America. Bless you for the insanely good things you’ve given the world. Muscle cars, hamburger joints, rock ‘n’ roll and television will always be your crowning glory and us Limeys will forever be in your debt.

However, your taste in television shows is awful. From a country (nay, virtual continent) that gave us Taxi, The Simpsons, M*A*S*H, Roots, Ren & Stimpy, The Muppet Show and more, what in Christ’s name are you doing frittering away your time with dross like Two And A Half Men?

Seriously. What’s with liking Two And A Half Men so much that it breaks network records? Eh? And don’t think we haven’t noticed how much you enjoy the unswerving dreck of The Big Bang Theory.

For some inexplicable reason, 28.74 million Americans tuned in to watch last night’s season premiere of Two And A Half Men.

Of course, there was a fair amount of curiosity surrounding the show because Charlie Sheen’s character, Charlie Harper, was killed off, replaced by a soaking wet Ashton Kutcher. Nearly 29 million people actively stopped doing something to settle down with one of the worst TV shows ever aired.

The AV Club report that, aside from a few post-Super Bowl specials and couple of event programmes, last night’s …Men was one of highest rated scripted shows, ever. Ever, ever, ever. By the close of the show, audience figures grew to 30 million.

That’s lazy laughs from vaguely dirty jokes and a cast that is as dead behind the eyes as the Sheen which exited the show in such spectacular fashion.

Two And A Half Men is the kinda show that feels like a nursing home for misogynistic comedy, where we see three men resenting each other, filmed before a live laugh-track. Of course, some people love shows like this. They’re so insultingly one-dimensional and old-fashioned that they slip on like a comfortable pair of old socks.

But these rat-a-tat comedies keep gurgling out of America. Look at the irksome How I Met Your Mother fercryinoutloud! The aforementioned Big Bang… which has a running joke of Look How The Indian Character Talks Funny.

In Blighty, we air these shows in the mornings or tucked away on bit-part channels like E4. That’s the home for this dull-ass gag attacks. That’s not to say we’ve not been infected by this lowest common denominator comedy. My Family is written by an American style team of writers and, regrettably, The Inbetweeners is also ploughing the line of misogynistic nose-bag that everyone so loved in the ’70s.

All the mentioned shows employ a tactic of throwing as much as possible at a viewer and seeing what sticks. Effectively, it’s like standing before a muck spreader and waiting to be hit by a diamond.

Alas, with a huge chunk of America’s TV population tuning in for the new Two And A Half Men, you can’t but feel like they’ve invited it. The United States gets what it wants and, in this instance, the Ashton Kutcher they deserve.

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Daybreak, ITV’s woeful attempt at going head to head with BBC Breakfast, is in trouble as ratings continue to plummet.

The breakfast show, hosted by former One Show presenters Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, is only averaging somewhere around 500,000 viewers per show.

500,000 sounds like a lot, but when you consider that even Channel 4’s god-awful Seven Days experiment is pulling in more viewers per episode, you know that something is going seriously wrong.

But why are viewers abandoning ITV’s brand new and sparkly magazine show? The fact that Daybreak is one of the most mediocre and drab light entertainment programmes on UK television could be the problem. Even Loose Women is more entertaining than Daybreak, if only because watching 4 decaying hags fawn over Michael Bublé whilst their genitals audibly creak with every chair shift makes all of us here at the Hecklerspray office chuckle every time.

Another problem could be the presenters. Adrian ‘face of a car crash victim’ Chiles and Christine ‘if I show enough leg maybe people won’t realise I can’t present’ Bleakley.

There was a media circus surrounding the two personality deficient presenters when they defected from the BBC to ITV and they’ve failed to live up to the hype.

The One Show was bearable because they were only on screen for half an hour at most, but with Daybreak the audience is subjected to the train wreck that is the chemistry between Chiles and Bleakley for what seems like a lifetime.

Plus there’s no getting over the fact that Chiles has that whole Austrian kidnapper look about him and every time he glances at Bleakley you sense he’s plotting something sinister.

Daybreak will inevitably get a revamp sooner or later, but unless every morning is in fact dedicated to Chiles carrying out the evil plot we all suspect he’s running through in his mind every time he lays eyes on his co-presenter, don’t expect it to amount to much.

If anything, the most depressing fact to emerge from the whole Daybreak debacle is that there are half a million people out there who willingly gaze upon Adrian Chiles’ mangled face every morning whilst eating their breakfast.

What’s wrong with them?

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As we all know, on How I Met Your Mother on Monday night, Britney Spears managed to get through about 10 lines without crying or showing anyone her vagina.

So it goes without saying that Britney Spears will probably get nominated for an Emmy for it. Seriously.

Since the Britney Spears episode got How I Met Your Mother its highest-ever ratings, there's now a bundle of genuine speculation that Britney Spears will snag an Emmy nomination for it. Which we're fine with, so long as the Emmys open a new category entitled Best Transparent Stunt Casting Of A Mentally Ill Celebrity To Revive A Mostly Rubbish Sitcom. And even then it'll be a toss-up between Britney and Franz Kafka's rib-tickling turn on According To Jim.

There's something really odd about the way that self-destructive celebrities are given awards. What's that? Amy Winehouse has been taped smoking crack a couple of months after she almost died from a drug overdose? Quick, someone give her a Grammy. What's that? Naomi Campbell has punched a boat to splinters with her fists? Quick, someone give her a, um, actually, Naomi Campbell doesn't really win awards, does she? Bad example, let's move on.

And now it looks like history might just repeat itself. A couple of months ago, the only awards that Britney Spears could have possibly won were the Most Disturbing Dance Teacher award and a prize for being the only person in history who does a British accent worse than Don Cheadle. But now? Now Britney Spears has been on a mediocre sitcom for about 15 seconds, so it's only right she should get an Emmy for it.

Even though the cast of How I Met Your Mother would only admit to being 'quite impressed' with Britney Spears' cameo on Monday's show, by and large TV critics have fallen over themselves to praise Britney's performance in what we can only assume to be a heavy-handed overcompensation for the kicking she gets from other parts of the media. And, yes, that means there's Emmy talk. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Emmy voters love to hail stunt casting in those guest-acting categories. Often when big-name stars condescend to visit the boob tube, they get rewarded with nominations just, so it seems, for showing up — like Brad Pitt did when he accepted an invite for turkey dinner on "Friends"… Now consider all of the people who tuned in to see Britney Spears on "How I Met Your Mother" last night: 10.6 million. That's the highest viewership ever for the CBS sitcom. Audience size matters when you weigh who might get nominated for an Emmy because that first round of voting is determined by a popular vote of TV academy members.

Can Britney Spears really win an Emmy for How I Met Your Mother? Stranger things have happened, and who knows what'll happen if Britney gets an accolade for her work, rather than for shaving her head and getting her chuff out. Plus, if an Emmy for Britney Spears means that House doesn't win quite as many this year, then we're all for it.

But let's not forget that this year's Emmy Awards don't take place until September. Was Britney Spears' fleeting appearance on How I Met Your Mother memorable enough to keep her in voters' minds until then? Worse still, what if Britney Spears gets her act together between now and September? The whole mental illness thing is Britney's USP as far as the Emmys go. If she wants to stand any chance of winning this award, Britney had better go out and do something hopelessly batshit right now. Right now. Batshit!

Read more:

Can Britney — egad! — be nominated for an Emmy? – LA Times 

Looks like the easiest way for TV executives to boost ratings on their TV shows is to find the youngest girl they can and make her pregnant.

That's what has happened with Jamie Lynn Spears' Nickelodeon show Zoey 101. The just-broadcast season finale of Zoey 101 – the first episode since Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy – recorded viewing figures twice as high as usual.

Special mention should be given to the lucrative Dirty Old Middle-Aged Men demographic, which we imagine has gone sky high since Jamie Lynn Spears revealed that she was sexually active.

Although in theory the biggest victim of Jamie Lynn Spears' teenage pregnancy – thanks to a perfect storm of genetic makeup, family history and the fact that it's doomed to spend the rest of its life on the same family tree as Kevin Federline – the second biggest was thought to be Zoey 101, Jamie Lynn Spears' zany Nickelodeon teen sitcom.

You'll remember, of course, that days after Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy Nickelodeon swiftly killed off Zoey 101 for fear that the sight of a pregnant teenager on TV would corrupt the world's youth so much that they'd start drinking from Daddy's whisky bottle and listening to this new-fangled rock and roll music.

At the time it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do, because nobody wanted to watch another Sabrina The Teenage Witch where the lead character is obviously about 45 years old and holding a cigarette behind her back as she delivers her lines, but now it seems like a strange phenomenon is developing.

It seems as though people actually want to watch Zoey 101 more now that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. Sky reports:

Following the announcement that Brit's sis is to be a teen mum, more than double the normal amount of viewers tuned in to watch the season finale of Jamie Lynn's Nickelodeon show Zoey 101… Jamie Lynn's baby announcement appears to have in fact drawn people in. With 7.3 million viewers tuning in for the end of Zoey 101's third season, Nickelodeon have now confirmed they'll be going ahead with a fourth season to be aired this February.

Obviously most of these viewers will have watched the show out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, wondering to themselves "Who is this slut?" and then being slightly stunned that, unlike her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears can speak using full sentences and a range of more than two extreme emotions.

And – we'll hold our hands up too here – the news of Jamie Lynn Spears getting pregnant made us watch Zoey 101 too. Admittedly it was shit and we turned off after about ten seconds, but it's more than we've managed before. So maybe this tactic actually works – pregnant children are the way forward.

Having said that, not even the knowledge that a four-year-old boy got knocked by a goat could make us watch Hollyoaks, so don't get any ideas Channel 4. 

Read more:

Jamie Lynn's Baby Hit – Sky