What makes us so sure of this? How about the fact that, despite rumours to the contrary, Britney Spears has refused to perform at this year’s MTV VMAs? Apparently she fears it’ll be a hopelessly incompetent retread of last year’s hopelessly incompetent MTV VMA performance, recently voted the biggest single atrocity to ever happen to mankind by us in a vote in our head just now.

You know what this means, don’t you? Without Britney Spears around, the MTV VMAs is going to be – gulp – professional. Urgh. Seriously, one of the Jonas Brothers had better be planning to soil himself onstage and then slip around in the mess like a baby deer on an ice rink, because right now that’s all we’ve got left to cling to.

Has anyone else noticed a quiet turning around of Britney Spears’ public image lately? It seems like she’s winning people over again. Maybe that’s because people feel sorry for her, or maybe it’s because she’s not leathering the shit out of their cars with an umbrella any more, but lately public support for Britney Spears has grown so much that she even gets praised for going out without looking a mess.

And this public rehabilitation seems to have made Britney Spears cleverer as well. Case in point – Britney Spears isn’t going to perform at the MTV VMAs any more.

You’ll remember what happened last time Britney Spears did the MTV VMAs, of course. The stumbling, the miming, the hair extensions, the drawn-on abs, the listless crotch-grabbing. It was brilliant. Not for Britney Spears, obviously – it sent her spiralling into a psychological hellpit that she’s never fully recovered from – but it was fun to watch, and isn’t that what’s most important?

There were rumours that Britney Spears wanted a redo of the performance at this year’s MTV VMAs next month, but sadly they’ve turned out to be a big fat bag of lies. Yahoo reports:

“Contrary to media reports, Britney was never slated to perform on this year’s VMAs,” Larry Rudolph, Spears’ manager at Jive Records, said in a statement. “She’s in the middle of recording her next album, which is going amazingly well, and her focus remains on the studio.”

Is it just us, or does Britney Spears not seem like Britney Spears if she’s behaving normally? We’re worried. The old Britney would have jumped at the chance to perform at the MTV VMAs, then forgotten to prepare for it, then started to cry halfway through her performance, then tried to lick the tears out of her own eyes in the mistaken belief that they were made of gin, fallen into the orchestra pit and started to hump a tuba. That’s the Britney we all know and love.

What next? Is Britney Spears going to display enough parental competency to be allowed to look after her children again? Good lord, we hope not. Urgh.

People still talk about Britney’s VMA performance of Gimme More with the glazed tremble of a war survivor. The bikini, the drawn-on stomach, the stumbling, the dire miming – as well as effectively ending Britney Spears’ career for good it also caused up to 300 unwitting viewers to completely lose their eyesight.

Clearly, then, Britney Spears would be stupid to ever return to the MTV VMAs. Worse than stupid, in fact – Britney Spears would be showing such a profound lack of self-awareness that she should be encased in ice and sent around schools as a warning to future generations of the negative effects of celebrity.

So what might Britney Spears do at this year’s MTV VMAs? That’s right. Oh, don’t look so surprised.

Over the last couple of years, Britney Spears’ life has descended into a kind of thick featureless bad news goo – like a traffic pile-up so vast you can’t even see the individual car wrecks any more, just a mottled ocean of twisted metal that stretches off to the horizon in all directions.

Despite this, though, a few moments still stick out as being particularly rubbish. There was the time that Britney Spears shaved all her hair off, for example – that was the horrible harbinger for everything to come. Then there was the time Britney went to a mental hospital and was diagnosed as Gravely Disabled, the closest Britney’s come so far to hitting rock bottom.

And then there was Britney Spears’ performance at the MTV VMAs last year.

It’s almost been a year since Britney Spears decided to open the MTV VMAs with a spectacular comeback performance of her then new song Gimme More. There were rumours that the routine was going to be a career-high showstopper designed to silence the critics, featuring magic and fireworks and explosions. That’s not what we got, though.

What we got was Britney Spears in rancid hair extensions, wearing the least flattering bikini in creation and abs airbrushed onto her stomach. Britney stumbled around cluelessly for three minutes, looking like she barely knew her own name, let alone the words to her song, and then ran offstage in tears knowing that she’d become a monumental global joke.

It was awful. So needless to say she might be doing it all over again in a couple of months. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Troubled pop star Britney Spears will have another chance to storm the MTV stage, after receiving a nomination for this year’s Video Music Awards. The star has been nominated by network bosses in the category of Best Female Video for her hit single “Piece of Me,” competing alongside a list of music’s top female rockers.

OK, so it’s just a nomination for now, but MTV bosses must want her to sing – a performance by Britney Spears would get them more publicity than anything else on Earth. And, you know what, it might not be such a bad idea. Here’s why:

1) Britney Spears has just done that tour video for Madonna. If that doesn’t set up a redo of their lesbian VMA kiss from five years ago, nothing will.

2) Britney can wear clothes properly now. That’s a start.

3) Now that she’s firmly under the care of her family, Britney Spears can concentrate fully on the performance without distraction.

4) Britney’s lost her kids forever. See above.

5) This is the most important one. No matter what Britney Spears does during her MTV VMA performance this year, it can never ever ever be as bad as last year. She can go round shitting into nuns’ eyes if she likes. No, no she can’t. She should.

It was well-known before he went to the giant concert hall in the sky that he was suffering from ill health. But the old dog battled through and made a final performance for the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006. Now the conductor on the night, Leone Magiera, has revealed that the ex-porker was doing an Ashlee Simpson and miming. Though he made it a bit more convincing. 

As we all know, rubbish pop stars use backing tracks to help them. Amusingly for us, it can be quite funny when it goes a bit wonky. We all remember Ashlee Simpson’s ill-fated appearance on Saturday Night Live, when it all fell flat on its arse.

And now we’ve been told that the late, great Pavarotti did the same thing. What’s next? They're going to tell us that some DJs just press play on their computers and fiddle around with various buttons and knobs all night?

That's too hard to believe, but to pull off a fake orchestral performance, complete with conductor as well as a miming singer, well that takes a lot of skill to pull off.

Magiera has said:

"The orchestra pretended to play, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. It came off beautifully. No one was aware of the technical tricks. His voice was nearly intact. He found the strength to repeat it until he was completely satisfied. Then, he fell back on his wheelchair and closed his eyes, exhausted."  

You know what? Full respect to the bloke for doing so. For starters, he was crippled with the cancer, which finally took his life, plus he’d had previous health scares. While we can’t be arsed to do most things on a daily basis, Pavarotti came through, so he disappointed no one. 

The performance went so smoothly that everyone was none the wiser. Though with recent politics outshining the upcoming games, no doubt some idiot protester will cry into his onion soup tonight.

Read more:

Pavarotti Faked Final Performance – BBC 

Amy Winehouse actually managed to sing in tune.

But, yes, Amy Winehouse won five Grammys last night – for Best Record, Best Song, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist. And Amy's elation was clear for all the Grammy viewers to see. That's because, at current market value, she'll be able to trade the Grammys in for a big bag of crack on the streets.

The organisers of the Grammys know that they're in charge of a long, ultimately dull ceremony that only Wayfarer-wearing ponytailed middle-aged record executives can honestly admit to being interested in. But to their credit, for last night's show, they decided to give the show more appeal by making it personal. Almost uncomfortably so, in fact.  

Kanye West, for example, sung a song about his dead mother. And Amy Winehouse managed to take a song a song about her current rehab situation and pepper it with references to her jailed husband. The way it was going, we were genuinely surprised that Tina Turner didn't use her Grammys duet with Beyonce to debut a new song called I'm Glad That Old Fucker Died. 

Still, though, despite the weird tabloidy air of proceedings, last night's Grammys were really only about Amy Winehouse. Although she was nominated for six Grammys, Amy wasn't allowed a visa to attend the ceremony because of that pesky 'crack-smoking' video of hers. So as an alternative, Amy Winehouse got to perform by satellite instead. But even that was wracked with uncertainty.

For example, nobody knew if Amy Winehouse would have a full set of teeth in for the performance, or whether she'd offer out the entire Grammys viewing audience as she's so fond of doing during performances. Amy could have – as she's appeared to do in the past – pulled drugs out of her beehive and ram them up her nose while singing. Or she could have done what she's done uniformly for the last year and turned in a lazy vocal that sounds like the Cloverfield monster trying to do a Chewbacca impression during a karaoke version of Baby Love.

But no. What Amy Winehouse actually did was sing normally while looking vaguely healthy. We know, it was hard for us to take in, too, so here's a video for proof…

Other Grammy winners included Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Foo Fighters and just about everyone else who seems to win Grammys every year anyway. But last night was Amy Winehouse's night, and her non-rubbish performance coupled with her five Grammys for Best Record, Best Song, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist could very well open a new chapter in her life.

Perhaps all this adulation will mean that Amy Winehouse will clean up her act for good and never do anything newsworthy ever again. And if that's the case, we're going out of business. Nice knowing you all.

Read more:

Grammys Serve Up Winehouse on Tap – E! Online 

On Sunday the Dallas Cowboys lost an important match against the Philadelphia Knicker-Kickers (or something), with Tony Romo having a particularly bad day. Now, Dallas American Football fans being what they are have studied everything from training to meteorological conditions to Philadelphia's advanced level of man-marking in an effort to try and work out what was to blame for Tony Romo's spectacular drop in form – and they've decided that it's Jessica Simpson's fault. It's all Jessica Simpson's fault. Everything is Jessica Simpson's fault and she smells and walks like a man. Basically.

Yoko Ono must be thrilled at the way 2007 has gone for her. First Heather Mills makes a fool out of herself on TV and becomes the world's most hated Beatle wife and – now that Jessica Simpson has obliterated her new boyfriend's talent – angry misogynists have turned their attention away from her instead. That just leaves Yoko Ono with racists and those who didn't like Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow), which is pretty much everyone now we think of it.

But anyway, back to Jessica Simpson. After Jessica's dad set her up with Tony Roma recently, you would have expected the couple to live their life in a whirlwind of romantic snuggling, hand-holding, nuzzling and the unspoken fear that any babies they have together will inherit Jessica's jaw. But that hasn't been the case at all, because Jessica Simpson has been too busy being public enemy number one for any of that.

Although we know nothing about American Football, we're told that Tony Romo has had an exceptional season so far, scoring lots of kicktouches and setting up an unbroken string of surgewhipples, the likes of which the modern game has never seen before. But on Sunday Jessica Simpson went to see Tony Romo play in a game against the Philadelphia Crumplebums (or whatever) and Tony Romo played the worst game of his life, fluffing the snapcatcher and wasting the opportunity to force gamebreaker penalty stabs again and again.

Naturally, this has caused the Dallas Cowboy fans to blame everything on Jessica Simpson and the way she kept making moon-eyes at Tony when he should have been concentrating. Bloggers, writers and TV reporters have all openly speculated that Jessica Simpson's appearance in the stands and Tony Romo's performance slip might not be unrelated, but Tim Cowlishaw from the Dallas Morning News isn't so certain, saying that the blip:

"probably had more to do with the right thumb that was heavily bandaged after the game than it did that Jessica Simpson was on hand to watch her hero."

Still, whatever the reason for Tony Romo's bad game, he'd better watch his back because this is how it starts. Jessica Simpson's boyfriends always start off famous and successful, but over time they get worn into a braindead husk by Jessica's unique mix of dead-eyed ambition and relentless ditziness. Watch this space – as soon as Tony releases an album all about how sad he is, we'll know that the damage has been done and it's too late for him.

Read more: 

Jessica Gets Ribbed Over Tony Romo's Bad Day – People