American Idol loves its theme nights – we’ve previously had Beatles Night, Big Band Night and Ironically Let Taylor Hicks Win Night.

But the forthcoming American Idol will be groundbreaking. That’s because it’ll be the first American Idol theme season – and the theme is ‘everybody be really nice to all the contestants, even if they’re clearly awful, in case more of them show up dead outside Paula Abdul‘s house’.

Actually it’s not. Simon Cowell has spoken about the death of Paula Abdul’s obsessed fan and has decided that, though sad, he’s still going to be a bastard to everyone he meets. Hooray!

The death of Paula Goodspeed was upsetting on so many levels. Partly because it was a waste of a young life, partly because the warning signs went unheeded for so long, partly because choosing to kill yourself because you couldn’t be Paula Abdul’s best friend is possibly the silliest decision that anyone could ever make and partly because it would seem that American Idol may have been a direct factor for her suicide.

Shortly after Paula Goodspeed was found dead in a car near Paula Abdul’s house it emerged that she was a former American Idol contestant who was chosen to appear on the show because she was so obsessed with Paula Abdul that her house was littered with life-size paintings of her. Brought on, laughed at, ridiculed for her dental braces and sent packing – the American Idol machine chewed Paula Goodspeed up and spat her out.

And now that she’s dead, Goodspeed has made sure that she’ll hang over the entire new season of American Idol like a particularly miserable cloud. Firstly, Paula Abdul is spooked out and angry at the show’s producers, which will make for an interesting dynamic when American Idol reaches its live stages. Secondly a hasty format rejig means there won’t be so many lunatics appearing in the American Idol audition shows. And thirdly, there’s Simon Cowell.

Simon Cowell’s bread and butter is the withering put-down but, now those put-downs have been linked to a woman’s suicide, there’s a chance he’ll have to reign them in a bit on the new American Idol. And what’s Simon Cowell left with if you take away his shocking rudeness? Some ill-fitting trousers, the world’s least-flattering haircut and a voice that sounds like KITT from Knight Rider‘s gay uncle who’s been struck down with a nasty case of M.E.

So will we see a new, fluffier Simon Cowell when American Idol premieres next month? Not bloody likely, as he told Reuters:

“I have thought long and hard about this… I think we will continue in the way we have always done. We have tried to have a sense of humor. The show is not an inherently mean show… What happened was awful. My regret is that we didn’t know how troubled this person was. If I had gone back in time and known what she was going through, I wish we could have spent time trying to help her, but we genuinely didn’t know.”

To be fair, Simon Cowell does have a point here – none of the American Idol contestants who he’s scolded for looking a bit gay or probably being disabled have killed themselves, so maybe Paula Goodspeed was just a tragic one-off.

And he’s absolutely right to refuse to drop all the sarcastic comments. Rude Simon Cowell may have accidentally helped to prompt one untimely suicide, but that’d be a drop in the ocean to the millions of horrified viewers who’d start disgustedly stabbing themselves in the face if Simon Cowell ever hugged someone or – worse still – actually started crying. Just thinking about that has given us the creeps, actually. Bleurgh.

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Paula Abdul once sang a duet with a chainsmoking cartoon hip-hop cat, so she knows weird when she sees it.

But when a woman who a) looked like Paula, b) painted lifesize pictures of Paula and c) appeared on the TV show that Paula judges died outside Paula Abdul’s house surrounded by pictures and CDs all bearing Paula Abdul’s image in a car with a licence plate that professed her love for Paula Abdul, that may have tipped things to a new level.

Apparently Paula Abdul hasn’t slept in her own house since any of this happened. Well, duh.

Usually when a celebrity gets a stalker, it tends to confuse us a bit. For instance, we’ve had two and a half years to reflect on the fact that John Cusack has a stalker and we still can’t make head nor tail out of it – there are billions of people in the world, so why pin unattainable hero status on the bloke out of Con Air? It just doesn’t make sense.

But Paula Abdul, we’re sorry to say, seems like perfect stalker fodder. She ticks all the boxes. She’s pretty, she’s friendly, she used to be a popstar so people see her as a lost fragment of their youth and she often seems fairly incomprehensible, so people want to try and fix her when they meet her. Plus, if rumours are correct, she’s possibly OK with sleeping with people she barely knows.

But the main reason why Paula Abdul appears to be a likely victim for stalking is because she’s the nice one on American Idol – not only do thousands of deluded idiots pass in front of her eyes day after day, but Paula Abdul is often the only one who’ll cushion them from Simon Cowell‘s withering put-downs and stop them feeling like total failures.

It’s a dangerous mix, which is why it was horribly unsurprising when Paula Abdul’s number one fan Paula Goodspeed was found dead near her house three weeks ago. The blame for her death could be laid at any number of doorsteps – but that doesn’t hide the fact that a young woman died, and that’s terribly sad.

And now Paula Abdul has decided to talk about Goodspeed’s death and how it affected her. It’s probably no surprise to hear that Paula’s been avoiding her home as much as possible since the incident, as People reports:

“I’ve been staying in different homes and hotels, and I have security with me… It was very tragic and very upsetting to hear. She had tried to do this before, and it was just heartbreaking … It was in the middle of Hollywood week, and it happened while I was actually working at the Kodak Theatre, and it was devastating to hear.”

The superficial knock-on effects of Paula Goodspeed’s death are obvious – Paula Abdul’s house is now inevitably on the market – but what’ll be interesting is seeing how Paula copes with this event in the longer term. Will she be frostier to the American Idol contestants?  Will she continue to judge American Idol at all?

Ultimately, though, we hope that Paula Abdul realises that this was an isolated – though unfortunately extreme – incident, and that not everyone has the same mental issues that Goodspeed appeared to suffer from.

As we’ve said before – it’s when Randy Jackson gets an obsessive fan that we’ll realise that the world has turned to shit. When that day comes, you’ll find us cowering in the bottom of our cupboard clutching a bottle of gin and a cricket bat.

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An American Idol contestant infatuated with Paula Abdul enough to paint huge pictures of her has been found dead near Abdul’s home.

The body of Paula Goodspeed was discovered yesterday near Paula Abdul’s mansion in a car with a Paula Abdul-referencing license plate, next to pictures and CDs of Paula Abdul. It’s thought that Paula Goodspeed overdosed on prescription drugs, following a less successful suicide attempt near Abdul’s home earlier this year.

It’s sad news, and Goodspeed’s death might even make reality producers question their vetting process or treatment of contestants. Maybe they could just let Randy Jackson judge the next season of American Idol alone. After all, nobody can like him that much, can they?

There have been all manner of celebrity stalkers in recent years, all with varying degrees of scariness. Some are happy to draw creepy pictures of their victims, others will try to run them over on their driveway. But none have ever been willingly insulted by the object of their affections on national television.

Tragically, that happened to be the case with Paula Goodspeed, the Paula Abdul fan who yesterday killed herself close to Paula Abdul’s home. Paula Goodspeed auditioned for the fifth season of American Idol in a televised segment that now seems to be uncomfortably stuffed with warning signs…

As BBC News reports, Paula Abdul has already expressed her sadness over Goodspeed’s death:

The 30-year-old was discovered in a car alongside prescription drugs, CDs and pictures of pop star Abdul. The car was found near the singer’s home. Abdul said in a statement, released by her publicist Jeff Ballard: “I am deeply shocked and saddened at what transpired yesterday. My heart and prayers go out to her family.”

The news of Paula Goodspeed’s apparent suicide will no doubt affect Paula Abdul deeply. Every episode of American Idol these days seems to come complete with a little montage of fans telling Paula how much they love her, and this news might force her to be a little more hands-off with them in the future.

Whatever happens, though, we expect that the knock-on effect of Goodspeed’s death will be a toning down of the early American Idol stages. Simon Cowell has already been criticised in the past for his treatment of homosexuals and the disabled and so, to avoid a repeat of this sad news, we’re predicting that American Idol will cut back its attacks on the less talented audition performers in future seasons.

And what will that leave us with? Six months of David Archuleta clones. Who’d watch that?

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