Last night Ricky Loney was eliminated from X Factor. Hopefully you didn’t form a close attachment to him. Oh, of course you didn’t – he was arse-awful.

But aside from that gigantic inevitability, what else happened on X Factor this weekend? Well, Whitney Houston was the guest mentor, so the theme was obviously Diva Night. We heard it was going to be Ludicrous Former Crack-Addict Hasbeens Who Need Weird-Haired Frank Butcher Lookalike Sidekicks To Keep Them Upright, but that was found to be slightly too niche.

Anyway, how did the X Factor contestants do this weekend? Time for that recap you’ve all been waiting for…

Lucie Jones – Everybody has their own definition of the word ‘diva’. Take Lucie Jones, for example. Based on Saturday’s X Factor performance of How Will I Know, she thinks a diva is someone who drops to the floor inside a perspex testicle and then clomps around like an obnoxiously self-confident four-year-old at a Butlins junior talent show. Still, we don’t think that anybody should actually vote for Lucie. You see, if she continues to fill her routines with as many violently sassy hair-flicks as she did on Saturday’s X Factor, it’ll only be a matter of time before her head pops off and she gets rushed to hospital. It’d be a wasted vote.

Olly Murs – The worst thing about Olly Murs, after his hair and his needlessly large mouth and his stupid face and everything he’s ever done in his entire life, is that he’s almost a good performer. On Saturday’s X Factor Olly sang Fool In Love, and 90% of it was decent. It was in tune, nicely choreographed and – crucially – quite short. But the last 10% just made us want to reach inside our TV and slap his massive clueless face. For instance, does Olly really need to shout “HAH!” and “NOW LISTEN!” between every line he sings? No. Does he really have to be so smug that he’s constantly seems on the verge of dissolving? No? Does he really have to look like a dangerously uninhibited Bradley from EastEnders? Well, yes, probably. And that’s why we’ll never be able to love him.

Miss Frank – You may have noticed that we wanted Miss Frank to win X Factor this year. Well that probably won’t happen any more, and it’s all Miss Frank’s fault. If they’d chosen to sing an old Tina Turner song like Olly did, then they’d have sailed through to the next round. But they didn’t. They sang All The Man That I Need. By Whitney Houston. Whitney Houston, for God’s sake. And they sang most of it solo. And there wasn’t even any rapping. It was just a great big empty nothing. By Whitney Houston. Ugh. It’s a shame – if we know who Miss Frank are more than Miss Frank do, then that can’t be a good sign. Disappointing.

Rachel Adedeji - When we saw Rachel Adedeji start her X Factor performance of If I Were A Boy by lying on her back, we were initially worried that her giant asymmetrical haircut had thrown her back out or something. But no, it was all just a false alarm – in fact, there’s a good chance that Rachel was only doing it to make the song more memorable. It was a nice try, because God knows the song itself was such a fat sack of nothing that we barely even noticed when it finished. If only those four haggard stripper girls were around to save Rachel’s arse every week, then she’d be just fine.

Joe McElderry – Here’s what we learnt about Joe McElderry on Saturday’s X Factor: 1) His childhood was an elongated nightmare that alternated between obesity and transvestitism. 2) If he over-emoted any more during his version of Where Do Broken Hearts Go then he would have actually had to do a shit in his trousers. 3) If Britain ever remade High School Musical, then Joe would definitely be a shoo-in for the role of fourth male lead. 4) We’re not really sure that a show like X Factor should be won by someone who clearly idolises H From Steps to such a worrying extent.

Danyl Johnson – So on Saturday’s X Factor, Danyl Johnson performed I Didn’t Know My Own Strength; a song from Whitney Houston’s new album that nobody has ever heard. How did Danyl manage to cope with such a risky strategy? The same way that he copes with everything – by atonally howling the lyrics at the top of his voice. It was awful, but all the X Factor judges were duty-bound to praise it, because a) the song’s executive producer Clive Davis was sitting right next to them and b) nobody wanted to accidentally call Danyl a raging homo again. For the record, though, it was terrible.

Lloyd Daniels – Lloyd didn’t so much perform Bleeding Love on Saturday’s X Factor as cluelessly mumble the lyrics to Bleeding Love while someone held down the Dido preset button on a 1980s Bontempi keyboard. And it was genuinely horrible, possibly the most embarrassing X Factor performance since the days of The Unconventionals. Nobody liked it. The audience didn’t like it. The X Factor judges didn’t like it. Not even Whitney Houston liked it, and she’s spent most of the last decade off her face on crack. Not that Lloyd was ever in danger of being eliminated, though, because Cheryl Cole cried at the end of it and Lloyd gave her a hug. And that’s the sort of shit that you idiots apparently fall for. We hate you sometimes, idiots.

John & Edward – OK John & Edward, we may have got you wrong. We thought you were just a couple of annoying Irish morons, but we were mistaken. In actual fact you are MINDBLOWINGLY AWESOME. On Saturday’s X Factor John & Edward performed Oops… I Did It Again. All of Oops… I Did It Again. Even the spoken-word interlude. While wearing red leather suits. On a technical level there might have been some timing and pitch issues, but on a spiritual level John & Edward were THE BEST THING WE HAVE EVER SEEN. Watching John & Edward was like watching a UNICORN HUMP A RAINBOW. John & Edward were JESUSLIKE. John & Edward MUST WIN X FACTOR. THEY MUST. WIN. X FACTOR.

Rikki Loney - Whoever decided to make Rikki Loney – weedy little pointless hat-wearing Rikki Loney – sing Respect on Saturday’s X Factor deserves a medal. Because it’s finally what got Rikki slung out of X Factor forever. It was a dreary, muted version of Respect that was as flat and uneventful as we imagine most of Rikki’s life has been up until this point, and not even paying four tubby backing singing to desperately dry-hump their microphone stands could detract from how monstrous it all was. The end.

Jamie Archer – Up to and during his performance of Thank You on Saturday’s X Factor, we were worried that Jamie Archer was going to let us down. True, he did refer to himself as ‘Mr Cool Guy’ in the pre-song VT. And he did say that the song would show the public who he really was – which, based on his performance, means that he’s really a bland, whiny turd. But he didn’t even shout “Come on!” at the audience once during the song. Were we wrong about Jamie Archer? Was he less of a staggering cock than we’d been giving him credit for? No. Because as soon as he finished singing, Jamie Archer high-fived Simon Cowell. Cockitude restored. As you were, people.

Stacey Solomon – Now, OK, based on talent Stacey Solomon should probably win X Factor. But we’re worried about her. We think we’re detecting the genesis of Leona Syndrome with her. You know Leona Syndrome. It’s where a singer is so consistently faultless week after week that the public starts to tire of them, putting their chances of winning in jeopardy. Stacey’s X Factor performance of At Last on Saturday was perfect, just as her X Factor performance of The Scientist the week before was perfect. This is the sort of thing that could get old fast. So thank God she’s such a gibbering chav, eh? That’ll save her.

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Good news – the X Factor live finals are back! Better news – Kandy Rain were kicked off. Jesus on a stick, they were crap.

But anyway, how did the X Factor contestants do? Let’s have a wonderful recap, shall we?

Rachel Adedeji - Rachel’s obviously a bright girl, because she left university to appear on X Factor. It’s a smart move because, while graduating from university is likely to increase your earning potential, most people who go on X Factor end up bitterly playing to tiny groups of disinterested pensioners in Welsh caravan parks for the rest of their miserable lives. Anyway, on Saturday’s X Factor, Rachel did a sort of muffled version of Let Me Entertain You accompanied by about 50 nightmarish mime artists who looked as if they’d like nothing better than to abduct your children and eat them. Horrible.

Kandy Rain – As well as being the first act out, Kandy Rain were the first act to kickstart a controversy on X Factor when, after their admittedly awful performance of Addicted To Love, Cheryl Cole essentially told them that they dressed like sluts. This caused Simon Cowell to remind Cheryl that she only got famous because she dressed like a slut too, which isn’t strictly true. In actual fact, Cheryl Cole got famous by dressing like a slut and by screeching violent racial epithets at nightclub toilet attendants. Get your facts straight, Simon. Yeesh.

Olly Murs – So Olly Murs desperately wants to be Robbie Williams, and Robbie Williams was the guest mentor on Saturday’s X Factor. So what did Olly sing? That’s right – a Robbie Williams song. In the style of Robbie Williams. On the plus side, Robbie Williams did say that he wanted to be friends with Olly, but that’s only because Olly is exactly like Robbie Williams and Robbie Williams looks like the sort of person who masturbates to pictures of himself. Fact.

Rikki Loney – On Saturday’s X Factor, Rikki performed Back To Black by Amy Winehouse and wasn’t particularly good. However, that’s not what we want to talk about. We want to talk about all of Rikki Loney’s poxy hats. We’re starting to believe that Rikki uses hats as a kind of personality substitute. And if that’s the case, it works. Because we do think that Rikki has a personality – it’s the personality of a dickhead who wears too many stupid hats.

Stacey Solomon – On Saturday’s X Factor, Stacey Solomon performed The Scientist by Coldplay, and was promptly complimented by all the judges for her brave choice of song. It just goes to show how dull X Factor is when a ballad by the world’s dreariest bunch of namby-pamby pissbags gets held up as a leftfield experimental voyage into the terrifying unknown. Maybe next week Stacey Solomon will sing a Keane song and Louis Walsh will have an aneurysm. Who knows?

Miss Frank - We’ve never really hidden our desire to see Miss Frank win X Factor. And we’re still standing by that following Saturday’s show – their rendition of Who’s Loving You was timeless and soulful and actually pretty amazing. We hesitate to call perfect, because the one in the middle didn’t arbitrarily break off and start rapping in a foreign language halfway through, but it was close enough for now.

Jamie Archer – Jamie Archer is a big-haired titsack who we dislike for any number of reasons, like the way that his version of Get It On was a pile of dreadful, overblown guff and the way that we can’t help feeling as if he’s probably Jamie Oliver’s favourite contestant. However, Jamie shouldn’t leave X Factor just yet, because he’s the star of our new favourite X Factor game – the How Many Times Will Jamie Archer Interrupt His Own Song To Bellow ‘Come On’ At The Studio Audience game. On Saturday’s X Factor it was twice. Can he beat this next week? We hope so. We believe in you, Jamie. WE BELIEVE IN YOU.

Lloyd Daniels – A theory: if hair straighteners were banned tomorrow, Lloyd would never stand a chance of winning X Factor. Because that’s all he is – a silly haircut plopped on top of the world’s dullest boy. On Saturday, his X Factor performance of Cry Me A River was lifeless and lacklustre and anaemic and only livened up by the mental dancer next to him who kept flinging herself around like she was on fire. The judges don’t like him. The musical directors don’t like him. Robbie Williams didn’t seem to like him. But despite all this we get the feeling that Lloyd’s going to go far. It’s a very silly haircut, after all.

Lucie Jones – Lucie is pretty, has a pretty voice and can sing ballads quite well. On Saturday’s X Factor pretty Lucie used her pretty voice to sing a ballad. We’re probably going be cutting and pasting that last sentence into every X Factor recap we write about Lucie from now on, because we get the feeling that she’ll be doing that a lot.

John & Edward - This year’s designated hate targets, John & Edward used Saturday’s X Factor to perform Rock DJ. And you know what? It wasn’t terrible. Now, was that because our expectations of them are so low that we’d be pleasantly surprised if they managed to go for two minutes without kicking a puppy in the ribcage or curling out a turd on the stage? Well, yes. Duh.

Joe McElderry – Joe McElderry is such a gaping charisma vacuum that he may as well not even exist. Case in point: on Saturday’s X Factor, Joe performed No Regrets as if he was auditioning for Robbie Williams: The Musical. It was dire, but on the plus side at least now we know what it’s like to see a desperately bitter song performed by a grinning toddler. So that’s something.

Danyl Johnson - Outed by Dannii Minogue following his performance of And I Am Telling You, to his obvious distress. It’s important to remember that Danyl is a teacher, and this sort of muck-spreading is bound to have a number of upsetting ramifications for him. Although, you know, if Danyl has got this far through his career in education without being the target of merciless bullying from his pupils, then his pupils obviously aren’t trying hard enough. Kids these days, eh? They don’t know they’re born.

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What’s that smell?

Could it be the subtle scent of talentless TV exploitation, the overwhelming fragrance of WAG or the clover-hinted odour of small-man’s syndrome? Freshen up like a pointless media middleman with four new fragrances from X Factor. You’re bound to get lucky if you smell like a TV talent show judge, and nothing says ‘I love you’ like rating your partner’s performance in the sack.

No, really, the X Factor judges are all getting their own perfumes. You’ll be able to buy them in time for Christmas and everything.

The personality cult has hit an all-time low. Forget about the talent, it’s all about the talent-show judge: Someone who can’t sing… but knows what good singing sounds like. “What about Cheryl Cole?” you ask. Yeah OK, she’s behind a desk and she’s not paid to think. She’s paid to endorse products, like Geordie handbags, crap shampoo or TV show perfumes. Cheryl and the other panel members each reportedly earnt £250,000 for selling their smells. We thought we’d give you an idea of what’s in store:

Eau de Simon Cowell: Crisp banknotes blended with petals of egomania and the backside of Sharon Osbourne, this fragrance suits a particularly useless breed of human being, but one with character. Loaded with special pheromones that attract gold-diggers and industry psychopaths.

Essence of Walsh: Irish bog-water and Kensington High Street combine for a special one-off whiff of Louis, designed for two-faced nice guy types who ‘just wanna help you out’. Wearing the Essence of Walsh will get you out of anything. Anything.

Cole 187: A lovely mix of Byker Grove, girl-band knickers and cyanide that changes your voice and somehow makes you less attractive, especially if you’re married. Want to put a stop to those pesky one-liners? Go for Cole 187, it’s absolutely lethal.

Dannii Miasma: Smell like your sister with this refreshing and flirty outback musk. Made from ethically sourced children and crocodile oil, Dannii Miasma can summon your siblings at will. Especially useful when you need a second opinion or some backup in a scrap.

After meeting with experts to discuss their odours this week, the four will release fragrances under the X Factor brand name in time for Christmas, parting thousands of idiots with their money. Simon Cowell is rumoured to be smug about his man-smell, as one source revealed:

“Simon says his will be the top-seller – he’s already winding the other three up.”

Jade Goody musicals, X Factor fragrances… What’s next? We think that saving money has never been more attractive.

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9 - Here, have a pretty map of all 13,000 McDonalds branches in America – Geekologie

8 – What’s the highest level of smarm that you think Simon Cowell could ever achieve? Double it. Double it again. You’re still waaaay off – WWM

7 - Look, it’s a lovely teasmade - Interestment

6 – Paris Hilton staring at her own boobs with a sense of childlike wonder – AmyGrindhouse

5 – Courtney Love’s Twitter feed… DECODED! – PopEater

4 - Do you like Agas and polka dots? Well this is your lucky day! - Domesticsluttery

3 - Stuff about New Moon. Oh, pull yourself together - Popsugar

2 – Barack Obama and the Spanish goths – Bestweekever

1 – This is awesome, and you must watch it…

Cheryl Cole is known for being in Girls Aloud, for marrying a rogue of a football player, and for more-often-than-not being fully dressed while in public.

Not only does the singer/ TV presenter insist on conducting herself in a rather respectable manner, she’s now come out and said that she would not consider doing a nude photo shoot. Elaborating that she would consider it tacky.

Cheryl’s assertion that she would like to remain clothed as often as possible, even in the bath, seems odd. Especially since we just made that last bit up. Not least because her girl group are often onstage clad in what closely-resembles bondage gear. Oh well. We’re guessing S&M gear still technically counts as clothing.Very tight clothing that comes with a free tube of thrush medication.

We’re not all that uncomfortable with public nudity over here, nor are we adverse to talking in an over-familiar manner about celebrity body parts. The commentary is usually based around Robert Pattinson and other annoying/ often shirtless stars, but we are happy to broaden the net to include some fresh meat.

Cheryl is currently wowing people who are easily wowed, as co-host of the X-Factor. By ‘wowing’ we mean ‘astonishing’ people with her feats of not smacking Simon Cowell over the head with a wet fish every time he makes a pre-pubesctent crooner cry.

This success and others have clearly gone to the girl’s head. She now thinks she doesn’t have to bikini pictures/ boob shots to still further her career. We think that her being naked while on the show wouldn’t do much to improve the shows ratings but surely it can’t hurt. Crazy tone-deaf tweenagers will only boost ratings so far.

Difficult as ever, Cheryl states that even for the greater good, she is unwilling to pose nude for a lads’ magazine.

From Showbiz Spy:

The Girls Aloud star and X Factor judge thinks naked photo shoots are tacky. “There’s nothing tasteful about some fruit covering your bits!” she said. “Sometimes a beautiful dress is much more sexy than underwear. Have some class.”

This was a guest blog from Amy Grindhouse, who couldn’t be wonderful if she was made of golden sparkles…

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Hands up who remembers Chris Sligh from American Idol. Anyone? No? Fine. To refresh your leaking memory he was the fat guy with the glasses, who made it through mainly because he had a moderately good sense of humour, which papered over the cracks of his rather less impressive singing voice. He looked like Jack Osbourne. He also loved Jesus. Far more, it seems, than he loves American Idol these days. 

Writing on his blog, the tubby singer thought it high time he put paid to this ridiculous notion that a talent show will reap any kind of reward, as he ripped into a tirade of startlingly obvious home truths, telling future contestants what it’s really like when the spotlight fades.

“You are going to struggle. No one will care about you.”

Such comments will obviously serve as an almighty punch in the underpants to the hundreds of small town inbreds who intend on embarking on the annual pilgrimage to be scoffed at by Simon Cowell, or called “dog” by Randy Jackson. But to most of the rest of the world, it’s all really quite obvious.

Sligh, to further remind you, was one of the unfortunates who faded under the Jordin Sparks sunbeam during the sixth season of the show, and regardless of the hopeless nature of his failure to win, he claims to be one of the most successful entrants from that particular installment. He is now a full time musician/singer. Yet, even so, the bitter rage still spews forth like molten rocks spluttered from a dragon’s sneezing nose.

“You’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to be millionaires.”

He continues to say:

“They’re not going to buy your album.”

A hunch suggests that Sligh’s big fat slice of truth pie won’t stop anyone from giving it a go for season eight, or nine, or twelve, or whatever it is. Mainly because his observations were near pointless, as even a brain damaged dog could tell you that once these things finish, only the smallest handful of hopefuls will ever be heard from again. In fact, even the winners can fall pretty flat once released from the shackles of a weekly sing-off. Taylor Hicks won the thing, then his output totally failed to float anyone’s onions. It is, in short, a lottery.

Suggestions for Chris’ next tirade include: “Has anyone else noticed that Starbucks sell coffee?” Or “Isn’t it WEIRD that Superman wears underpants OUTSIDE his trousers? What is THAT about?”

Perhaps to shed a little more light on Chris’ unfortunate demise, here’s a clip of the big man in action…

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And so it was the weekend when the big pulsating brains behind X Factor decided that they might as well do two shows in two days. That equals around three hours of hot singing action, plus judges comments. Dannii Minogue, fast receding into the background, has ceased to say anything of worth, and the occasional flashes to her still, eerie face have carved her a niche as the only subliminal judge on the panel.

The other three still cast their important judgements, and Cheryl has now taken to the stage on at least three occasions to hug the weeping contestants, much like Mother Teresa would, had she ever been given the chance to get out of the slums to judge a singing contest instead. She’s dead now, bless her. Has been for ages.

Of this weekend’s stand out contestants, there was a prison worker who looked like she was on the game. She’s called Faye. She made Simon’s loins go all funny. There was a band called Harmony Hood, who looked like they’d shiv you in the neck. A big lump of a woman had a bash at Janis Joplin, as her granny looked on wearing a humiliating pink vest. And a couple of Pontins maniacs called It Takez 2 plundered their way through some rubbish song, then had a bit of a cry, because they love each other to bits.

During the second helping, one of the tits from One True Voice has reinvented himself as a father-of-two by having unprotected sex with his girlfriend – and now he’s decided that the only way to stop the little blighters from damn near starving to death is to become a pop star. He has, it seems, a rather short memory. A girl called Amy was the recipient of a limp Cheryl cuddle after she started crying because no one liked her singing. She then blubbed so much that everyone changed from “no” to “yes”. An autistic man got through, prompting Cheryl to question in her head whatever could be wrong with being “artistic” anyway. And to cap a fine series of auditions, a genuine street criminal did a love song. It was very moving.

Plus, of course, there were the usual rabble of unfortunates with genuine mental health problems, wheeled out in front of the studio audience to sing from their cages. Particularly jeered were Jarrod Morrison, who took his top off to reveal the body of a hungry prisoner of war. A set of first cousins, who had clearly used “singing practice” as an excuse to secretly practice kissing without their family knowing. Eyebrows will surely be raised in that particular household now. Plus there was the old woman who wanted to have sex with Simon. She was rubbish.

Great stuff.

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Yay! Big Brother’s finished! Yay! That means we can talk about X Factor now! Yay! Until Christmas! Yay! Or until we take our own lives! YAY!

Now, X Factor is still in that awful, unnecessarily long early audition part where people turn up, sing in a hilariously bad way and then go home to develop lifelong violent revenge fixations on Louis Walsh. These episodes barely warrant recaps, to be honest, but how else could we spend our time? Seeing friends? Going outside? Pah.

So here are the X Factor contestants from Saturday who caught our eye – Olly Murs, Demi Cullum and Carla Schettini…

THE ‘GOOD’: Olly Murs

Some things in life are legitimately worse than death. Torture, for example. Or having your face pushed into an obese man’s sweating armpit on the tube in the middle of August. Or – and this is easily the worst of the lot – being called ‘cool’ by Simon Cowell. Because Simon Cowell is the precise scientific opposite of cool. He signed Robson & Jerome. He’s got granny teeth. He nodded enthusiastically when he first heard an Il Divo record. We imagine that his nipples are three inches long. Simon Cowell couldn’t grasp the concept of cool if you spent a month bellowing it into his face through a megaphone positioned two millimetres away from his eyeballs.

And yet, on Saturday’s X Factor, Simon Cowell decided to call Oliver Murs ‘cool’. Olly Murs, for what it’s worth, is essentially what Jack Tweed would be like if he went through a Face/Off-style bodyswap experiment with Bradley from EastEnders. But what was it about Oliver Murs that made Simon Cowell decide that he was cool? He sang Superstition by Stevie Wonder quite well if a little cluelessly, danced like a robot and tried to act out every word of the song like the woman who does the sign language on the Sunday omnibus of Hollyoaks. All in all he was fairly decent. But Simon Cowell thinks that he’s cool so he may as well just hurl himself off a cliff while he still can.

THE BAD: Demi Cullum

We’re repeatedly being told that X Factor is a singing contest and not a personality contest. This is clearly the case, because if X Factor was a personality contest, then that would suggest that Leona Lewis was in possession of some form of personality, which fairly obviously couldn’t be any further from the truth.

However, the old ‘if this was a personality contest, you’d come first’ line was trotted out for Demi Cullem on Saturday’s X Factor. She’d been singing since she was a baby. Her family had all made banners. She’d decided to sing Saving All My Love For You. The problem was that she decided to sing it really loudly and slightly off-key, so it took a couple of lines to realise that she was actually pretty dreadful. We’re not sure what happened after that – we assume she was rejected – because that was the point that Cheryl Cole decided to do that awful self-conscious Mother Teresa thing of hers and give Demi a hug, so that’s when we had an anger stroke and vomited until we blacked out.

THE POINTLESS: Carla Schettini

Came on, gave Louis a tie, sang If You Don’t Know Me By Now by a band she appeared to call Simple Bread while channelling The Count from Sesame Street if he was being attacked by wasps, and then Simon Cowell gave her one of her trademark vicious tongue-lashings. Except he didn’t. He said it was nice to meet her and then gave her a big moony smile. Simon Cowell’s gone soft. This is the worst X Factor ever.

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Just like Christmas, Easter, St George’s Day and the mourning of our office hamster, X Factor has made its mark and become a regular calendar fixture.

Entering series number six, the programme will once again whittle down a select few hopefuls from hundreds of thousands and give them the belief they’ll win an elusive record deal.

And for the rejects? Well for a good five weeks ITV can boost its audience share by editing together programmes that contain utterly shoddy performers. Will there be tears? Burly council estate dads threatening the judges when their tubby daughter is rejected? Quite likely yes, but will there be Japanese monkeys wheeled in to work with the chosen few in bootcamp? We don’t really know, which is why we present our predictions for X Factor 2009.

It would be brilliant if X Factor could be tied up in one neat little package that lasted about a month. Sadly this isn’t going to happen and quite likely, the show will be dragged kicking and screaming into December. By then the contestants will have completed their ‘country & western’, ‘traditional North Korean spoken word’ and ‘90’s acid house’ theme week performances.

Based on five previous series of X Factor, knowing the judges and the way people react to the show, we will know have a stab at guessing what’s going to happen. Don’t go down the betting shop at once now; they’ll assume you’ll have insider information.

• They’ll be a sob story. Every pissing year we are treated to a range of tales that are designed to soften us up and make the judges cut them some slack. From “My dog Brian just got ran over in the car park” to “If I don’t win I won’t be allowed back in my flat” they’ve all been used before. Throw in some soft music and slow motion and you’re there.

• After escaping the sinking ship that is Big Brother, Dermot O’Leary will attempt to build tension and fail miserably. During the audition stages, he’ll try not to laugh at people who have no chance of winning and be used as a human cushion from crushed rejects.

• Simon Cowell will say “you’re the best thing I’ve ever heard.” Amazingly, he said this in series one, two, three, four and five. He also said it on the sly in American Idol. But we’ll forgive him. The main is so rich he can probably ejaculate money. No doubt he’ll make crap put-down comments to rivals and be a total arse as usual, too.

• Aww it’s Cheryl Cole. Nearly everyone in the world loves her. Before Cheryl, there was Sharon Osbourne. Thankfully this replacement worked as now we can look at pretty Cheryl all day. Shame she is married to a bellend footballer. Honest, we’d like to just be in her company and tell her how ace she is. Erm… oh yeah, and she’ll quite likely have the winning act.

• Louis Walsh will continue to have old man moments. By this, we mean he’ll forget where he is and get upset easily when someone slags him off. Louis will also mention he has something to do with Westlife approximately four billion times during each episode.

• Urghh, it’s whiney Dannii Minogue. Why can’t the bosses trade her in for a better model who’d be prettier, less complaining and more charismatic than a cloth? Oh wait, they can! Please get her sister Kylie in. As per normal, she cling on to the show until The Daily Star launch a campaign to get her out so she can go back to releasing crap dance records,

• Guest performers! Rumour is rife that Madonna is going to make an appearance on the show. However, a hidden rule means that the loser on the night gets to be abducted by Madge and join her other African playthings. Michael Jackson was meant to be visiting too, but probably not in Thriller form now.

• It’ll be full of morons. From pensioners nearing death to the obese making music from their gut, we’ll see them all. 95% of people who go to audition sing in front of eleven people at crap karaoke bars and assume a limp applause means they’re mega!

• At the end of it all, we won’t remember what the winner will do. So far, only Leona Lewis has conquered the charts in the UK and USA. Last year’s winner Alexandra Burke has gone quiet and previous winner Leon Jackson has been abandoned by record company bosses. Now you can buy his tears in 500ml bottles for £4 in certain branches of Aldi.

Phew, and that seems to be about it really. Don’t bloody get us started on Strictly Come Dancing, that’s another kettle of onions altogether. The BBC’s move to make Alesha Dixon their version of Cheryl Cole will quite likely go wrong.

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Paula Abdul’s bad decisions have included singing with a cartoon cat, marrying Emilio Estevez and speaking in public.

But quitting American Idol? That was her worst decision of all. And we don’t say that lightly – this is a woman who deliberately got married to Emilio Estevez, for crying out loud.

Anyway, it seems that the flurry of interest that swamped Paula Abdul’s departure from American Idol has now crawled to a trickle, And Paula now reportedly wants her old job back. Phew, it’s good that Simon Cowell is so famously compassionate, isn’t it? This could have got pretty awkward otherwise.

We’ve all been there. You’re in a relationship that turned stale long ago, so you decide to make a clean break and move on. Then, after the first rush of breathless excitement, you realise that being single doesn’t involve having crazy, borderline-illegal sex with a procession of supermodels – it mainly involves eating beans on toast in a damp flat and weeping because you’re watching a Holby City DVD boxset on your own.

Meanwhile you start to hear rumours that your ex is doing fine without you. More than fine, in fact – they’ve replaced you with someone new, someone prettier, someone less likely to interrupt important conference calls by screeching loudly about diarrhoea for no reason whatsoever. Suddenly you wish you’d never bloody left.

And that’s precisely the situation that Paula Abdul finds herself in at the moment. Sure, when Paula Abdul quit American Idol there was talk of her rapidly jumping ship to another equally-prestigious reality show where she’d be taken more seriously – a show like Dancing With The Stars. But when Dancing With The Stars announced its new line-up this week and Paula Abdul wasn’t on it, the alarm bells started to go off. Not real alarm bells, obviously. We get the impression that sudden loud noises make Paula Abdul kind of jumpy.

This all means that despite leaving American Idol, and then Twittering relentlessly about her decision to leave American Idol, Paula Abdul isn’t sure if she wants to leave American Idol after all. TMZ reports:

Sources connected to Paula Abdul say Miss Paula wants back on “American Idol”. Our sources say Paula’s Twitter is retracted — at least in her mind – if the price is right. The magic number is $10 million… She doesn’t want to do “Dancing with the Stars” — we’re told, because she wants to be able to jump on a plane on a moment’s notice to rejoin her fellow judges on “Idol.”

Wow, so Paula Abdul doesn’t want to join any other TV shows in case she’s mysteriously invited back to American Idol in the middle of the season, perhaps during a time when her reappearance would have the most impact on ratings. How completely unexpected.

It’s Victoria Beckham who we feel most sorry for here – she’d been drafted in as Paula’s American Idol replacement and now it looks like she’ll be jettisoned from her dream job before she can even get comfortable. We certainly hope Victoria Beckham and Paula Abdul don’t fall out about this. Or have a fistfight about it. A fistfight that results in both parties sustaining equally critical injuries. That would be a very bad thing indeed.

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You probably felt a surge of conflicting emotions when Paula Abdul revealed that she was leaving American Idol.

First there was shock. Then incredulity. After all, American Idol had reportedly offered Paula Abdul $5 million a year to stay – who’d turn down a sum like that? And then came begrudging acceptance. After all, this is Paula Abdul we’re talking about – a woman whose modus operandi seems to be ‘how could I make the least possible amount of sense here?’

So maybe Paula Abdul really is stupid enough to turn down that sort of money. Or maybe it’s all a publicity stunt…

It didn’t really make a lot of sense when Paula Abdul quit American Idol this week, did it? Admittedly, coming from a woman who routinely punches herself in the face with dogs and shrieks about diarrhoea during important conference calls, it’s actually one of the most sensible things she’s ever done – but from the perspective of a normal human being, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Because if Paula Abdul leaves American Idol, it leaves everyone effed. It’d mean that the American Idol judging panel would be staffed by three glowering humourless nimrods – well, two glowering humourless nimrods and a babbling A.D.D-addled toddler – and it’d fling Paula Abdul back into semi-remembered obscurity.

No, really – it would. What has Paula Abdul done aside from American Idol over the last decade? Released a woeful single that she hopelessly mimed at the Super Bowl, taped a reality TV show that made her look like a cast-iron lunatic and got kicked off an underperforming movie about over-sexualised plastic fashion dolls. American Idol is literally the only thing that Paula Abdul can do, and she can’t even do that very well.

And that probably explains the number of conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds. We half-jokingly hinted at it ourselves yesterday, but some people are now seriously suggesting that Paula Abdul has in fact signed a new American Idol contract, and that this is all part of some giant ratings-grabbing bait and switch ploy whereby Simon Cowell realises two episodes into the new season that the show can’t go on without Paula Abdul, allowing her to come back in a blaze of glory.

It’s got everything – drama, a strong soapy element, a sort of happy ending, plus Simon Cowell has a history of doing this sort of thing – and maybe that’s why Ryan Seacrest and Randy Jackson are being unusually cagey about the whole affair, as E! Online reports:

On his radio show this morning, Seacrest said Abdul’s departure was real—”as far as I know.” Jackson, meanwhile told Extra, “It looks to be true [emphasis added].”

Alright, it’s not exactly Area 51 territory, but it does give us hope that maybe – just maybe – Paula Abdul will return to American Idol. We’re praying that she does. Not because we’re big fans of Paula Abdul, you understand – in fact we’re fairly sure that we’d end up punching ourselves unconscious within seconds being in her proximity – but because if this really is a ploy to win ratings and it works, it’d open American Idol up to a world of hacky fake storylines that we’d be desperate to see.

Just imagine – this year it’s ‘Has Paula left?’ but next year it could be ‘Kara’s unborn child – is Randy the father?’ or ‘Ryan gets secretly replaced by a robot trained to destroy humanity’ or ‘Simon Cowell pulls a face so smug that it causes the universe to implode’.

That last one’s not really that hacky or fake, but you get the picture.

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Tuesday night saw the re-auditioning of some of the season’s losers, per the orders of Godfather Simon Cowell.

Last week, America’s Got Talent brought  a couple hundred of its remaining acts to Las Vegas. More specifically, to a Las Vegas airport hangar. Upon their arrival David Hasselhoff appeared, dressed as a homosexual 18th Century plantation owner, to tell all of the best acts that the whole thing had been a con and they were going straight back home.

The foolishness was halted by an unexpected phonecall from the ultimate boss, Simon Cowell, telling the moronic judges they had to reconsider their choices. So, who would be back in? Let’s see…

Yes, the ending of last week’s AGT showed the judges receiving a threatening call from Cowell while they were midair in their private jet – nice sadistic touch, Evil Overlord – to tell them:

“Hi guys, it’s Simon here. I’ve just had a look at your choices for the top 40… we have a very, very serious problem here.”

Cut from the show was his follow-up statement:

“I am holding your closest family members in a New Jersey lockup. I suggest you reconsider your choices, because in twelve hours your loved ones’ oxygen will run out and they will die slowly. Painfully.“

Having been chastised like naughty five-year olds by the one man who actually has power, the judges had to spend last night pretending that, honestly, they kind of liked the acts they had previously discarded.

It was like that awkward moment during every high school reunion when someone asks a buddy they haven’t seen in years, “Hey, do you remember that fat chick with the bad breath that you used to date? Denise Something?”

And they reply comes, “Yes, we got married six years ago“.

Here’s Sharon Osbourne’s critique of the fight-for your-life performance by Thia Megia, the big-voiced tiny girl from California who had previously been kicked off the show by the knowledgeable judges:

“I can’t wait to see you grow each week on this show, because you’re fantastic. You really are.”

And David Hasselhoff’s:

“Thia Megia, you really got to me-a. You are a huge star, baby… You’re going to go a long way in this competition.”

Piers Morgan also tried to comment on the young lady, but all we heard was the sound of an eel swimming through jam.

The entire show was a terribly executed exercise in backpedalling, ordered by Cowell and which was necessary only because he had in the first place chosen the three most inappropriate people in the entire world to judge the thing (next time, we suggest he goes with John Madden, the Crying Girl from last season’s American Idol, and Helen Keller’s ghost).

The only surprise of the night was that Kari Callin didn’t make it through to be mocked a second time. We’re guessing it’s because after seeing the emotions generated by her departure, the producers realised that to reintroduce her would be like sticking Barry Bonds into the Minnesota T-Ball league.

Oh, we could go on and detail all of the painfully obvious audience-manipulating tricks. Like how yodelling sado-milf Manuela Horn’s act sounded as if it was being broadcast through a collection of plastic cups and seashells, while singing douchebags Mosaic’s performance was as slick as buttered ice.

It doesn’t matter: America has been subliminally instructed who to vote for, and they will. Results show tomorrow, when Kevin Skinner, Thia, Mosaic and some others go through.

The whole thing stinks.

And we love it.

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That’s it. American Idol has lost its heart. Well, maybe not its heart – more like its atrophied cerebellum.

Anyway, look, Paula Abdul has left American Idol. That was our point. And Paula Abdul’s American Idol departure is a shock – for all the threats and posturing from her management recently, we were certain that Paula was just angling for a bigger salary. But no – first Paula Abdul Twittered her resignation and then Fox confirmed it.

We can’t overstate what a loss this is. Without Paula Abdul around, the American Idol contestants will now be forced to sleep with each other. Disappointing.

American Idol has been good for Paula Abdul. It was the show that finally got people to stop seeing her as the hasbeen who did that awful song with a cartoon cat and start seeing her as the boogly-eyed, desperately incomprehensible, painkiller dependent woman who’d somehow lucked her way into a high-profile job that she seemed vastly underqualified for.

But that’s all in the past now. Paula Abdul has decided to quit American Idol for good, either because contract negotiations broke down or because of tense interpersonal relationships between the judges or because Paula wanted to dedicate more time to her hobby of quacking like a duck at her own reflection for hours at a time. We’re sure that a clearer picture will emerge in the next few days, but all we have for now is the Twitter message that Paula Abdul wrote to the world yesterday:

“With sadness in my heart, I’ve decided not to return… I’ll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all being a part of a show that I helped from day 1 become an international phenomenon.”

And Fox’s confirmation that Paula Abdul was a goner:

“[Paula was] an important part of the ‘American Idol’ family over the last eight seasons and we are saddened that she has decided not to return to the show.”

This announcement had been coming for a while, ever since Paula Abdul threw a tantrum because she wasn’t getting paid as much as Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell. At the time it looked like a canny negotiation tactic on her part, but now that it’s backfired it seems more like greedy petulance. It seems unlikely that Paula Abdul will ever score such a high-paying job again, unless of course planet Earth is invaded by an army of shrieking, easily-distracted aliens and she’s employed by the government to communicate with them. Which could happen.

So what happens to Paula Abdul now? Well, it’s time for her to wistfully reflect on all the amazing opportunities that American Idol has given her – like the opportunity to allegedly sleep with an American Idol contestant, the opportunity to disfigure her face on a dog, the opportunity to be an international laughing stock and the opportunity to see what it’s like to have a crazed fan commit suicide on her doorstep. Golden moments, one and all. It’ll be sad to see Paula Abdul go.

And it’ll be crushingly inevitable when, two shows into the new American Idol season, Simon Cowell dramatically and spontaneously realises on camera that he has to immediately re-hire Paula Abdul, just like he did with Louis Walsh on X Factor a few years ago. Probably.

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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!

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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.

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