Yesterday we said that Paula Abdul was probably going to leave American Idol. And she really was, too.

She was going to leave. It wasn’t just a dimwitted bluff to make American Idol pay her more money. Paula Abdul was definitely leaving American Idol. Unless the show decided to pay her a lot more money, in which case she’d consider staying. But it’s not about money. Its about being treated with a basic level of human decency. And money. It’s mostly about money.

Anyway, Simon Cowell has revealed that he wants Paula Abdul to stay. That was probably our point.

When Paula Abdul threatened to leave American Idol yesterday because Ryan Seacrest was being paid more money and Simon Cowell was being paid more money but she wasn’t being paid more money, many simply dismissed it as empty posturing. But those people don’t know. They don’t know the sacrifices that Paula Abdul has made to appear on American Idol.

Paula Abdul had plenty of work before American Idol came knocking, you know. Sure, her pop career has stalled a little, but she still had her choreography work. And she was, um, the answer to the pub quiz question “What’s the name of that pop star who did that rubbish song with the dancing cartoon cat and then stopped being famous to the extent that most people assume she’s now dead?” And sprawling around your house off your chops on painkillers takes up more time than you’d expect, you know.

So Paula Abdul is quite happy to walk away from American Idol to further pursue her hobbies of crying in public and smashing up her face on tiny dogs. But she might not need to, because her knight in shining armour has arrived. Now, yes, the armour is only shining so that the knight can only look at his reflection in it while licking his lips in a creepy way, and he’s riding a horse that’s been reinforced to cope with the awesome weight of his hefty manboobs, but Paula Abdul isn’t in a position to be choosy at the moment.

That knight, if you hadn’t already guessed, is Simon Cowell. And he wants Paula Abdul to stay on American Idol, damn it. People reports:

“She’ll be fine. She’ll be on the show,” judge Simon Cowell told Extra on Monday. “I don’t get a lot of say. I’ve just made it clear that I want Paula on the show. Full stop.” Meanwhile, host Ryan Seacrest expressed a similar sentiment. “I think as far as I know you’ll see everybody back,” he told the TV show. “I hope so.”

It’s beautiful to see the American Idol family pull together for Paula Abdul like this. They love her, they don’t want to see her go and their display of unity is bound to sway the bean-counting producers into giving her exactly what she wants.

Unless, you know, what she wants is more money than Simon Cowell. Because then the bitch can walk. Seriously, she’s gone. And she’d better not Simon Cowell in the eye on the way out, either. He knows people. You hear him? HE KNOWS PEOPLE!

Retweet this post or follow hecklerspray on Twitter here

As far as American Idol goes, Simon is the brain, Randy is the mouth and Kara is like the appendix or something.

And then there’s Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul is American Idol’s beating heart. Admittedly it’s a slightly terrifying heart that seems to be drunk a lot of the time and often shrieks to itself for no particular reason, but it’s still a heart. What would American Idol be like without Paula Abdul? It’d be professional and consistent. And rubbish.

But we’ll see that next year, because Paula Abdul is about to quit American Idol in a pay dispute.

Even though fewer and fewer people are watching American Idol – perhaps because the whole show is essentially three months of bad karaoke followed by a nightmarish Gillette ad of a winning single – it seems like the principal American Idol stars are about to have their wildest wishes granted in the show’s current contract negotiations.

Ryan Seacrest, for example, is going to get $45 million to present American Idol for the next three years. Simon Cowell is apparently after $100 million for the same period of time. And Randy Jackson – well, actually Randy Jackson has just been given a ball of scrunched up tin foil because that’s what he thinks money is. But what about Paula Abdul, the woman so beloved by American Idol viewers that some of them occasionally will kill themselves in slightly misguided demonstrations of their adoration for her?

Nothing. Not a peep. Apparently nobody has even begun to talk about granting her wildest wishes. Why? We just don’t know. Maybe it’s because Paula Abdul’s wildest wishes involve fairy tears and unicorns that can poo gumdrops. Or maybe it’s because whenever anyone tries to negotiate her American Idol contract with her, she gibbers on incomprehensibly for 45 minutes, then starts applauding something that only she can see, then falls over. Feasibly it could be either of these two things.

But whatever the reason, Paula Abdul is furious. So furious, in fact, that her longtime manager of three weeks David Sonenberg has told the media that Paula Abdul will leave American Idol unless her demands are met. Essentially it’s the plot of Die Hard 3, except it probably won’t end with Paula Abdul dying in a helicopter crash. The New York Daily News reports:

“She’s not a happy camper as a result of what’s going on. She’s hurt. She’s angry. I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual; I think unnecessarily hurtful. I find it kind of unconscionable and certainly rude and disrespectful that they haven’t stepped up and said what they want to do. Very sadly, it does not appear that she’s going to be back on ‘Idol.’”

So there it is. Paula Abdul is the Kim Jong-Il of American Idol. While producers are busy sorting out Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, she’s threatening to bomb Hawaii because people have stopped taking her seriously. She’s bluffing, of course – like Kim Jong-Il she probably won’t carry out her threat, accept whatever meagre scraps are thrown her way and then, um, develop the early stages of pancreatic cancer.

It’s not really a comparison that stands up to much inspection, is it? Sorry.

Retweet this post or follow hecklerspray on Twitter here

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Lindsay Lohan? We’ll tell you. Inspirational.

No, really. Inspirational is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Lindsay Lohan. It is. It is. It is. Shut up. It is.

Alright, inspirational is almost the last word that comes to mind when you think of Lindsay Lohan, sandwiched between ‘well-adjusted’ and ‘clothed’. But Ryan Seacrest clearly thinks that Lindsay Lohan is inspirational, because he’s just hired her to be the judge of his new reality TV show, provisionally titled America’s Next Top Harrowing Trainwreck Hasbeen.

Say what you like about Lindsay Lohan, but never say that she’s lost her dignity. Actually, scrap that. You may as well say that Lindsay Lohan has lost her dignity, because in retrospect that was one of the first things to go. In fact, claiming that Lindsay Lohan still has her dignity is plainly the worst kind of bullshit that only someone who had never heard of Lindsay Lohan would say. So, you know, sorry.

What we meant to say was that, despite all the horrible things that have happened to Lindsay Lohan in recent years – the arrests, the protracted rehab stints, the sudden lesbianism, the nudity, Georgia Rule – at least she never succumbed to the curse of reality television. True, her family did, but that was only because her mother is such a desperate attention-whore that we suspect it was either star in a reality TV show or get her bum out for strangers at bus stops.

But not Lindsay Lohan. She long ago decided that a Denise Richards: It’s Complicated-style reality series wasn’t for her, partly because her life is already comprehensively documented in magazines and on the internet, and partly because there’d be other choice but to call the series Lindsay Lohan: It’s A Staggeringly Morbid Spectacle That Will Puncture Any Notions You May Have Developed Around The Idea That There’s An Overwhelming Goodness At The Heart Of Humanity, which wouldn’t have really fit into TV guides particularly well.

But all of that ends now, because it’s been reported that Ryan Seacrest has picked up Lindsay Lohan to be a judge on his new reality TV show. The New York Daily News reports:

“Met with Lindsay last night about a show idea I have for her…it helps people and gives others a second shot!” Seacrest wrote on Twitter. “Still putting it all together.”… Lohan, 22, also mentioned details of the pair’s new project on her Twitter page. “Working on a really great project for television – I am excited!” she tweeted. “Something meaningful like Extreme Home Makeover on ABC… ”

According to reports, the new show will be an American Idol-style show which is all teary-eyed sob-story and no hopeless Aerosmith cover versions. Whoever is deemed to have the most miserable life each episode will be given a million dollars to turn their lives around and definitely not spend any of it on drugs and glue-sniffing prostitutes.

And, just to reiterate, Lindsay Lohan is going to be a judge on this show. A judge. Not a contestant. A judge.

Even though a) we strongly presume that Lindsay Lohan thinks that she’s the only living person on the entire face of the planet, b) paying Lindsay Lohan to offer advice to people who no longer want to have troubled lives is a little bit like paying Jeffrey Dahmer to offer advice to people who no longer want to rape, torture, murder, dismember and eat arbitrarily-chosen members of the public and c) the extent of Lindsay Lohan’s advice is likely to be “Hey, have you thought about making a low-budget movie about a pair of amnesiac lapdancing twins? It certainly worked for me!” Lindsay Lohan is actually going to be a judge on Ryan Seacrest’s new TV show.

It sounds horrible. We literally can’t wait for it to start.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

We have some breaking news. Apparently America likes speccy idiots who scream like bellends and are rubbish.

It must do. Because on last night’s American Idol Danny Gokey - the man with a face like a remedial-level bespectacled foot who had performed Aerosmith’s Dream On in the style of a traumatised burns victim – wasn’t eliminated. Instead, Allison Iraheta was told to pack her bags and instantly leave the public consciousness.

Allison Iraheta did OK on American Idol, and she’s young – she’s got the rest of her life to consistently fail to reach the same heights before dying embittered and resigned.

Before we get into last night’s American Idol, let’s just deal with the issue that everyone’s thinking about, OK? Randy Jackson is a mystic soothsayer and we all need to worship him as an almighty deity. There, we said it.

It’s true – before American Idol started to get serious, Randy Jackson proclaimed that a boy would win. And a boy will win – thanks to Allison Iraheta’s elimination last night, it’s a fact that American Idol will be won by either Danny Gokey, Adam Lambert or Kris Allen. This means that Randy Jackson can see into the future, and everything he says is Nostradamus-style coded prediction. So based on the vocal output of Randy Jackson throughout the season, what else does the future have in store for us? Dogs, apparently. Lots of dogs. Dogs that aren’t really feeling it. They’re the worst kind of dogs.

But let’s panic about the uprising of our new canine overlords later, because last night Allison Iraheta was voted off American Idol. Sad, yes, but Allison should take solace from the fact that the people who voted her off American Idol were also the same people who decided that Danny Gokey isn’t an offensively clueless turdmouth who deserves to spend the rest of his life in total obscurity, so they’re obviously not the full ticket.

So what will we remember most about Allison Iraheta? Well, there’s the succession of increasingly bad haircuts, obviously. And the fact that she had a voice like a man. But most of all, we’ll remember that Allison Iraheta’s name was so hard to spell that we deliberately avoided writing about her in case our spellcheck caught fire and burnt down. Oh, the memories.

But anyway, although it’s goodbye to Allison Iraheta, it might not be farewell. American Idol host Ryan Seacrest had some comforting parting words for her last night, as Reuters reports:

The red-haired singer’s swan song had the two women judges standing and cheering, and afterward Seacrest, who also hosts a radio show, made a prediction about Iraheta. “I know I’m going to be playing you on the radio real soon,” Seacrest told her.

That’s right – coming soon, Ryan Seacrest’s new radio competition entitled Guess The Name Of This Anonymous Idiot Who We Briefly And Wrongly Thought Might Be Famous Once A Couple Of Months Ago. We can’t wait!

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Humanity could soon be wiped out by couple of Mexican pigs with the sniffles. But relax, Britney Spears is on it.

If Ryan Seacrest is right, then Britney Spears plans to repopulate the planet in her image – she’s apparently pregnant again. This means, in years to come, Britney Spears will be seen as Earth’s new Eve figure – identical to the old Eve but with worse skin, madder eyes and, somehow, even fewer clothes.

Anyway, Britney Spears is reportedly pregnant again. All that Eve stuff was a distraction to stop you howling in despair like we did when we found out.

You know how most performers exist on an album/tour/album/tour cycle? Not Britney Spears. She like to mix things up, which is why she’s currently in the middle of a gruelling album/tour/baby/baby/harrowing mental breakdown/vagina/album/tour/baby/vagina/breakdown/vagina/breakdown/vagina cycle. And the sharper among you will have noticed that, since Britney Spears is currently on tour, the next stop obviously involves a baby.

So let’s cut to the chase. Despite being so overwhelmingly controlled by her father that we genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to one day catch him with his hand up her bottom, Britney Spears is apparently pregnant again. And this news comes direct from Ryan Seacrest, so it must be true. MTV reports:

Britney Spears is said to be pregnant one more time following reports from the US. American idol host Ryan Seacrest broke the alleged news on his LA radio show where he claimed he heard the information from a ‘reliable source.’

So is Britney Spears pregnant? It’s hard to say – Britney’s rep has denied it, but who are we to argue with Ryan Seacrest? And determining how pregnant Britney Spears is has got a lot harder since she cleaned up her act – it’s not like we can wait for her to get out of a car in a miniskirt and check to see if there’s a tiny pair of hands and a terrified face jutting out of her clodge any more, is it?

And also, if Britney Spears is pregnant, who’s the father? Before this alleged pregnancy was announced, Britney Spears was being linked to all kinds of men. There was one of her backing dancers, for instance, along with her tour manager, a member of Good Charlotte and her ex-husband Kevin Federline.

Having said that, though, it shouldn’t be such a hard job to work out who the dad is – it’s just a case of working out the face you’d pull if an evening of fun that you’d entered into out of nothing more than ironic curiosity had suddenly turned into a lifetime of reluctant responsibility, and then matching it with the men we listed above.

Personally, though, we’re praying that the baby belongs to Kevin Federline. Not because we’re romantic or anything – but because if it isn’t, it’ll be so mentally advanced compared to Britney’s other two children that they’ll probably end up mistaking it for a robot and killing it before it even learns to speak.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

See what we mean? 100 times more sensational – that’s the stuff people want to read.

Had Seacrest been entirely consumed it probably would have been due to his utter refusal to preach Bible things to the Assyrians, whom we can all agree have been on a hot streak of wickedness in the past few weeks or so. He’d have to sit in the sharks belly just long enough to think about what it is he’d done, and sternly resolve to improve.

Actually, at this point it is widely unknown if Seacrest’s shark attack is a direct result of him offending the Almighty. We, however, having watched over ten minutes of last season’s American Idol, are pretty sure it was.

What more evidence can anyone ask for?

Nobody is sure what type of shark it was that took a chunk out of ol’ Ryan Seacrest, but it probably wasn’t venomous. We know this because the biter is widely assumed to be Asian due to the fact it covered him in soy sauce and prodded him with two big plastic chop-sticks before any toothy incision was made. As any science book will tell you, no breed of Asian shark carry any venom poisonous to man.

Of this, Seacrest is safe.

Fox News has specifics on the attack:

“So there Seacrest was, leisurely ocean-swimming in nothing short of olympic form, when next thing he knew he was being forced up against a sandwich pickle and a mayonnaise covered piece of toast.”

Did we attribute that to Fox News? No, we meant this is from them:

“Ryan Seacrest was taking a swim in the ocean over the weekend when he was bitten by a shark, he said on his KIIS-FM radio show Monday. The “American Idol” host said he was “about eight feet out” when he felt something swim by him. “I thought it was a stick,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what had happened.” Then, he said, “I saw it swim! He took a bite, and he left.”"

Word has it Seacrest is currently revising his resume to include ‘food’ alphabetically between American Idol stage-guy and radio personality. This will reportedly look impressive should he ever need to apply for work at Nabisco or Duncan Hines.

Also Larry King might like to see it on there. A little variety never hurts when it’s coming from the guy who might one day replace you.

That is to say his posture is poor – that of his guests is nothing less than perfect. They all sit there straight-backed with pinkies extended while flipping through etiquette books and properly addressing each piece of silverware. King’s got a cooking show, right? No?

But as we said – King’s been at this interviewing business for some time now – on his current show since 1985 if our sources are correct. But he can’t keep at it forever you know. If he’s ever going to dedicate himself to making more Jewish/Mormon hybrids he’s gotta act fast. He’s getting older – soon his ovarian tubes will shrivel, drying his man-milk reservoir to an endless low. Before long, for baby making he’ll have to rely solely on fluids drawn from Lake Michigan, which has a one-part spoo three-parts water ratio.

And when he retires, who do you think will have the hunched-at-a-desk prowess, the swivel-chair stamina and the never-ending suspender collection to replace him?

Why, Ryan Seacrest, apparently.

American Idol has long been known as a launching pad for careers in the music biz. After all, it’s where that Clarkson guy got his start, and recent information tells us the show’s even responsible for retroactively discovering Puff Daddy back when he was still full of both puff and daddy. They did it with wormholes or something. Randy Jackson wrote a paper on it once.

Or he didn’t.

The latest career to explode off the singing stage is that of Ryan Seacrest – the guy who we think was possibly voted out in the third round back in season five after he formed a failed alliance with Richard Hatch and the bassist from Bauhaus. We’re not sure about that actually, as the only time we tried watching the show a merciful God intervened and exploded our television by having a gasoline-covered raven fly into the open back and get jammed between channels 22 and 23 (forever in your debt, your Highness).

This Seacrest guy is supposedly in talks to take over Larry King’s show. Don’t believe us? Maybe you’ll believe MSNBC:

“Ryan Seacrest might be adding hosting duties of another kind to his schedule in 2009. A source from within CNN says that Seacrest, who has filled in for his friend Larry King in the past, is involved in “serious negotiations” to take over “Larry King Live” around year’s end. King told The New York Times in April 2007 that Seacrest would be his first choice to take over the show when the time came.”

Don’t get too excited now, others at CNN have denied the story outright.

If it did happen though, we think the show’s format would probably change a tad. Pre-teen girls would be able to vote-in texts to save their favorite politicians, and once per season a tipsy Paula Abdul would be brought in to continue saving Somalia.

By collecting and mass-mailing cheese sticks.

Starving third world warlords need calcium too.

Read More:

Ryan Seacrest is Wanted to Take Over Larry King Live – Stupid Celebrities

And if that stuff you did included slathering kisses up Jennifer Garner's neck and verbally assaulting Ryan Seacrest on live global TV on the Oscars red carpet, then you probably know how Gary Busey has been feeling this week.

Except, no, you really don't. Because Gary Busey phoned Ryan Seacrest's radio show yesterday to explain his bizarre Oscars antics. And it turns out he's like that all the time.

You're probably sick of the Oscars by now. We are. We already know everything that happened - No Country For Old Men won and nobody watched and Whoopi Goldberg got ignored and was sad. And that's about it. Or at least it would be, were it not for the gloriously unhinged red carpet shenanigans of Gary Busey.

You know. Gary Busey. From Lethal Weapon. And Predator 2. And Under Siege. Barely even counts as an actor. Went to the Oscars anyway. Doesn't matter. Because in one fell swoop on Sunday night Gary Busey provided the sole Oscars highlight by staggering up to Ryan Seacrest live on TV during the pre-show red carpet segment, shouting something along the lines of "You! Youuuuuuu!" and then wiping his damp mouth up and down the neck of a clearly disgusted Jennifer Garner before stumbling off again. It was perfect, and it's here.

Now, your average human being would probably wake up the next morning feeling slightly shamefaced about everything and desperate to either hide away in private forever or justify their actions. Not Gary Busey, though – he phoned up Ryan Seacrest on his radio show yesterday not to apologise but to try and explain what he was trying to babble at him at the Oscars in the most nonsensical way imaginable. E! Online quotes:

You are to me, when you're working, an innocent champion of honesty. Your heart has a way to embrace the truth in your delivery without looking like you are reading a script. Everything looks spontaneous. What spontaneity is—spontaneity comes from an invisible idea that is there before the creation began. And you have that naturally, so I just wanted to pay you a compliment. But I didn't know you were in the middle of an interview, I was just moving through there.

We'd love to transcribe the whole Gary Busey interview, in fact – it's full of talk about catching dreams and the etymology of the word 'fan' – but you can click the link below for edited highlights.

All in all, though, Gary Busey's bewildering behaviour has led us to believe that maybe he might be just the thing to turn around the Oscars' dwindling fortunes. Imagine an entire Oscars ceremony hosted by Gary Busey. It'd be awesome – he'd divide his time rambling on enthusiastically about nothing and dribbling wads of man saliva over whichever female he happened to be nearest to. 

In fact, forget the Oscars. Gary Busey deserves his own VH1 reality TV show. That's how big he deserves to be.

Read more:

Gary Busey Rambles, Deems Ryan Seacrest an "Innocent Champion of Honesty" – E! Online 

No, wait, our mistake – Britney Spears would want to cut a mumbled half-interview with Ryan Seacrest short to take a shower. Yesterday morning in what appears to be her only piece of actual promotion for the album that could make or break her future as an artist, Britney Spears had a telephone interview with Ryan Seacrest in which she exclusively revealed her love of cookies and how she thinks the world is slightly cruel. Then Britney abruptly cut it short to listlessly meander off to shower.

Still, at least we know that Britney Spears showers now. We had wondered.

Call us old-fashioned, but if we had spent the last three years of our lives thumping out accidental redneck babies from our vagina, divorcing the redneck who put them up there in the first place and having disquieting bald-headed suicide attempts in rehab where we honestly believed ourselves to be the devil, we'd want the promotion of our comeback album to be bulletproof.

You know the kind of thing – wall-to-wall interviews, maybe a TV special, a big tour – just to reassure the world that we were still the pleather-loving virginal schoolgirl of a pop star they came to love a decade ago. But that's just us. Britney Spears, you see, has other ideas.  

So far Britney Spears has announced her comeback by miming to songs in clubs, miming to songs in front of the whole world looking like a concussed prostitute, wiping dog turds on expensive dresses and losing her children to a cornrowed pirate thanks to a judge calling her a giant drug addict. All Britney needs to do now is send a hungry bear into a post-natal clinic and she'll have completed the full house of badly-advised album promotion techniques.

But yesterday Britney Spears decided to change this by doing some actual promotion for Blackout by letting Ryan Seacrest interview her on his radio show. And, yes, Britney was in bed at the time. And she didn't seem to have a clue about anything going on around her. And she cut the interview short without saying goodbye so she could go and have a shower. But it still counts as an interview, OK? Take 40 reports on what few full sentences Britney Spears did manage to murmur out before she realised how dirty she was:

Seacrest asked her all about her custody case, and if she is doing everything she can to regain some custody of her children, to which she replied, "Oh God yeah. People say what they want and do what they do and it's sad how people, how cruel our world can be… At the end of the day… you've just got to know in your heart that you're doing the best you can and that's basically it." Britney, clearly not across the details of her court case, said, "That's like, all in the court. Stuff like that, my lawyers know all that stuff." 

Then Britney was gone, leaving her cousin Alli Sim to blurt some halfhearted excuses about her whereabouts before hanging up.

But, as much as she basically managed to reinforce every single negative preconception about her during the interview without managing to look even slightly self-aware, it does go to show what a class act Britney Spears is. After all, it took Heather Mills a full day of berserk self-promotion to get the planet to realise what an idiot she is, but Britney Spears achieved the same reaction just by mumbling four sentences about nothing in bed and then taking a shower.

We should really be applauding this woman for her efficiency, if anything.

Read more:

Britney's Quick Pre-Shower Interview - Take 40