In fact, according to some reports, the real reason for Janice Thibodeaux choking Terri Seymour is because Simon Cowell had joking choked Paula Abdul on that evening’s episode of American Idol, and she wanted revenge. Which is frankly depressing.

Doesn’t this woman know that to be a genuinely unsettling Paula Abdul fanatic she needs to literally audition for American Idol just so she can get some face time, only to end up killing herself outside Paula Abdul’s house because the weight of rejection became to much for her? You can’t just rock up and try to strangle the ex-girlfriend of the man who sits next to Paula Abdul on American Idol – that hardly counts at all.

Honestly, if we had to characterise the decline of modern civilisation in one example, it’d be the decreasing craftsmanship in obsessive Paula Abdul fans’ manic displays of love. How terribly sad.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

It made so much sense when Paula Abdul admitted her addiction to painkillers. The behaviour. The slurred speech. The extended tolerance of Randy Jackson.

Yes, when Paula Abdul admitted that she’d spent 12 years off her box on a cocktail of medication, everything became clear. Simon Cowell’s teeth hadn’t sent her down a path to insanity. The inexplicable popularity of Danny Gokey hadn’t turned her synapses to mush. It was the drugs.

Except it wasn’t. Paula Abdul has claimed that her statements were taken out of context. Apparently you can take harrowing descriptions of withdrawal out of context now. Who knew?

That’s it. We’ve decided that we’re going on a spa holiday, preferably to that place in California where Paula Abdul went last Thanksgiving. Why? Because we’ve heard so many wonderful things about it. There’s the tennis, for instance, and the golf. And the luxurious spa facilities. And the… oh, how did Paula Abdul put it? Yes, that’s right:

“I could have killed myself… I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating.”

Oh, wait, that doesn’t sound very pleasant at all, does it? Previously we thought that Paula Abdul only found her stay there so unbearable because she was using it to kick her 12-year addiction to painkillers – but now she says that she’s never been addicted to painkillers at all, so that can’t be it. It must just be a really rubbish spa.

The moral here – other than never let Paula Abdul endorse ANYTHING is that Paula Abdul has never been addicted to drugs. Yes, we know, a lot of things point to the possibility of Paula Abdul having a drug addiction – her wayward behaviour in public, for instance, and the fact that this week she gave an interview where she stated in very clear terms that she’d been addicted to painkillers for 12 years – but now Paula Abdul is saying that the whole thing is a great big dollop of tish.

And whose fault is it? That’s right, our old friend context. You see, Paula Abdul may have used the interview in Ladies Home Journal to reveal in explicit detail that she was addicted to drugs, the names of all the drugs she was addicted to and the nightmarish conditions of her withdrawal, but she didn’t. Even though she did, she didn’t. It’s very simple. Paula Abdul told a Detroit radio show called Mojo In The Morning:

“It was very stressful for me to hear that and to be quoted saying something. I never said. I’ve never checked into a rehab clinic. I’ve never been addicted or abused drugs, and I’ve never abused alcohol. I’ve never even been drunk in my life.”

Meanwhile, Ladies Home Journal has decided to stand by its story. So one of them is telling a lie – but which one? Either Paula Abdul really was a drug addict or that notorious hotbed of investigative journalism Ladies Home Journal made it all up. There’s only one way to sort this out for good – someone needs to tie Paula Abdul to a chair and time how long it is before she starts crying and seeing ants crawling through her veins instead of blood. Our guess? About eight seconds.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Let’s say American Idol is a family. Who would Paula Abdul be? Correct, she’d be your aggressive, incoherent, substance-addled mother.

That’s right – not your drunk mother or your mentally ill mother. Your substance-addled mother. Paula Abdul has finally revealed that she’s been addicted to prescription painkillers for 12 years. and she went to rehab last year to get better.

Silly Paula Abdul – this now means that the chances of her interrupting an American Idol episode to burp the theme-tune to Quincy or start licking her own chair are greatly reduced. And why else would we watch it? For the singing? Please.

Paula Abdul is America’s sweetheart, in that she’s got a slightly Muslim-y surname, she looks like she’s always off her shit on over-the-counter medication and when she talks she’s all like “meurgh meurgh meurgh” and nobody can really understand what she’s saying. But under that glazed, boggle-eyed facade, a dark secret has been gnawing away at Paula Abdul, and now she’s finally ready to reveal it to the world.

Paula Abdul had a 12-year dependency on painkilliers.

Wait. That’s it? That was a secret? Everyone knew that Paula Abdul was constantly off her face on painkillers, surely. We even mentioned it two paragraphs ago. That’s how little of a secret it was. Pfff. Frankly we were hoping for something a little more shocking, like a revelation that Paula Abdul drinks a bottle of bleach before breakfast or that her brain is actually made of stoat offal. Anyway, here’s how Paula Abdul broke this actually quite rubbish news to Ladies’ Home Journal, which is apparently a thing that exists:

Last Thanksgiving, determined to overcome her habit, she checked into the La Costa Resort and Spa to wean herself off her medications in one fell swoop. “I could have killed myself…. Withdrawal — it’s the worst thing. I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating. But at my very core, I did not like existing the way I had been.”

Paula Abdul then went on to describe how she’d been hooked on a combination of painkillers, muscle relaxant, nerve medication and a patch that delivered her a chemical 80 times stronger than morphine. But for good reason, though – since 1991 Paula Abdul has injured her back, broken her leg, hurt her neck in a car accident and become partially paralysed in a plane crash. It’s a bit like an episode of Mr Bean, isn’t it? A really crap episode of Mr Bean. That goes on for 12 years. And stars an idiot.

News of Paula Abdul’s recovery is extraordinarily bittersweet, though – while it’s good that she’s better, it means that never again will Paula Abdul smash up her face on a dog. Or go on TV slurring and dribbling like a maniac. Or have a screaming meltdown in an airport. Or interrupt an important conference call to weep and bellow about poo.

And, really, what is Paula Abdul without any of that. Vapour, that’s what. Vapour with a haircut.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

When Hecklerspray gets called into various places to accept awards and whatnot, we routinely do four things.

The first is we always have a sword pointed at the innards of whoever hands us our trophy. That’s just to ensure an enthusiastic and positive over-the-top speech, which works well over half the time. If you Youtube ‘Hecklerspray, Billy Crystal, Kidney Sack Spill’ ‘you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about there.

Other major celebrities have a similar routine of only attending certain award ceremonies. Paula Abdul, for instance, only attends them when the presenter is Sacha Baron Cohen with cameras rolling.

Usually when Paula Abdul takes an award it’s off of a mantle place during a famous friend’s Christmas party. That doesn’t matter though – because she still takes it graciously and offers a slurred speech about how she couldn’t have done it without MC Skat Cat and/or the restless ghosts of all her dead fans.

You can imagine then how eager she was to accept an award that actually had her name plate screwed onto the base. Allegedly it was for being ‘Artist of the Year’ in Germany. Nominees she’d probably beaten out were David Hasselhoff, Michael Knight, and the grandson of the guy who used to trim Heinrich Himmler’s moustache.

To accept the award Abdul was told she had to show up at some vacant house in Hollywood. We’re told Paula Interviewed well. She maintained good poise, she used sentences fused together with a good noun to adverb ratio, and perhaps most importantly her butt didn’t fart on the backs of the Mexicans she was literally sitting on. She describes the whole set up like this:

“It is the most interesting, wacked-out situation that happened to me. I was scarred for my life for a year. I walk into the home, and I’m greeted by this futuristic Captain Nemo-looking dude with a Mohawk — and he’s flaming. And I’m going, ‘Oh, this is going to be one of those fun Japanese game shows.’ I’m like, ‘OK, this is weird.’ [Bruno] says, ‘Sorry, there’s no furniture.’ And he snaps his fingers and says, ‘Gardeners!’ And these two Mexican guys come in, and they drop down to all fours, and he says [to me], ‘Sit down.’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ “

“It was getting so uncomfortable, and I’m throwing daggers with my eyes at my publicist. I said, ‘No, I won’t be doing that. I have to go to work. … And by the way, where’s my award?’ And I’m trying to hold a smile on my face. It was hysterical, but it was so disturbing.’”

Now take that scene and throw it together with the one where Bruno paid the cage fighters to start making out in front of a bunch of low-brow red necks and you’ve got yourself a fairly decent movie.

Not as good as anything Lucas would make, mind you, but decent.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Guess what happened on American Idol last night. Everyone sang songs. And Adam Lambert sang the best song. Shocking.

Oh, wait. No. We meant massively predictable. But still, even though we all know who’s going to win American Idol but still have to suffer through everyone else lumbering cluelessly through songs they’ve clearly never heard before, at least the judges can mix things up.

During last night’s American Idol Ratpack Night, Paula Abdul told Adam Lambert that he was ‘Michael Phelps‘. Or an ‘eyeball whelk’. Or ‘my heel yelps’. Honestly, who knows what that bloody woman was babbling on about.

After a few weeks of dangerous experimentation – yes, for American Idol two Bryan Adams songs in an hour does constitute dangerous experimentation – American Idol was back in familiar territory last night with its annual Ratpack night. You know, the night where the remaining American Idol contestants are schooled in old-fashioned power and charm by a twinkly veteran like Tony Bennett.

Well, replace ‘Tony Bennett’ with ‘Jamie Foxx‘, ‘old-fashioned power and charm’ with ‘just being thankful that they were getting to spend some time within touching distance of the superstar Jamie Foxx’ and ‘twinkly veteran’ with ‘objectionable bellend’ and that’s exactly what last night’s American Idol was like.

Oh, we’re being too harsh on Jamie Foxx. After all, he once starred in a film that was set in roughly the same time period as when the Ratpack were alive, so he’s clearly an expert. Also if any of the American Idol contestants wanted to learn how to desperately try to distance themselves from offensive comments they made about a child, mentors don’t come any more experienced than Jamie Foxx.

But anyway, onto last night’s American Idol performances. Danny Gokey was told he was better than usual because he didn’t blink as much (or something), Allison Iraheta was told that she was a laser-eyed robot programmed to destroy humanity (or something), Kris Allen was told that he was a dark horse because he can crap and walk at the same time and often lets Irish midgets ride around on his back in his leisure time (or something) and Matt Giraud was told that he was rubbish (he was rubbish).

And then there’s Adam Lambert, the obvious winner of American Idol, who last night performed Feeling Good in such a preposterously gay way that we were half expecting to see a chorus line of kittens dressed as the cast of Sex And The City get shot out of a glitter cannon at the midway point. Following his performance, Paula Abdul told Adam Lambert:

“It’s like watching the Olympics and you’re our Michael Phelps.”

Let’s hope for all of our sakes that Paula Abdul is right here. Not because it’d be an outrage if Adam Lambert and his abundance of talent didn’t end up winning American Idol, but because we’re quite looking forward to the time when Adam Lambert gets photographed smoking drugs at a rubbish house party and isn’t allowed to endorse breakfast cereal any more. And that’s the only reason. What of it?

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Next time someone tells you that they’re a ‘little bit mad’, don’t greet the news with a cheerful honk and a quip about how you can be “bonkers” yourself sometimes.

Call the cops, have them sectioned. It might seem harsh, but remember – there’s just one mood swing between a hilarious farting noise when you bend over, and a bread knife being plunged into your chest because you’re not the Take That fan they hoped you would be.

With that in mind, we thought we’d go through a few celebrities we’d never befriend, for fear of dying at their hands…

1. Anthea Turner

Hell’s Kitchen, like Celebrity Big Brother a few years ago, has unleashed the terrifying real-life Anthea Turner – and she’s a total maniac. Her face gurns and convulses in an attempt to silence the voices and calm the bubbling anger that lurks within. One day she will go on a killing spree. Just watch.

2. Robbie Williams

Robbie Williams has never quite had complete control of his emotions, lurching wildly from smugly peacocking on stage, to rocking silently in a darkened stationary cupboard. Last seen hunting around wastelands looking for ET, the rumour is that he now enjoys the company of disgruntled factory workers in Swindon. Careful, lads.

3. Paula Abdul

Paula can barely conceal her lack of control. Even she has no idea what words might be coming out of her mouth at any given moment. A hunch suggests that before American Idol is over, she’s going to hit Cowell with a torrent of spectacular verbal and physical abuse.

4. Chris Moyles

So needy is Chris Moyles, so very very needy. As long as he’s with his guffawing employees, everything will be alright, but should his shouty-shouty school of entertainment cease to impress, expect to see a very fat man hurtling around Oxford Street with his top of, swinging a machete in the air.

5. Lee Ryan

Raised in the forest by nomads, Lee Ryan hasn’t once left a room without everyone in it turning to one another and making a face. One day he will catch them, and then splat! Dead guys.

6. Tina Malone

Tina, of course, was the gargantuan Shameless actress on Celebrity Big Brother. You know – the one who couldn’t make it to the end of a conversation without restating how strong she is, and how she doesn’t care that she’s a revolting fat woman. One day, the tide will turn on that particular lie.

7. Geri Halliwell

Poor Geri, literally no one wants to go out with her. She’s a bit like Jennifer Aniston in that sense. Or Duffy. The problem is that she looks like she’d never once leave you alone. Not even for a second. She’s probably killed before.

8. Amanda Holden

Even when she’s cheerfully clapping the performance of that strange Scottish gentleman who did the song from Cats, something in Amanda Holden’s eyes is telling you that she cried herself to sleep last night. Unstable.

For more like this visit Interestment.co.uk

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!