This week’s uppers and downers.

Folded:

• Clothes on Film (cool site about clothes in movies. Goodness the editor is handsome)
• Edge of Darkness (Gibbo’s back like it’s 1995)
• David Lean in Close-Up with Jonathan Ross (BBC4, the only reason we pay a licence fee)
• Champagne price drop: pour it on your cereal (by Christmas a bottle of Moët will cost £15, or thereabouts. Possibly)
• Damien Hirst’s return to painting (critics say rubbish, so who cares what we think? It will irritate the hell out of people and that’s good enough for us)

Creased:

• PlayTV (you lose Freeview channels and the crappy PS3 remote can’t adjust volume on your telly. Nice menus though)
• Leona Lewis getting a slap (okay she’s annoying, but if that’s all the justification we need why didn’t someone just bat Lindsay Lohan or Peaches Geldof instead?)
• White Lies by Mr Hudson (this is why the Rusko remix works so well, because the original is downright dull)
• Robbie Williams on X Factor (pop stars singing live always sound cack, but blimey Robbie, it’s not like they put you on the spot)
• Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes (far worse than you’ve read. Even worse than the film in fact)

Ever since Plain Jane the Superbrain took off her glasses, smeared some slutty red lipstick around her mouth, and rubbed ice cubes on her stupid nipples, the celebrity makeover has been a must for anyone hoping to increase their fame.

For those unaware, the whole Plain Jane thing happened in the Australian drama serial, Neighbours. She went from geek to whore in a matter of moments.

It was astonishing. Completely astonishing. And it got us to thinking about what the greatest celebrity makeovers of all time might be. We narrowed it down to this small bunch.

1. Joaquin Phoenix

In a career spanning almost twenty years, we have become used to Joaquin’s various physical changes – the majority of which have been a result of the natural aging process, and the awkwardness of puberty. Most recently, however, he’s embarked on a road to total gorgeousness by letting his face-pubes run amock. This has resulted in a gentlemanly beard, leaving Phoenix at the forefront of hobo chic. Rumours suggest that he has even been bathing in milk to achieve a sexy Cleopatra level of putrid, sour stink. Hollywood is watching in shocked, silent awe.

2. Amy Winehouse

When she first arrived in the line of public vision, Amy Winehouse was just your everyday jazz singing stage schooler. Her body was almost completely blemish free, and she was around the average weight for a young woman. Exactly, how boring. Thankfully, she, like Phoenix, embarked on a makeover of her own, by covering her body in strange tattoos – usually only seen on the arms of drunk sea dogs, or alarmingly violent men in one of the country’s many jails. And filling her veins and lungs with popular street drugs like heroin and crack. After that the weight completely fell off. She even started her own line in blood-filled ballerina shoes, presumably aimed at kids. Bloody work horse.

3. Claire from Steps

Like Winehouse, when Claire from Steps was actually in Steps, she looked like every other girl walking down every single street on the entire planet – blonde, sparkly, very beautiful. Hence she went about her makeover by plopping herself down on an exercise couch and stuffing great big handfuls of McDonalds into her greedy mouth, using both of her arms – which, by the way, were becoming considerably weaker with every passing day. After months of hard work, the makeover was complete, and she was a big fat blob. A massive wobbly-bottomed jelly-woman. Great look, Claire. But did H follow suit? H did not. Jesus, H. Christ.

4. Robbie Williams

Probably the most fascinating of the makeovers, Williams focussed the majority of his attention on having a personality makeover. This involved lots of personal work, lots of staring angrily into a mirror. Lots of shouting to the heavens to send him more money, more success, more women. It involved talking endlessly to anyone who would listen about his every waking emotion, each individual thought delivered as though it were caked in finest platinum.  He even spoke a little bit about aliens, before going back to discussing himself again. Makeover complete, he is now a total cretin.

For more from Josh go and have a look at Interestment.co.uk

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You get to travel the world, stopping occasionally to jump around on stage, then, in the evening, you can wile away the hours brainlessly passing groupies around, necking gin. You don’t have to think for yourself, which makes certain popstar decisions near impossible to understand.

Below are four maniacs who decided to brave the world on their own, only to realise that they’d probably just made a massive mistake…

1. Robbie Williams
Granted, Williams could – should he wish to – sprint around town hurling money into the air like it was confetti at a local wedding. But where is his joy? His genuine popstar joy? That’s right, he hasn’t got any. While his old Take That buddies swan around enjoying a second phase of fame, with nice haircuts, children and long term lovers, ‘Rob’ spends much of his time presumably staring silently into a mirror waiting for his beard to grow. Shivering. Needs friends.

2. Mutya Buena
It was 2005 when Mutya decided that she was far too cool for the Sugababes. What a mistake that was. Since then, she has covered herself in strange tattoos, most of which look like entire extracts from Harry Potter books, replaced her front tooth with an unopened Oxo cube, and baffled the nation by WALKING OUT of the Big Brother house, without anyone realising that she’d ever walked in. As for her reinventing herself as a street version of Amy Winehouse… yeah, didn’t really happen, that.

3. Dane Bowers
Face it, Another Level were actually good – even Jay-Z thought so. They were also one of the few UK boybands who didn’t appear to be fashioned from the mind of an overweight and embittered gay man, desperately hunting for kicks. They enjoyed a big hit with Freak Me – American for Have Sex With Me – before Dane Bowers, the podgy lead singer, thought it best if he trod his own weighty path to stardom in 2000. Uh-oh. After a string of singing disasters, he ended up humiliating himself on Totally Boy Band – a very bad MTV show, where five has-beens once again smelt the stench of career failure in their ravaged noses. And, unfortunately, Dane is now widely considered to be a poor girl’s Dean Gaffney.

4. Kerry Katona and Bryan McFadden
These two share a joint place, thanks to their brief stint as a twisted version of Posh and Becks that didn’t last long. In the case of Katona, since going it alone away from her charming sing-a-long sisters in Atomic Kitten, she has been on a steady decline into total mania, topped off with a genuinely tragic appearance opposite Schofield and his goons during the latter stages of last year. The girl. Was. Wasted. McFadden, meanwhile, bade a cocksure farewell to his Westlife cohorts in 2004 – fully expecting to emulate Robbie Williams’ chart success – only to smash the hit parade with all the impact of a flea hurtling into a flannel. He has since decided that he might marry that skinny girl who used to be in Neighbours.

This has been a guest blog by the marvellous Josh Burt from the exceptional Interestment. Go and be his friend.

Team hecklerspray likes to bond over a game of croquet and snifter of port, but not Take That. Take That like group wanking sessions. Or at least they did. Honestly.

Because Take That’s fans were all twelve when they split up, it probably wasn’t best letting that sort of sordid information cripple their ears. But we’re all grown up now so, yes, Take That did all used to masturbate furiously together. Happy now?

When people meet for the first time, it can be slightly awkward. After asking someone what their name is, what they do for a living, who their favourite death metal band is and what they had for tea the previous evening, conversation can get slightly stale. So what happens next?

In what sounds like the making of a second-rate low-budget porn film, it appears that the manly men of Take That used this lull in the conversation to whip out their cocks and tug away at themselves.

Talking to Q magazine, Howard Donald revealed that he and former bandmate Robbie Williams had a wank session together when the band started out, saying:

“It were me and Rob… it only happened once.”

We aren’t sure if it was in a hotel room, a bedroom or a room where naughty boys are sent. Still, it is slightly peculiar to indulge in that sort of behaviour with your fellow man.

Maybe they were in a hotel together without a swimming pool and they desperately wanted to see who could survive underwater the longest without drowning. Perhaps we are wrong to judge and should applaud them for inventing such a creative game of wank endurance.

But it gets worse. If it wasn’t enough spreading each other’s seed around, some of the more nervous members sat and watched. Mark Owen added:

“That was an odd one, that. I think I was more of an observer.”

No Mark, you’re all odd. Though with a new single coming out in March it is one of the strangest promotional techniques we’ve read in a while. You’re all utter freaks.

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Well, the very same Robbie has been papped at his LA home, lounging by the pool with his lady – and by the looks of it he hasn’t half piled on the pounds.

He’s never been stick thin, and fair play to him for that. But he’s always been known as the ‘chubby one’, especially since Noel Gallagher labelled him ‘a fat dancer’ all those years ago.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Between ripping off viewers with rigged text-in competitions and now the news that a British Comedy Award they won was also rigged, the cheeky Geordie bobbleheads are now neck-deep in shit. Which, since it’s Ant and Dec, is about three inches of shit.

Now Ant and Dec, who appear to be oblivious to all these vote-fixing shenanigans, have said they are ‘appalled’ by the scandal. Hopefully not appalled enough to quit television forever, though, because that just leaves film and music for them to return to and, lord, haven’t we suffered enough already?

Last year the world of television was exposed as an utter fraud. Literally everything you saw onscreen was a deliberate attempt to mislead you. The Queen was seen throwing a strop when she didn’t, Richard and Judy asked you to phone in for competitions after the winners had been chosen, Penelope Cruz’s eyelashes didn’t really exist and Alan Titchmarsh was revealed to be a 30-foot mechanical reptile warrior in a fleshy costume who interviewed guests via several clever perspective-based camera angles.

But perhaps worst hit were Ant and Dec. Now that they’re big stars – OK, maybe ‘confusingly underdeveloped-looking stars who are quite famous’ is more accurate – Ant and Dec are now allowed to have their names slapped all over anything they present. There’s Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, Ant & Dec’s Gameshow Marathon, the sadly uncommissioned Ant & Dec’s Chlamydia Swab… Live! – but, while this above the line profile is good for a host’s ego, it also drops them right in the crapper when anything goes wrong.

And, boy, have things gone wrong. ITV has been fined a record £5.67 million for its participation in these vote-rigging scandals, and shows presented by Ant and Dec account for a whopping £4.2 million of this. Still, Ant and Dec say they were unaware of any vote-rigging, ITV has promised to reimburse cheated viewers and everyone’s very sorry. The end.

Or it would be the end, if only it hadn’t just been revealed that Ant and Dec fraudulantly won a comedy award in 2005 because it was the only way to get Robbie Williams to come to the show. The Sun reports:

The Geordie lads were wrongly given a top prize at the 2005 British Comedy Awards. It should have gone to funny-girl Catherine Tate, who was picked by viewers. Telly bosses gave Ant and Dec the gong because superstar Robbie Williams would only attend the glitzy show if he could present his pals with an award… Ant and Dec’s spokesman said: “They are so upset and completely appalled. They have been lucky to win many awards and would never want to win an award in this way.”

Oh, you’ll never win an award again, Ant and Dec, that’s for sure. Unless they start handing out awards for Most Unknowingly Untrustworthy TV Presenters Who Look A Little Bit Like Foetuses, that is. Which we don’t think they do.

Honestly Ant and Dec, we’re not sure we can ever believe anything you have to say again. Or anything you ever said in the past, for that matter. “Watch us wreck the mic”? Cuh, we wouldn’t be surprised if you never wrecked any mics at all, you bloody unwittingly misleading bastards.

Read more:

Ant & Dec: We are appalled – The Sun

Robbie's biggest fan is his mum, and she spoke to the illustrious Stoke Sentinel about Robbie's Take That return. She's probably a more reliable source of information than Robbie Williams, too, because we've always got the feeling he'd say he went down on a horse if it gave him an ounce of extra publicity.

Robbie's mum said:

"On the question of him doing something with them, I feel that will happen. It would be something he wanted to do."

Well, getting your mum to do your PA work for you is new for Mr. Williams, who normally just gets his head fried with drugs and then goes to rehab and blubbers to the tabloids about his 'hell'. Personally we'd prefer to see Robbie's old-school, sad masochistic destructive form of promoting his albums.

His much publicised fall-out with Take That singer Gary Barlow might stand in the way of a reunion, but these two media whores will gladly let bygones be bygones if it gets them mentioned by the 3am girls. Robbie has continuously denied he would rejoin the group, but seeing as how his last album was panned by critics and Take That's album was a commercial success, a reunion looks very likely, especially when his mum added:

"I'm thrilled that out of all the negative stuff that happened in the past, there's now something great happening".

Well, keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks, as there will probably be some response from Robbie's agent soon. In the meantime Take that will be arranging the necessary changes to their touring schedule, such as finding arenas which can fit Robbie's huge stomach and unbearably big ego, along with buying every packet of Walkers Crisps they can find.

Read more:

Robbie Williams Might Rejoin Take That – NME

[story by Paul McLoughlin] 

And just to prove how quick to apologise he is, Robbie Williams has just said sorry to former Take That manager Nigel Martin Smith because he claimed in a song that Smith was a thief who stole funds from Take That's earnings when actually he wasn't. And it was one of the most heartfelt apologies we've ever heard, with a lawyer making a forced, court-ruled apology on behalf of Robbie Williams in his absence to a lawyer accepting the apology on behalf of Nigel Martin Smith in his absence in a courtroom. However, it's not all good news – if Robbie Williams is back in the news, does that mean he's famous again?

Does a falling tree make any sound if nobody is there to hear it? It's an important question, because we're in the middle of a similar, yet slightly updated, conundrum – if Robbie Williams libels you in an album that nobody buys, does it still count as libel?

Actually, it's not a conundrum at all, because it turns out that actually it is libel and if you take Robbie Williams to court for it there's a chance he'll end up paying you half a million quid and saying how sorry he is.

That's what's just happened to Nigel Martin Smith, anyway. You'll remember Nigel Martin Smith as the former manager of Take That, and the man who Robbie Williams has held a near-compulsive grudge against for over a decade. The grudge revealed itself most explicitly on a track called The 90's on Robbie Williams' latest album Rudebox, where Robbie apparently claimed that Martin Smith had stolen money from the band.

Whether this is true or not we just don't know – latest statistics show that Robbie Williams only actually sold one copy of Rudebox, and that was to his Mum, and she hasn't got round to listening to it yet. But even though Robbie Williams changed the lyrics to The 90's at the first sniff of trouble, Nigel Martin Smith still came after him.

And the case resolved itself this morning when Robbie Williams was ordered to pay Nigel Martin Smith an undisclosed sum of damages – thought to be somewhere around the £500,000 mark – and publicly apologise to him. Robbie Williams didn't do that himself – he stayed in LA where it's cheaper to work through 60 cigarettes, 36 double espressos, 20 cans of Red Bull and all sorts of Seroxat every day – but his lawyer did an awfully good job of apologising quite profusely:

"Robbie Williams wishes to make it clear to his fans, and the public at large, that he did not intend these lyrics to be taken at face value. Specifically, Robbie Williams did not intend to allege that Nigel Martin Smith has ever stolen any funds from Take That or anyone. Prior to the release of Rudebox, the lyrics to The 90's were changed by Robbie Williams in order to avoid any further misunderstanding. Nonetheless, Robbie Williams wishes now to apologise publicly and unreservedly for the distress that the original publication of those lyrics caused to Nigel."

And now that's all over, perhaps Robbie Williams and Nigel Martin Smith will be able to put their differences behind them and maybe even become friends. It's not like they have nothing in common, is it? Nigel Martin Smith and Robbie Williams are both northern, tubby and have their best work behind them – plus if two grown men can't bond over a deep resentment that Gary Barlow is more successful than they are, what can they bond over?

Read more:

Robbie Pays Dear For 'Outrageous' Lyrics – Sky