It’s hard not to feel jealous of Ricky Gervais, since he seems to have Hollywood in the palm of his hand. Not content with appearing in any old cinematic guff swimming out our shores, one cheeky snaggletooth smile and he is whisked away to star in… well, any old guff swimming out of the US.

Alas, the man from sunny Reading has managed to attract a whole host of star-wattage toward his latest project – The Invention of Lying. Taking on co-writing and co-directing duties, not to mention starring in the film, you may think that this film is just a rehash of 90’s Jim Carrey vehicle Liar Liar.

That wouldn’t be a far off assumption – jumble around the ingredients and you’re left with the only man who can lie in an alternative universe where only the truth can be spoken. Replace Carrey’s gurning antics with a repressed, reserved English lead and, of course, hilarity ensures.

Except not quite. Gervais does what is expected, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what that is without using the over-used, nonexistent adjective ‘Brentish’, but this role actually surprises by using a bit more range, even touching on emotional depth.

Still, as Mark, Gervais has to rely on the supporting cast to stop this feeling like an American holiday for one of the UK’s top comedians. Jonah Hill and Tina Fey make best out of all too short roles which could have, and would have, definitely welcomed expansion. Most of the interaction and humour comes from Rob Lowe and the gorgeous looking Jennifer Garner (We once said that Gone Baby Gone was the best thing Ben Affleck has ever done – we were mistaken).

The two play their parts well enough, although apparently in this alt-verse you are also partially lobotomised. All the characters seem to have no range or depth, walking around with child-like naivety and often repeating the same lines to hammer home jokes (at least we think these instances were jokes). It seems odd that Mark is the only person thinking on any logical level. Does the ability to lie also make one more intelligent? It appears so.

It’s not a film that needs to be thought about too much. After all it is a comedy. But it is a shame given how rich The Office or Extras was. The film just meanders around obvious jokes and a reliance on star cameos. The only stand-out jokes being more of the understated humour and not necessarily the expected over-the-top jokes.

This isn’t Gervais on top form. It doesn’t quite reach the potential and, for a film that relies on one joke, it doesn’t explore it as much as it should. Towards the end, when religion becomes the target, it seems wishy washy, not as ballsy as it proclaims and just gives up on it after an uninspired Jesus costume.

This isn’t a remarkable effort. Although it demonstrates some of Gervais’ best acting work, The Invention of Lying lacks in the scipt and direction. Perhaps Ricky wasn’t the talented one after all, maybe it is time we all hail the comedy master that is Stephen Merchant! It is not a bad film, but just enjoyable fluff – it’s not that we’re angry with you Ricky, we are just disappointed.

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Some things we’ll go to the grave not knowing. Like, for example, do people really watch Brothers & Sisters? Really?

Also, we’ll never know what happened between Rob Lowe and his nanny Jessica Gibson. Last year Lowe claimed that Gibson was trying to blackmail him and sued her, only for her to hit back with a countersuit, saying that Rob Lowe waggled his willy at her and kept trying to put his hands in her knickers like some kind of box-faced Benny Hill sketch.

Anyway, Rob Lowe and Jessica Gibson have dropped their lawsuits now so, long story short, pfff.

Try as we might, we’ve never thought of Rob Lowe as a particularly sexual person. Why that is, we don’t know – it could be because his face looks like it was built out of unusually smug Duplo, or it could be that he once filmed himself having sex with an underage girl and so thinking of him in connection with anything sexual creeps us the hell out. It’s probably the first one, in retrospect.

And that’s why last year’s malarkey between Rob Lowe and his nannies was so unexpected. You may remember that last year Rob Lowe sued all of his staff - some for allegedly swearing, some for allegedly having sex on his bed and then stealing all of his medicine and, in the case of nanny Jessica Gibson, for allegedly lying about giving him a massage. The lawsuits came as a surprise for three main reasons:

1 – It seemed like quite a heavyhanded reaction.

2 - We’d previously forgotten that Rob Lowe had ever existed, and

3 – Surely Rob Lowe would be too busy licking posters of his own chest while listening a tape recording of himself performing Mr Loverman by Shabba Ranks to notice it had even happened.

But more of a surprise was that Jessica Gibson countersued Rob Lowe, claiming that he liked nothing more than to flap his penis around at her and try and shove his hands down her knickers. What really happened between them? We’ll never know, because both Rob Lowe and Jessica Gibson have decided to drop their lawsuits. EW reports:

Both sides have reportedly requested that their respective lawsuits be dismissed, according to court records. Lawyers for both sides declined to comment to People, so it’s not known if a financial settlement was involved.

In many ways we suppose that a quiet, confidential end to this dispute is in everybody’s best interest. Particularly ours because every time we’re reminded of anything to do with Rob Lowe we think of this song and then we have to spend two afterwards hours quelling the urge to hurt people.

Anyway, it’s all over now, and both Rob Lowe and Jessica Gibson can get on with what they enjoy doing best. We don’t know what that is in the case of Jessica Gibson, but for Rob Lowe we’d imagine it probably involves covering himself in baby oil, drawing a pastel picture of himself riding a unicorn across a rainbow and trying to lick his own face. That’s just how we imagine Rob Lowe spends the majority of his time.

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The way they jabber on when they get their awards you would think they are saving lives or something. Yeah, well done on doing your job and dressing up pretending to be someone you are not. Good job. But that is not the only thing it’s about.

It’s about laughing at celebrities. Hey, that’s the only reason we stayed up until stupid ‘o’ clock this morning to watch the damn thing.

Do you think our lives really hang on whether Benjamin Button got best make-up or not? Don’t think so somehow. What we really care about is who is going to make a fool of themselves during their acceptance speech. Or which actresses clearly got dressed in the dark.

OK, we also take sick pleasure in taking note of the ageing Hollywood stars which are about to keel over, but it’s mostly about laughing at stupid celebs. And just for your pleasure, we have come up with the best, err, sorry, worst moments in Oscars history.

Hugh Jackman – you almost made this list!!

Enjoy!

16. You really like Sally Field, no really
When: 1985

The oddest ever acceptance speech was by Sally Field when she won her second Oscar for the Depression-era drama Places in the Heart. It’s often been misquoted, but what she actually said was: “The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” Everyone must have been thinking, ‘can we take it back?’.

15. Michael Moore goes on and on
When: 2003

Please shut up.

14. James Cameron is the **** of the world
When: 1997

James Cameron has never been one to hide away just how good he thinks he really is. So when he ‘jokingly’ repeated the ‘I am the king of the world’ line from his film Titanic no one took it as a joke.

13. Sean Penn has humour bypass
When: 2005

Note to Sean Penn – get a sense of humour. Actors are there to be shot at and when you have someone like Chris Rock on stage you can expect a few jokes at Hollywood’s expense. So when he asked the question: “Who is Jude Law? Why is he in every movie I have seen in the last four years? Even if he’s not acting in it, if you look at the credits he makes the cupcakes or something,” it’s funny. Not to Sean Penn, who strode on to stage and announced: “Forgive my lack of humour … Jude Law is one of our most talented actors.” Seriously, get a life Sean Penn. If the pictures are anything to go by, Jude Law has a small part all the time.

12. David Letterman’s dog trick
When: 1995

OK, choosing David Letterman to host the ceremony in the first place was never a good idea. There was the inevitable Top 10 list, which we usually find about as funny as malaria. But then there was the moment he enlisted the help of an embarrassed Tom Hanks to help with a dog trick. Basically, the dog span around when everyone clapped – which, let’s face it, as an act would not even get into the second round of Britain’s Got Talent, never mind the Oscars. Suffice to say, the dog got more claps than the host. But it got worse for Letterman…

10. Vanessa Redgrave has a go at the Zionist hoodlums
When: 1977

You really have to know your audience. Having a go at the ‘Zionist hoodlums’ during her acceptance speech for winning best supporting actress for Julia was never going to win her many fans among Hollywood.
Surprisingly, she got booed off.

9. Marlon Brando goes Native American
When: 1972

Once again, making a political statement at the Oscars is pointless – it just makes you look stupid.
The worst example, of course, was Marlon Brando’s acceptance speech when he won Best Actor for The Godfather. Or should we say Sacheen Littlefeather’s refusal to accept the Oscar on Brando’s behalf because of the film industry’s treatment of Native Americans. If that was not cringeworthy in itself, Littlefeather was not even an Apache Indian, but an actress. Good point well made Brando, you coward.

8. Come on and get it, Frank!!
When: 1934

Director Frank Capra must have been grateful the Oscars was not televised back in the 30s. Otherwise, he would have been top of this list, no problem. What can be more embarrassing than thinking you’ve won an award, only to realise it’s someone else with the same first name as you? That’s what happened to Capra when presenter Will Rogers opened up the Best Picture envelope and said: “Come on up and get it, Frank!”
Capra, assuming he was the only Frank who deserved the award (for the film Lady for a Day) proudly walked on to the stage only to realise that Frank Lloyd was the winner for the movie Cavalcade. D’oh!

7. David Letterman’s Uma Oprah
When: 1995

Just when you thought it could not get any worse for Letterman, he decides to introduce Oprah Winfrey to Uma Thurman. “Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah”. Hilarious, see.

6. Jerry Lewis is shot down
When: 1958

You would think that asking a professional ‘funnyman’ to ad lib to fill up an extra 20 minutes at the end of the show would not be a problem. Well, Jerry Lewis was so bad at doing it, producers ended up putting a short film about pistols instead.

5. Kojak, Mr Miyagi and Dom DeLuise sing together
When: 1986

Can you even contemplate the awfulness of that? It was the opening act for the 1986 awards night. Words fail us.

4. Phil Collins wins an Oscar
When: 1999

What kind of world do we live in when Phil Collins wins the 1999 Best Song Oscar for You’ll Be In My Heart from animated movie Tarzan? Famine, disease, drought and then this? What makes it worse is that South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut came out the same year.

3. Um, Jonathan, Um, Demme, Um, wins, um,
When: 1991

Um, best director Jonathan Demme’s acceptance speech, um, is, um, really, um, dull.

2. Gwyneth Paltrow’s annoying acceptance speech
When: 1999

Wail. Sob, sob. Gwyneth Paltrow’s sob-fest is the single-most annoying acceptance speech of all time. Made us cry too.

1. Oscars hits a real Lowe point
When: 1989

A camp Rob Lowe danced to the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic Proud Mary with a woman dressed from head to toe as Disney’s Snow White. It was so bad even Paul Newman and Julie Andrews wrote a letter of disgust to the Academy.

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A D V E R T

Why? Because a new chapter has been opened in the supremely entertaining he said/ she said lawsuits between Rob Lowe and his former nannies. Now a second former nanny has sued the Lowes, but funnily enough Rob Lowe’s name doesn’t really come up.

Instead it’s Rob Lowe’s wife Sheryl Lowe who’s been hit with the brunt of accusations, and they’re ones you’ll want to read. Assuming, that is, you like hearing about a sexually-curious naked woman describing the size of her childrens’ penises and showing Rob Lowe’s cockrings to whoever happens to be passing. You do like that, don’t you?

Every man knows that if you’re going to hire a nanny, you need to hire one you can trust to keep quiet when you get drunk and start trying you put your hands in her pants. It’s an unwritten rule, and it’s one that Rob Lowe seems to have forgotten about.

Maybe it’s because he decided to sue his nannies for a million dollars for incredibly vague reasons, but Rob Lowe and his staff seem to have fallen out in a big way. Although on TV with his stupid right-angled head and solitary facial expression Rob Lowe looks like a bit of a dullard, according to his nannies his house is like a scene deleted from Caligula for being too randy.

Right after Rob Lowe launched his lawsuit, a nanny named Jessica Gibson hit back with a countersuit claiming that Lowe had exposed himself to her and tried to put his fingers in her pants. But just before you start thinking “Oh, his poor wife,” it turns out that she might not be so squeaky clean either.

Another former nanny, Laura Boyce, has also countersued the Lowe family and, as TMZ reports, her lawsuit makes some pretty fruity claims about Sheryl Lowe, including allegations of:

- Walking around naked, completely exposing herself to Boyce.

- Asking Boyce about the size of Boyce’s boyfriend’s penis.

- Once saying “laughingly that her husband’s (Rob) cockrings were broken,” allegedly showing them to Boyce.

- Talking about the size of her children’s penises.

- After Boyce allegedly phoned to say she wasn’t coming to work because she was sick, Sheryl allegedly screamed Boyce “got strep throat from sucking nigger dick. I mean black dick.”

Well well, who’d have thought that a woman who married the alcoholic star of a notorious underage sex tape could be so kinky?

Rob and Sheryl Lowe’s attorney Larry Stein has already hit back at Laura Boyce’s claims in a statement, saying:

“Having struck out against Rob Lowe, Gloria Allred now seeks to drag his wife and children into the fray. In response to a lawsuit against Laura Boyce by the Lowes, Ms. Allred filed a cross-complaint on behalf of Boyce, which contains false allegations, in an apparent attempt to divert the negative publicity which Allred’s client, [Jessica] Gibson, has universally received. Although framed as a sexual harassment claim against both Sheryl and Rob Lowe, the cross-complaint alleges only words by Sheryl and never mentions any words or conduct by Rob whatsoever. The alleged statements by Sheryl are totally unrelated to, and do not provide any support for, Gibson’s claims against Rob.”

So it looks like we’re back at square one again. Who to believe – the nannies, who could just be bitterly inventing claims as revenge for Rob Lowe’s original lawsuit; or Rob Lowe, who’s already wrecked his career with a sex scandal once, and his penis-obsessed wife?

It’s a tricky one, and we’re sure the truth will eventually come out in court. And we’re fine with that, so long as a) it’s mucky and graphic and goes on for months and months and contains ever more degrading allegations that nobody can recover from and b) it doesn’t involve Rob Lowe having to model his cockring in public. The world’s just not ready for a harrowing experience like that yet.

Read more:

Nanny Claims Rob Lowe’s Wife Sexual Harasser – TMZ

And we mean, it’s a doozy. Rob Lowe’s 24-year-old former nanny Jessica Gibson has hit back at Lowe with a lawsuit of her own that claims Rob Lowe alledgedly kept exposing himself to her, tried repeatedly to shove his hands down her knickers and grabbed her buttocks in all kinds of different ways.

This quarrel between Rob Lowe and his nanny is turning into an expensive game of he said/she said that’ll leave no reputations intact whatsoever. Having said that, though, perhaps it’s all a mix-up – perhaps Rob Lowe was only grabbing Jessica Gibson’s buttocks so he could see how dreamy it made his forearms look. That’d certainly make more sense.

We’ve always been under the impression that there’s something fishy about Rob Lowe. Maybe it’s the way his face is the exact dimension of a tortoise coffin. Maybe it’s the way his Visit California tourism advert seems desperately insincere. Maybe it’s the way he’s a recovering alcoholic who filmed himself having sex with an underage girl once. There’s just no way to find out for sure.

But when Rob Lowe sued his former nanny for a million dollars recently, it made even less sense than you’d expect it to. You’ll remember that Rob Lowe claimed that one nanny had told lies about an intimate relationship between them and was falsely claiming sexual harassment.That’s extortion.

Extortion is a criminal offence, but then Rob Lowe dismissed the help of the police when they offered to help him get to the bottom of the nanny’s claims. Which is unusual to say the least. Was Rob Lowe hiding something, you might ask?

Well, Jessica Gibson seems to think he is. That’s because Jessica Gibson is the former nanny who Rob Lowe is suing. And she’s now claimed in a countersuit that Rob Lowe allegedly exposed himself to her, tried to put his hands down his knickers and grabbed her buttocks. People reports:

Lowe, 44, the lawsuit… alleges, “placed his hand inside Gibson’s pants” several times from about Sept. 2005 to around Jan. 2008. The actor also allegedly grabbed her buttocks without her consent around Dec. 2007, according to the filing. In a statement read on Tuesday’s Today show, the Lowes’ attorney, Stanton “Larry” Stein, said: “Ms. Gibson’s older sister worked for the Lowes for 7 years. Ms. Gibson worked for the Lowes on and off for 7 years. She left at least 2 times, to pursue other jobs, and returned each time asking for more hours. She sent 2 emails the day after she left, both saying she loved the Lowes and her leaving had nothing to do with them but her heart wasn’t into being a nanny anymore. This is totally inconsistent with her latest allegations.”

So either Rob Lowe or Jessica Gibson is telling lies, but who? On the one hand, Rob Lowe’s behaviour around this lawsuit has been a little bit suspect, but on the other hand maybe Jessica Gibson is the liar here.

After all, being falsely accused of a sexual attack is probably every man’s worst nightmare. And what’s more: can you imagine Rob Low grabbing anyone’s buttocks? Of course you can’t.

That’s because Rob Lowe is too busy grabbing his own buttocks while looking in a mirror, yelling “Ow!” and snarling at himself in a creepy sexual way. That’s something we imagine that Rob Lowe does most days.

Read more:

Former Nanny: Rob Lowe Exposed Himself to Me – People

So far these efforts have included an advert for the California tourist board and the TV show Brothers And Sisters, but neither worked – because a) he's not really very recognisable these days and b) it's Brothers And Sisters, for God's sake. Who'd watch that?

So instead Rob Lowe has tried a different tactic – he's suing all of his employees. And rightly so, because we know we'd rather go down in history as the man who sued people for having sex on our bed, finding us attractive and swearing at them for being the bloke from Brothers And Sisters.

Rob Lowe's decision-making process has long fascinated us, mostly because it's so flipping demented. Here's a man who, moments before having sex with an underage girl, thought "hold on, I'd better film this," a man who agreed to sing a toe-curling duet with Snow White at the Oscars, a man who – and this is just sick – is in Brother And Sisters.

However, it gets worse. Rob Lowe has got in a strop about two of his former nannies and an ex-chef. Fair enough – sometimes staff can be genuinely difficult, like when Robert De Niro's maid stole all his stuff – but that doesn't seem to be the case with Rob Lowe. Instead, Rob Lowe is suing them for a million dollars for all kind of reasons – vaguely involving extortion of some kind – with the main focus being on one former nanny in particular. People reports:

"In a 26-page complaint against the longtime former nanny, Lowe's lawyers say the woman claimed to have 'a personal and intimate relationship (with Lowe), and, in effect, accusing Rob Lowe of infidelity'. On at least one occasion, the nanny 'bragged' about giving Lowe a massage during a trip with the Lowe family, according to court papers. (The couple claims it never happened.) The woman also allegedly claimed that Lowe sexually harassed her and that Sheryl Lowe was an 'overly demanding' and 'abusive' employer, who made 'inappropriate comments of a sexual and racial nature' to her."

A million dollars for 'lying' about a massage? That's pretty heavy-going. However, if the claims are true then it sounds as if a million dollars is a fair price – because we'd imagine you'd have to crack on to Rob Lowe pretty heavily for him to stop rubbing oil into his own nipples while staring at himself in a mirror and winking long enough to actually notice you.

As for the other ex-nanny and the ex-chef, Rob Lowe alleges that one had sex on his bed, stole medicine from his bathroom and broke some security cameras, while the other one swore a bit sometimes.

Actually, whether or not Rob Lowe has a valid case against any of these people here isn't the most important question. The most important question is what a two-bit TV actor like Rob Lowe needs all these servants for. He's not exactly A-list, is he?

On the other hand, maybe Rob Lowe does need some extra help around the house. Those dishes aren't going to wash themselves, are they? Not while he spends all day pouting into the back of a spoon and imagining how great it'd be to kiss himself. 

Which is how we imagine Rob Lowe spends all his free time.

Read more:

Rob Lowe Sues Former Nanny, Claims She Had a Crush on Him – People