It must be, because Anne Heche is moping around court because her TV show got cancelled and now she can’t even pay her child support bills.

Seriously, is this how bad the credit crunch has got? It’s scary to think that not even a famous actress like Anne Heche can pay for the upbringing of her children because the measly $65,000 she gets for each of her tiny movie roles won’t cover the cost of keeping her two international homes, her cars and all her other various expenses. Maybe we should stage a telethon for her.

Remember that TV show Men In Trees? No, us neither. Shame it wasn’t better, really, because if it was then maybe Anne Heche wouldn’t have had to go to court just now and whine about being so poor.

You’ll know Anne Heche, of course, as the woman who regularly does things that make you feel a little bit sorry for her until you realise that actually she’s being a dick. And the terrible Psycho remake, probably. Last year Anne Heche made the news for losing custody of her child to her ex-husband Coley Laffoon. Sad, but only until you realise that her main argument for keeping custody was that her ex-husband wanked and played ping-pong a lot.

It’s a pattern that stretches way back, past the time that Anne Heche started a lesbian affair with Ellen DeGeneres and then broke it off so she could tour around America telling everyone how God had cured her of her homosexuality all the way back to when she invented the alter ego of hers who could talk to aliens. You know, the one who was Jesus’ half-sister.

Anyway, it’s time for the cycle to come around again, because Anne Heche has gone to court claiming that she can’t pay her child support bills because she’s been a tragic out of work actress since Men In Trees got cancelled. E! Online reports:

“Since January 18, 2008, I have been unemployed and had no income from unemployment except for one very short term contract for a movie role for which I received a total of $65,000, approximately the amount I received for one episode of Men in Trees [which has not been renewed for a third season],” Heche’s filing states. Among the expenditures listed are private school tuition for Homer, rent for her L.A. residence, the mortgage on her Vancouver abode and miscellaneous auto and personal expenses. Heche says the $240,000 she received in January from the sale of her and Laffoon’s Hollywood home is already long gone.

Anne Heche got paid $65,000 an episode for Men In Trees? Yeah, we remember that time we got paid a total of $2,275,000 just for going to work 38 times as well. We barely know how we managed to get by. We literally had to dig through other people’s rubbish because our servants kept serving us our whole roast suckling pig on cold plates. Cold plates! What did they think we were? Animals?

Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that the court granted Anne Heche’s wish to suspend her child support payments for the month of July, potentially putting their son’s private school tuition in danger. That might be a good thing, though – after all, the less educated he is, the longer it’ll take him to realise that his mother seems to be a Curly Wurly short of the full selection pack.

Read more:

Anne Heche Doesn’t Have to Pay for July – E! Online

Luckily, one poverty-stricken family in Hull will be getting that exact treatment. Minor royal and all-around annoyance Fergie is going to live with them to help shine a light on what life's like for the cruel minority who, for whatever reason, don't live in massive New York penthouse apartments.

Fergie's doing this for a new ITV reality show, of course, called The Duchess In Hull. It'll be broadcast in the summer, backed by an ITV2 spin-off show called Someone Get Me The Bleach, One Of Them Just Touched Me And I Don't Want To Catch AIDS.

Say what you like about ITV, but you can't deny that it loves its poor people. The Jeremy Kyle Show may as well be called Bad-Suited Pikey-Taunt Hour, while every couple of weeks there'll be a Tonight With Trevor McDonald special called I Sold My Baby To Buy Chips.

This could be because poor people are the only ones desperate enough to spend whatever pittance they earn texting ITV competitions to try and win one of the cash prizes that keeps getting dangled an inch from their face during GMTV and This Morning – but regardless of the reason, ITV has decided to rope in a minor royal to augment its celebration of poverty this summer.  

Fergie – not the knicker-wetting Black Eyed Pea Fergie but the middle-aged ginger woman who used to be married to one of the Queen's sons Fergie – has signed up for new ITV reality show The Duchess In Hull, where she'll visit Preston Road, one of the poorest communities in the country, trail a bunch of single mothers and tut every time they eat crisps as The Times reports:

She promised to use her experience of “eating disorders, low self-esteem, family conflict, financial crisis, divorce and bereavement” to help families on the estate to improve their lifestyle…Families in Preston Road have some of the lowest incomes in Britain, as well as high levels of teenage pregnancy, crime and unemployment. The estate has been selected for a £55 million regeneration scheme. The duchess said: “I do like being with people at street level, where I feel they accept me as I am.” … On her first day she was taken on a shopping expedition with fellow single mothers to Netto, a low-budget supermarket. The duchess picked out cream crackers and margarine.

Funny that, because if we were Fergie we'd hate for people to accept us as we are. That's because Fergie is essentially a needy overprivileged aristocrat who was briefly the most ridiculed woman in the country and seems to think that poor people will take to her because she's a single mother, even though one of her kids is on the cover of fucking Tatler this month and her mother-in-law is the sodding Queen of pissing England. Accepting us for what we are would be the last thing we'd want people to do.

Anyway, it seems as if Fergie's stay with the poor did the trick, because one woman she stayed claims to have lost a stone in a single week thanks to Fergie's intervention. Well, stamping your feet and screaming "I hate that stupid jumped-up cow!" non-stop does burn up a lot of calories.

Read more:

Duchess of York gives diet and debt advice to city’s poor families - Times