To be fair, everyone knew what to expect anyway – 90 minutes of Britney Spears going “Cuh! What happened THERE? Lorks a-lummy, I went proper bananas for a while, didn’t I? Oh well, I’m better now. Buy my record” – but that didn’t stop all the interesting parts of the documentary creeping out weeks ago.

But now that Britney: Have I Told You About My Record has been aired in America, we now know everything that happened in it from start to finish. So what did happen in Britney: You Know What’d Make A Lovely Christmas Present For All Your Loved Ones? My Record? Nothing. It turns out that people weren’t leaking the interesting parts of the documentary, just the bits where Britney Spears used actual identifiable words.

Britney Spears fans on either side of the Atlantic have equal reason to be jealous of each other today. In Britain, Britney’s new album Circus has been released but her warts and all documentary Britney: For The Record isn’t aired until tonight. Meanwhile, in America, Britney: For The Record was shown last night but Circus isn’t out yet.

So who has it better? The country that has already seen Britney Spears tearfully picking through the remains of her broken life, or the country that has already got full access to the sound of Britney Spears going “Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow” during a song where she appears to be begging her own father for sexual intercourse?

Well, the truth is that nobody wins. The British don’t win because the Britney Spears album can be heard for free anyway – and also because a victory that involves hearing Britney Spears going “UHH Pappi LOVE you! UHH Pappi LOVE you!” again and again isn’t really a victory at all – and the Americans don’t win because Britney: For The Record has been leaked so extensively that it’s barely worth watching anyway.

Before Britney: For The Record was shown anywhere, everybody knew that at some point during it Britney Spears would say that her life was worse than prison, and that she’d also confess that it was loneliness that sent her barmy. But was that just the tip of the iceberg?

No. No, that was pretty much the entire iceberg. Unless it was a special kind of iceberg that you can see 99% of on the surface, with the remaining one percent being made up of some sort of garbled nonsense about driving a car that doesn’t really make any sense. MTV reports:

Explaining her breakdown, Spears said that she had let the wrong people into her life. “[It was] a really bad time in my life. … I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say I was OK,” she admitted. “Maybe I had traumatic stress. I just remember I did not want to be at home. When I was in my car, I was driving and I was going somewhere.”

Now we’re not sure if that’s a metaphor for Britney’s life, or if she was literally driving a car somewhere at some point, but that’s not important. Nor is the fact that most of Britney: For The Record was leaked out so long ago that not a single person who watched it could have been even slightly surprised by anything that happened in it. No, what’s important is the overriding message of Britney: For The Record, the universal message that everyone can learn a little from.

And, if you even needed to be told, that message is “Oompapa oompapa oompapi oompapi ooh papi ooh papi ooh lammy ooh lappy ooh papi uh ow.”

Profound, we’re sure.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

That’s not particularly surprising – years ago Madonna had her brain removed to make space for more bicep and her tear ducts were cemented up because she didn’t weep holy Kabbalah water – so we’ve come to expect steely, robotic reactions to everything from her. However, Madonna has now finally decided to accept her divorce and mention it in public for the very first time.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Madonna has said how sad she is about the divorce, and how grateful she is that her heavy workload can distract her from it. Wow, sadness and gratitude? We’ve seen Swept Away and Body Of Evidence – that’s literally about six more human emotions than we thought Madonna was capable of.

When Madonna married Guy Ritchie almost eight years ago, there was a lot of speculation about why the world’s most famous woman had decided to move to England to live with a man who looks like a potato and can’t decide whether he’s Ray Winstone or Terry Thomas. And all the time it was staring us right in the face.

Madonna married an Englishman because she’s essentially English herself. She rides horses, she speaks in something that she believes is an English accent, she wears vastly inappropriate clothing for her age (see: Loose Women) and – most importantly of all – instead of expressing an emotion, Madonna would rather roll up her feelings into a little black ball and push them down into the pit of her stomach where one day they’ll surge out of control and prompt an act of staggering violence on someone who doesn’t deserve it. It’s the British way.

You can see this fear of emotion in Madonna’s professional output – she’s so lifeless in all of her films that often we have to be reminded that we’re not watching a film about a veiny ventriloquist’s dummy, and the most profoundly emotional thing she could come up with on her most recent album is “tick tock tick tock tick tock” – but at least her recent divorce from Guy Richie has yanked some feeling out of her.

Last week, after their divorce was finalised, you’ll remember that Guy Ritchie reacted by smiling and looking pleased while Madonna gave everyone the finger like a surly teenager would. But, of course, in reality Madonna is as raw and vulnerable as you’d expect her to be in this situation – all the posturing and aggressive defiance was just to paper over the cracks in Madonna’s broken heart. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

In an interview with the Associated Press, she says her intense schedule “provides a distraction that keeps me going,” adding, “I’m sad about my personal life, but I feel very blessed and very lucky that I have the opportunity to do what I do in my professional life. It would be horrible if I was just thinking about getting a divorce and had nothing to do.”

Look, we never said they were very big cracks, OK?

But now that Madonna has finally decided to allow herself to properly reflect on the divorce in a healthy and emotionally naked way, maybe she open herself to the remaining stages of being a 50-year-old recent divorcee, too.

For instance, first Madonna is bound to feel some resentment, then loneliness, then slowly she’ll come to terms with her loss. And then finally she’ll get shitfaced in a pikey disco in a small provincial town and end up wanking a frightened 18-year-old off in a toilet. That, too, is the British way.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

But Michelle Williams has probably the most genuine reason for missing Heath Ledger – not only was she engaged to him, but she also gave birth to his daughter. And because of this, it’s apparent that Michelle Williams is still having trouble coming to terms with Heath Ledger’s death.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, Michelle Williams broke down upon hearing Heath Ledger’s name, telling her interviewer that her grief is only getting worse over time. Warning: the following probably isn’t going to have too many jokes in it…

We’re all going to be hearing a lot more about Heath Ledger in the coming weeks and months. He may have died early this year after accidentally overdosing on prescription medication, but thanks to his turn as The Joker in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger is going to be all over the place in the run-up to the Oscars.

Variety is already running ‘for your consideration’ adverts mostly of Heath Ledger’s giant face in an attempt to win him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar he’s been linked to since almost the day of his death. And, with The Dark Knight’s DVD release and Oscar-friendly theatrical re-release in January, Heath Ledger is going to be rammed into our faces for some time to come yet.

For casual fans that’s bad enough – the last thing anyone wants is for his turn as The Joker to have the life analysed out of it – but it’s probably even worse for Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger’s ex and the mother of, possibly, his only child. Although they split up last September, Michelle Williams is still finding it hard to deal with Heath Ledger’s death, as The Boston Herald reports:

“It’s so sad. I just wake up each day in a slightly different place . . . grief is like a moving river.” Although the two “Brokeback Mountain” stars had split before Ledger’s death, they remained close. “It’s a strange thing to say, because I’m at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse,” she said. “It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone.”

It’s sad, but in time Michelle Williams will learn to appreciate the positives from all this. For instance, although it might sting to be known as Heath Ledger’s semi-widow at the moment, in years to come she’ll be thankful that at least she wasn’t known as Michelle Williams from that crappy Ewan McGregor film that nobody watched.

And if Heath Ledger hadn’t died at a tragically young age, would her daughter Matilda still be named as the seventh hottest tot in Hollywood by Forbes magazine? No, no she wouldn’t. But she is now. In your face, eighth-place Madonna’s adopted African kid!

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Advert:

In fact it’s fair to say that so much of the Britney Spears documentary has now been leaked that the only new footage that’ll come as a surprise to anyone watching the whole thing next week is a three-second snippet of Britney Spears gazing into the middle distance and wistfully humming the theme-tune to Animal Hospital.

For instance, People magazine has now seen an exclusive preview of Britney: For The Record, and the most exciting bit left to review seems to be when Britney Spears starts crying and says of her life “It’s bad. I’m sad.” Bad? Sad? That’s the most eloquent you can be, Britney? Disappointing. We just expected something more profound from the poet behind “Womanizer womanizer/ You’re a womanizer/ Oh/ Womanizer/ Oh.”

If there’s one thing we hate it’s a spoiler. Honestly, when people told us that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense, or that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, or that Dumbledore is going to die in the next Harry Potter film, it really took the shine off our day.

So imagine how bummed out we were when people started blurting spoilers about the new Britney Spears documentary Britney: For The Record all over the place. We were furious! Apparently Britney Spears gets sad and cries a lot in it, which is absolutely the last thing we expected from a recovering psychiatric patient who’d had a high-profile mental breakdown, and now our enjoyment of it is going to be totally ruined!
We already knew that Britney Spears thought her life was like a prison sentence, only worse because never actually got to kill anybody and she still has to look after those poxy kids of hers (or something). But in case that wasn’t enough, People has seen a special preview of the documentary and seems determined to blab about it until its jaw falls off. Here’s what it said:

Spears takes topics ranging from her failed romances with Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline (”I never really faced it, and I just ran,” she says of divorcing him) to why she let “bad people” into her life. Her excuse: “Because I was lonely.”  At one point, Spears – whose father has permanent legal conservatorship over her affairs – bursts into tears while discussing her situation. “It’s bad,” she says. “I’m sad.”

As well as this brief rhyming extravaganza of unrestrained misery, Britney Spears apparently uses the documentary to lament of her loss of focus and control in recent years, how she isn’t cool any more and that she only agreed to be filmed because she didn’t like how she was being portrayed.

Which is good – judging by what we’ve heard about this documentary so far, if Britney Spears wanted to be portrayed as a hollowed-out constantly-sobbing paranoid depressive forced to perform against her will by a league of shadowy all-controlling authoritarians, then she’ll be super pleased with how it turns out.

In fact, Britney: For The Record might just go down in history as one of the most berserk marketing ideas ever. Two days after it gets broadcast, Britney Spears’ new album Circus is released, and that’s something that Britney wants to promote by being as uncomfortably miserable as possible on camera. What sort of circus is this anyway? One of those creepy European ones?

Therefore, we’ve decided to crown Kim Kardashian as our favourite girl in the whole wide world. Following that tape she made where she had loads of sex with that bloke, Kim Kardashian has apparently been sobbing her eyes out because she was voted off Dancing With The Stars this week.

True, that means there’s a full 18-month gap between Kim Kardashian having sex and Kim Kardashian crying, but we have to take what we can get. Anyway, the point is that Kim Kardashian was sad to be voted off Dancing With The Stars last night. But on the plus side, Kim can use this new free time to really try and work on closing that gap between the sex and the crying, maybe getting it down to a week or a good night’s sleep.

Differences between Britain and America, volume 14 – on British dance-based reality TV shows, the contestants tend to be retired journalists and wholesome television presenters. In America, though, they tend to pick people who are only famous for having sex on the internet.

And that’s how Kim Kardashian ended up on Dancing With The Stars this year, alongside that other noted sex tape star, 82-year-old Cloris Leachman. We’re just kidding, Cloris Leachman has never made a sex tape. But we heard rumours about a filthy wax cylinder once.

However – and we’re not going to pretend we know how – Kim Kardashian was voted off Dancing With The Stars last night, and reacted in the same way that most of us would if we discovered that our home nation had rejected us due to our participation in a grotty little sex film a year and a bit ago. People reports:

Though she concluded the show with a playful rendition of one of their earlier dances, once the cameras were off Kardashian rushed to the waiting arms of her family and immediately broke down into tears. Kardashian’s publicist followed the inconsolable bombshell around the press line with a box of Kleenex since, once the waterworks started, there was no stopping the outpouring of genuine emotion.

Yeah, we know all about following Kim Kardashian around with a box of Kleenex, right boys? There was no stopping the general outpouring of human emotion that night! Right? Anyone? Boys? No? Anyone? Too much?

Anyway, Kim Kardashian’s partner seems to think that her innate shyness was what got her thrown off Dancing With The Stars. You see, Kim Kardashian just doesn’t like performing in front of large groups of people like that. She prefers intimacy, you know. Intimacy and a camera. Intimacy and a camera and a bloke’s ding-dong slapping around the inside of her mouth. Give her all that and Kim Kardashian probably would have won Dancing With The Stars.

Still, Kim should realise that there’s no point getting upset about being voted off a reality TV show. These moments are always a stepping stone to bigger and better things, so who knows? Maybe this time Kim Kardashian will be starring in a sex tape with two men. Or two men and a horse. Or two men and a horse and a pregnant diarrhea-stricken midget dressed as Heather Mills. The sky’s the limit.

It all make so much sense now – if you’d just spent several months making a family drama that nobody’s going to watch, and had to do it in the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus, getting tanked up on prescription medicine and parking your car in the middle of a busy motorway would seem like a perfectly sensible thing to do, too.

And now Heather Locklear has been arrested for DUI after allegedly doing exactly that, the director of this new movie has spoken out. Jim Amatuilli thinks that Heather Locklear’s DUI arrest is ’sad’, especially since it followed Heather’s ’solid’ work on the movie. Solid? That’s the best adjective he could drum up in her greatest hour of need? No wonder Heather Locklear went mental. And that’s not any solid. That’s solid compared to Billy Ray Cyrus. Honestly, next time just go for the more sympathetic ‘Oh, just kill yourself already,’ Jim.

Following Heather Locklear’s DUI arrest this weekend – and the accompanying mugshot that makes her look like she’s just been expelled from clown school – the race is on to uncover exactly what caused her problems in the first place.

On the surface it seems simple – Heather Locklear went to rehab and allegedly tried to kill herself because her alcoholic husband left her for her best friend. Essentially it’s an episode of Jeremy Kyle, but with better teeth.

However, if you ask Jim Amatuilli – the director of Heather Locklear’s new movie which co-stars Billy Ray Cyrus that we’re not even going to name because you’re not going to watch it anyway – then there’s another reason for Heather Locklear appearing to get shitfaced on prescription drugs and stopping her car in the middle of a state highway for no reason.

And that’s that she’s, you know, getting old and stuff. Jim Amatuilli told the New York Daily News:

“It is very easy to see the effects of the ‘show-biz’ environment, and the stress it puts on relationships and families. Add to that the pressure that women face as they get older and roles narrow, with so much ‘value’ put on superficial elements, it’s sad to watch the results play out.”

You hear that, Heather Locklear? Jim Amatuilli speaks the truth. And we agree with him – you now have three options to get yourself back on the right track:

1 - Get a proper job.

2 - Go back in time and dedicate yourself to learning your craft instead of just coasting by on a series of mindlessly trashy roles that you were only offered because you looked half-decent in a bikini and the producers all thought that you might let them have a go on your fanny if they booked you.

3 - Realise that your ageing face grows a new flaw every day, and commit yourself to a merciless lifetime of constant plastic surgery procedures that – while possibly convincing someone standing far away that you superficially look quite young – will remove all trace of your character, gradually warp you into a freakish featureless splotch and ensure that you only get picked to star in films like The Perpetually Unhappy Walking Scar From The Planet Botox in the future.

Either one’s fine.

In a relationship? Valentine's Day will make you grumble about spending £1.70 on a card. Single? Valentine's Day will make you feel worthless and unloved. Bai Ling? Valentine's Day will make you steal magazines and batteries to the value of $16 from an airport store before you're caught and arrested.

Bai Ling – star of no good films ever – was arrested for shoplifting on Wednesday, and she blames it on splitting up with a boy right before Valentine's Day. Makes sense – sometimes the only things that can mend a broken heart are some celebrity magazines and batteries to the value of $16.

We've never really written about Bai Ling before, but that's because we weren't even sure if she qualifies as a celebrity. Yes, Bai Ling may have been in such cinematic masterpieces as Wild Wild West and Taxi 3 - which cinematically puts her up there with Dame Helen Mirren – but, well, we've just never really seen the point of her other than a funny a haircut and the slight idea that she looks a bit dirty.

And then Bai Ling went shoptlifting for some rubbish items and blamed it on a boy who made her sad. Welcome in, Bai, welcome in.

Apparently Bail Ling was due to fly from LA to Albuquerque for a film on Wednesday, but she was collared by a gift shop employee for trying to leave without paying for two celebrity magazines and two packets of batteries. True, it's not quite as decent airport entertainment as wetting yourself or vomiting champagne all over the place, but it's a start.

However, we shouldn't look upon Bai Ling's arrest as a bad thing, because we have much to take from it. Firstly, she looks on the verge of tears in her mugshot, which is a refreshing departure from arrested celebrities looking all adorable, and secondly, Bai Ling has the universe's best excuse for the arrest, as E! Online reports:

The 37-year-old actress and scenester exclusively tells E! News that she split with her new boyfriend Wednesday before she was scheduled to fly from LAX to New Mexico to begin shooting a film, turning it into an "emotionally crazy" day for her. She was dealing with the "huge problem of breaking up [before] Valentine's Day" when she was arrested for shoplifting, Ling said, adding, simply, "Wrong boyfriend."

It's actually quite sad, really, and we wish our emotionally-detached hearts were more like Bai Ling's, and that the visceral pain of a break-up could only be soothed by wandering into a gift store and trying to hamfistedly nick a bunch of stuff. So, yes, Bai Ling has our pity.

Enough pity to make us watch one of her films? No. We're not fucking mental.

Read more:

Bai Ling Blames Bust on Breakup - E! Online 

Us too, but it turns out that everyone was wrong about it – because Ryan Phillippe has just been interviewed in W Magazine and he revealed that he was so cut up about divorcing his vastly more successful wife that he literally didn't get out of bed for five months.

Also, according to Ryan Phillippe, "an outside person can never cause a divorce." So, lads, remember to keep that argument in mind for when your wife catches you boning other women. We hear that one's watertight from a legal perspective.

It must be hard being married to Reese Witherspoon. Partly because you'd have to wake up every morning thinking "That chin! What was I thinking?" and partly because she's an Oscar-winning A-list actress who – aside from that pants-looking Rendition movie she was in – can do no wrong while you're, well, you're just rubbish old Ryan Phillippe. 

Inevitably resentment is bound to set in at some point in that scenario, especially when you can tell that Reese is only faking her enthusiasm for Antitrust because she's too busy being America's Sweetheart. And that's why, when Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe split up after seven years of marriage, it wasn't really a surprise to learn that it was probably because Ryan was having it off with another woman.

That was over a year ago, though, and Ryan and Reese have managed to keep a dignified silence about the divorce throughout, which happens so infrequently these days that it has to be applauded. Or at least it would have to be applauded, except that Ryan Phillippe has decided to blab all about how the divorce made him all unhappy inside for a while. According to E! Online:

Ryan Phillippe calls his divorce from Reese Witherspoon, after seven years of marriage, "the darkest, saddest place I had ever been." The actor, 33, tells W magazine, "There were a good four or five months of not being able to get out of bed. It was the worst time in my life." But that was then. "You get through it," Phillippe says now. "It's a process that's not easy, but I get less and less sad about it every day" … The reason for the breakup was "far more complicated and far less interesting than it's made out to be. To look and search for these salacious reasons, to pin it on a person, or a moment in someone's life, it's not realistic."

A few points about the above:

1) Is it just us, or is clear that Ryan Phillippe is doing his best to weasel out of the fact that his marriage went down the toilet because he was having it off with another woman? 

2) He stayed in bed for five months because he was so sad? How must that have made the girl he was having it off with feel, since he stayed with her after he divorced Reese? Pretty lousy, we'd guess. Also, to what extent did Ryan stay in bed for five months? Did he get up eventually each day? Did he only get up for emergencies? What if he needed a poo? Did he just hang his bum off the side of the bed, or did he just go wherever he happened to be lying? We need to know these very important points.

3) The divorce was "the darkest, saddest place I had ever been." Oh really? Try going to Chatham, pal.

Read more:

Ryan Phillippe Opens Up About Divorce from Reese - People 

But not for much longer, because last night Michael Parkinson recorded his last ever celebrity interviews before fades away into a retirement of autobiography-writing and complaining about how rude young people are. And it's even been reported that professional northerner Michael Parkinson even got a bit teary-eyed during the filming of his last show. That's something we're either putting down to Parkinson realising what a prolific and generous interviewer he's been over the last three and a half decades or because Jamie Cullum turned up and started singing bad jazz-pop at him. We're going to go with the second one.

Michael Parkinson has interviewed all the big names in his time as television's most famous celebrity interviewer. Orson Welles, Muhammad Ali, Patrick Kielty – at one point or another they've all been exposed to Michael Parkinson's legendary interview technique that consists of making a noise like a half-dead washing machine and then twinkling his famous twinkly eyes in the mistaken belief that it's flirtatious, when actually we get the impression that the effect is most like the time your Nan fell face-first into the biscuits and forgot where she was.

Well, you can kiss that interview technique goodbye, because last night Michael Parkinson filmed his last-ever interviews. That wasn't particularly surprising – Michael Parkinson announced his retirement back in June – but nevertheless, filming them proved to be a moving task for Parkinson. And that's really saying something, since the last recorded time that Michael Parkinson showed any emotion was the first time he ever crapped himself as a baby. At the very end of filming, Michael Parkinson is reported to have welled up while telling the audience:

“I was told to pick a wish list and I put down these names and every single one of them is here… Over the years it has been a privilege to meet some of the most intelligent and interesting people. It has always been a great joy and I shall miss it.”

And this wish list of perfect Parkinson interviewees included Billy Connolly, Michael Caine, David Attenborough, Judi Dench, Dame Edna, David Beckham, Jamie Cullum and Peter Kay, with Dench apparently singing an amusing song about Meg Ryan to the host and Kay dressing him up as a lollipop man, presumably before making up a hilarious off-the-cuff hour-long routine that started with "Do you remember lollipop men? Do you? Lollipop men? 'Son, don't cross the road until I do, I'm the lollipop man'. Lollipop Men! Do you remember the sticks that lollipop men carried? What were all that about?" 

The final Parkinson – actually the penultimate Parkinson, since there's also a one-off lifetime retrospective episode to come – will be broadcast on December 15, but you'll probably only be able to stand about five minutes of the stilted, slightly self-satisfied conversation before switching channels just like every other time that you've tried to watch Parkinson lately.