Remember back in the mid noughties when everyone was all “Oh, The Royle Family is so indicative of the modern day working class, and it’s a problem that we need to address,” and “I know someone just like Denise. She’s a feckless moron as well. Terrible BO” and everything was “My Arse”?

We all can. It was a sad era for sitcoms. An era that would’ve contributed to Lucille Ball’s suicide. If she was alive still, and wanted to do go ‘Garland Style’.

Well Ralf Little, him with the really ordinary looking face, has tried to reinvigorate his career by co-writing a piece of trash called ‘The Cafe.’

Set in a coastal cafe in Weston-Super-Mare, it chronicles the nonsensical bollocks that people who frequent cafes instead of achieving things in their lives experience. Like talking to a gay who is dressed like Hellboy. Or being an unsuccessful writer. Or looking after the elderly and infirm. Or helping out your mother who is facing financial ruin because you run an eating establishment that isn’t Starbucks or Costa.

If the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were a thing that people could actually have faith in, The Cafe would be ranking pretty high as the thing that spontaneously infects people with Kerry Katonitis (which is a fervent mix of schizophrenia, substance abuse and a terrible taste in men). At times flipping between bafflingly pointless and shamefully mediocre, you endure with it because you believe that it’ll get better; like an abusive relationship: that you can change it, raise a family together, but in actual fact, you just look forward to the advert interludes, which in this analogy, is the brief respite when he (or she; we’re all for equal opportunities at HS) is too drunk to stand up to urinate.

Admittedly we at hecklerspray may have a high expectation when it comes to every single thing in the World (which doesn’t bode well for HS: The Next Generation), but The Cafe is so lacking in anything that anyone could call ‘entertaining’, that it becomes slightly surrealistic. But still retains it’s tragic awfulness at the same time. Like an optical illusion. A really shit optical illusion.

If it isn’t a flock of doddering pensioners arguing about the difference between a Cornish Cream Tea and a Devonshire Cream Tea, then it’s the same flock of doddering pensioners asking about what flowers mean. Apparently Roses mean I Love You. And at the same time, mean a Sunderland Leapfrog may be on the cards. The Cafe is honestly like watching an omnibus of ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’, ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and ‘Celebrity Shite In The Attic’ while suffering from Locked In Syndrome.

We’d like to leave you to get on with your filthy nocturnal habits, and googlings of ‘Sunderland Leapfrog’ with what stuck with us after all is said and done: who decided that ‘debbon’ was a correct pronounciation of Devon. It’s not. It’s ridiculous. Stop it. Stop it now.

When hecklerspray do reviews, it’s usually of a national institution like the X Factor, The Apprentice or Nick Knowles Dusts The Natural History Museum. It’s very rare for us to see something on television and write about it unless it’s likely to spawn pseudo-celebrity targets for us. Why is that? We’re not a TV website.

It’s pretty much as simple as that.

Still, that brings us around neatly to Comedy Central’s brand new situation comedy Threesome which starts next week on the channel which actively encourages “Two & A Half Men”. Still, let’s not hold that against Threesome, which is the very first British sitcom to be commissioned by the channel.

Or should we? Let’s face it. A channel that bases so much of its daily programming in repeats of Two & A Half Men and the second worst sitcom ever made (Everybody Loves Raymond) surely won’t be able to make a sitcom that’s passable as anything more than a “cheap Coupling” or a “rotten Outnumbered”, so why should we provide them with any platform for their terrible programming decisions.

And yet… it was Comedy Central’s US parent that brought back Futurama.

Swings and roundabouts.

So now that the argument of bias against the network is neatly packed up into Charlie Sheen’s coke-case and dispatched to a forgotten part of the Colombian rainforest, what of Threesome? Does it stand up against the usual, painfully unfunny dross that spews forth from the urethra of British television channels like televisual kidney failure?

Yes, it does.

That is to say, it’s actually quite good. It’s sometimes easy to write off small group comedies as being a format that’s almost impossible to find new direction in but Threesome takes one night of drug-sodden lust and makes it the basis for a witty comedy which is both intelligent and utterly juvenile in equal measure.Ha

Having three 29 year olds living a life that is often the staple of this kind of comedy is a risk in the first place. The urge to switch off before even getting to five minutes is strong as you watch Richie, Alice and Mitch bounce around their lives like MDMA-riddled spinning tops, alternating between hungover and absolutely off their tits like a grown-up version of Skins. Quite literally on acid.

In saying that, the rapid characterisation of the first third of the show is a calculated risk in a show where one needs to make an almost instant connection to the characters. There’s no building up a like of the three friends. If you can’t find anything remotely likeable in them after ten minutes then turn off, go and make yourself a cup of tea and then tweet about how there aren’t any good British comedies any more while you pick flecked tissue out of your nose.

Given that the press shots ruin one of the few surprises in the show, prepare yourself for a spoiler. It’s a pregnancy story. The real question will be, after a strong first episode, will the characters fall into ‘comedy pregnancy’ stereotypes and lose their way in jokes about breastfeeding and Epidurals. The hope is that they won’t but the danger looms, omnipresent in every word of the last five minutes of the first episode and leaves the viewer praying that Threesome doesn’t end up shitting its undoubted potential up the wall.

The fact is that despite the accelerated characterisation and seeming flippancy of one of the most important events in the series, Threesome is a diverting half hour. It’s well shot, doesn’t rely on a laughter track and is well paced, not trying to cram too many jokes into a half hour and letting the situations provide the humour. Look out for Mitch going the wrong way up an escalator to see what we mean.

You can have a watch of episode one before its premiere on Comedy Central and decide for yourself. You don’t even have to have Sky. Which is nice.

Here’s some clips of the show:

No eye contact, no cock touching

Putting up flatpack furniture on drugs

America. Bless you for the insanely good things you’ve given the world. Muscle cars, hamburger joints, rock ‘n’ roll and television will always be your crowning glory and us Limeys will forever be in your debt.

However, your taste in television shows is awful. From a country (nay, virtual continent) that gave us Taxi, The Simpsons, M*A*S*H, Roots, Ren & Stimpy, The Muppet Show and more, what in Christ’s name are you doing frittering away your time with dross like Two And A Half Men?

Seriously. What’s with liking Two And A Half Men so much that it breaks network records? Eh? And don’t think we haven’t noticed how much you enjoy the unswerving dreck of The Big Bang Theory.

For some inexplicable reason, 28.74 million Americans tuned in to watch last night’s season premiere of Two And A Half Men.

Of course, there was a fair amount of curiosity surrounding the show because Charlie Sheen’s character, Charlie Harper, was killed off, replaced by a soaking wet Ashton Kutcher. Nearly 29 million people actively stopped doing something to settle down with one of the worst TV shows ever aired.

The AV Club report that, aside from a few post-Super Bowl specials and couple of event programmes, last night’s …Men was one of highest rated scripted shows, ever. Ever, ever, ever. By the close of the show, audience figures grew to 30 million.

That’s lazy laughs from vaguely dirty jokes and a cast that is as dead behind the eyes as the Sheen which exited the show in such spectacular fashion.

Two And A Half Men is the kinda show that feels like a nursing home for misogynistic comedy, where we see three men resenting each other, filmed before a live laugh-track. Of course, some people love shows like this. They’re so insultingly one-dimensional and old-fashioned that they slip on like a comfortable pair of old socks.

But these rat-a-tat comedies keep gurgling out of America. Look at the irksome How I Met Your Mother fercryinoutloud! The aforementioned Big Bang… which has a running joke of Look How The Indian Character Talks Funny.

In Blighty, we air these shows in the mornings or tucked away on bit-part channels like E4. That’s the home for this dull-ass gag attacks. That’s not to say we’ve not been infected by this lowest common denominator comedy. My Family is written by an American style team of writers and, regrettably, The Inbetweeners is also ploughing the line of misogynistic nose-bag that everyone so loved in the ’70s.

All the mentioned shows employ a tactic of throwing as much as possible at a viewer and seeing what sticks. Effectively, it’s like standing before a muck spreader and waiting to be hit by a diamond.

Alas, with a huge chunk of America’s TV population tuning in for the new Two And A Half Men, you can’t but feel like they’ve invited it. The United States gets what it wants and, in this instance, the Ashton Kutcher they deserve.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or else we’ll kill you in your sleep or join our Facebook group if anyone is still daft enough to use it or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS OR WE’LL KILL EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER LOVED!

Imagine if The Brady Bunch contained a story where perky mum, Carol, had an affair with the mayor of New York and caught crabs off him. Well, it happened in real life as the actress Florence Henderson in the famed cutesy sitcom did exactly that.

She caught crabs after a one-night-stand with John Lindsay while cheating on her husband, which is exactly the kind of behaviour we expect of our celebrities.

Henderson reveals all this in her upcoming memoir, which also points out that she was cheating on her husband with a pig of a man and had a face so ugly that it could curdle a summer sky. He’s going to love reading all about that isn’t he?

She says that she was cheating on her husband during the ’60s because, against her better judgement, this minger put the moves on her while she was blind-drunk in a hotel.

“I was lonely. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. So, what did I do? I did it”

Then she found “little black things” crawling over her bed and body.

“Guess I learned the hard way that crabs do not discriminate but cross over all socioeconomic strata. He must have had quite the active life. What a way to put the kibosh on a relationship.”

So, if Brady Mom was a randy git, she must have been shagging everything in sight, right? That probably includes the cast and crew of the much-loved – but awful – sitcom.

We’re all looking at Barry Williams, who played her eldest teen-aged stepson, Greg Brady, who has long been rumoured to enjoy the insides of the actress.

However, it seems not to be the case.

“Barry did have a serious crush on me, which I understood and helped him get past. Let us just say that if he had entertained a roll in the hay with me, I would never have done it.”

Probably because she had crabs.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

Remember Matthew Perry? Y’know? Chandler from Friends? If you do, you’ll remember he went as thin as a heroin-addict’s dog for a while, before ballooning to the size of a shed full of butter, before going thin again and walking off the edge of the Earth, never to be seen again.

Well, Chandler is back to tell us something!

That’s right! He is here to announce that he’s been looking at himself in the mirror, horrified with what he’s seen and been drinking or gobbling handfuls of pills or something to deal with the wreck he is. And so, without anyone actually caring thus far, he’s announced he’s off to rehab to ‘focus on his sobriety.’

This time ’round, the Friends star hasn’t said what he’s addicted to, but in the past, he’s had an almost admirable fondness for painkillers.

He got himself addicted to Vicodin after he had a little accident on a jet ski and was later found throwing 20 to 30 pills a day down his neck. He then found himself in hospital with pancreatitis due to amazing amounts of booze in his bloodstream.

He should’ve spoken to Michael Jackson. Propofol is obviously where it’s at! Anyway, what has the former famous person got to say from himself?

In a statement, Perry says:

“I’m making plans to go away for a month to focus on my sobriety and to continue my life in recovery.”

And while you may think ‘Awww, what a shame! I kinda liked him. You idiot so-called journalists should get a life and stop being so nasty to a sitcom superstar!’, we’ll point out that Perry noted in his statement:

“Please enjoy making fun of me on the world wide web.”

So there you have it. If you have a problem with us poking fun at a desperately unhappy man, you should note that we’re only doing as the actor says and disagreeing with him is just like wanting him TO DIE.

HOW COULD YOU, YOU HORRIBLE GHOULS?

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

Hugh ‘It’s All About The Twiglets’ Grant is, and take this with a whole lake of salt, apparently being touted as a replacement for Charlie Sheen in the abjectly awful and heavingly unfunny Two and a Half Men.

It would appear that the actor-turned-paparazzi snitch started to be courted around a month ago by CBS boss Les Moonves and President Nina Tassler, knowing that, for some reason, Americans just can’t get enough of posh Englishmen pratfalling and pulling worried faces constantly.

And, the good news for Grant is that, even if he stint only lasts for one season and he hates working on an American sitcom, he’ll be able to comfort himself with a cheque for $1 million. Per episode. Even more baffling is that Charlie Sheen was getting more than that per episode when he was on the show. With $1.25 million per show, it is hardly surprising he could buy suitcases filled with weapons grade cocaine when it took his fancy.

Of course, Hugh isn’t the only person the studio are looking at.

Reports have linked Woody Harrelson, someone called Jeremy Piven and Rob Lowe to the Sheen shaped hole in the programme. However, it would appear that it is Hugh Grant that they’ve got their heart set on.

This will all be good news for the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, who will want to work with someone who, essentially, isn’t Charlie Sheen. Basically, he’ll be thrilled at working with someone who doesn’t need 24 hours a day of babysitting and pats on the back in return for unending abuse and glassy, hallowed out eye sockets.

Still, we shouldn’t feel sorry for Lorre because he’s subjected the world to the spectacularly woeful The Big Bang Theory and we shouldn’t ever forget that.

Naturally, if Hugh gets to replace Sheen, we’ll have to draw comparisons with the two as they’ve both got a thing for mucky, hired sex. Remember when he and prostitute Divine Brown were arrested on lewd conduct charges? Those mugshots still adorn the hecklerspray hovel walls.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

Hello, readers! There’s a Royal Wedding tomorrow! I’m sure you’ve missed most of the coverage though, the press and media have decided to be quite low-key in their build up to the nuptials and have decided just to show the odd quick snippet of footage just to remind people that it’s actually happening.

Here at hecklerspray we want to offer our own form of congratulations and advice to the happy couple who are going to spend most of their lives dodging the limelight. Married life, eh? Living with someone? It’s tough, it really is.

In sitcoms, relationships are used as devices to reveal character traits that one would usually miss, usually a negative one for comic effect. Or, in the case of Two & A Half Men, to parallel Charlie Sheen’s life for no comic effect whatsoever.

Cleverly enough, there’s a big ol’ furniture store that knows about sitcoms and the relationship dynamics that work within them.

‘Us’ versus ‘Them’.

‘Us’ being whatever gender you are versus ‘Them’ being the gender of your partner. If your in a same-sex relationship then the dynamic is slightly altered by the fact that sitcoms expect same-sex couples to never argue over trivial nonsense like the location of a shelving unit.

Thosh wacky guysh (that’s more Dutch than Swedish, to be honest) from IKEA are letting the happy royal couple know, albeit indirectly, that married life won’t be such a breeze while also encouraging them to forego the gifts of antique, period furniture from their half-dead mutant relatives (groom’s side) in favour of ingenious storage solutions from the Duke of the Davenport.

In order to do this, they’ve got a battle of the sexes going on. That’s what relationships are, after all, telling the other person how much you hate them and everything about them as much as you possibly can for as long as you can until the only way to solve things is to build a rickety wardrobe that will fall apart within the first three months of having it because you’re too busy fighting through tears to concentrate on the instructions.

That’s what relationships are. At least, according to IKEA they are.

It’s 2 vs. 2. A battle of the wits between two men who look like they’ve been blasted out of a howitzer through a branch of Next and two women so bland that they’ve even gone as far as to dress one of them up as a beige Dennis the Menace, which is ironic really as we’d like nothing more than to see her get hit in the head with a well-placed catapult shot.

Of course, the big argument is “Who’s messier?” men or women and the pantomime audience of poor, unfed, unwatered people being ordered to laugh at some banal jokes and 70s’ observations based entirely on sexual stereotypes did their best to add some enjoyment to the jokes. At one point you even hear someone in the audience shout “rubbish!”. Maybe that was us actually…

Innuendos and weak puns about shoes, coupled with jokes about ninjas which are so painfully on trend that they actually make us want to commit violent crimes aside, this advert doesn’t actually come to any real conclusion aside from subtly utilising all of the IKEA storage space available to them. Who is messier?! The people must know! The Royals must know!

Can you imagine William and Kate’s first fight? They’ll line the servants up in the drawing room and it will go exactly like this. Shouting at the help about how messy each other are and how when they have kids one of them might have a chin. It’ll be carnage. Royal carnage which will appear in the pages of OK! Magazine and give IKEA more publicity than they’ve already had.

The sitcom has taught us that relationships and the people in them can be funny and raising a laugh from mundane domestic situations has been a mainstay of comedy for centuries. It takes a spectacular level of commitment to fail at something so simple. IKEA have managed it and so will The Prince & Princess of Whojimmiflipit.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

After a pretty decent pilot, Channel 4 have gone and actually commissioned Campus, which is a sitcom set in the strange, dysfunctional world of academic mediocrity, Kirke University. It’s like Green Wing if someone replaced bins filled with surgical bandages with bins filled with the books and dreams of students.

Or something.

And with that, we have a nice trailer you can watch that hasn’t been on the television yet because it has ‘night time language’ in it, which we’re all rather fond of here, right?

Heading up the show is the vapid, fat fingered Jonty de Wolfe. De Wolfe, Vice Chancellor of Kirke University, is played by Andy Nyman who you may recall being an abject horror of a man in Charlie Brooker’s ‘Dead Set’. If you’re a massive Derren Brown fan, you’ll also know about their work together as well, won’t you?

(If not, there’s this thing called ‘Google’ where you can find out more – in short, he’s brilliant).

In the clip, we see Jonty being impressively rude to a man in a wheelchair and generally providing us the opportunity to watch someone say things in a comedic way, through our fingers while clenching our teeth with embarrassment.

Elsewhere, there’s randy English professors, shy-but-attractive lecturer Imogen Moffat and of course, students, all waddling around with their backpacks, hangovers and yeast infections.

All in all, looks like it might be a fun show to watch, right? Find out more on the Channel 4 site.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

How I Met Your Mother’s popularity has been, quite appropriately, infectious like some sort of venereal disease. Taking the template of Friends and leaving the casting of the ‘Rachel’ character an ongoing mystery has managed to ensnare the attention of young whatnots across the land.

Season 5 shows no sign of slowing things down, indulging in this hump stage – like most US sitcoms do –by throwing some extra cameos into the mix, flapping their proverbial arms for attention like an annoying child.

Jennifer Lopez, Rachel Bilson and Chris Kattan all duke it out for the converted title of ‘Most Outdated Celebrity’.

We’re being harsh, though, as beyond its derivative appearance lies one of the funnier sitcoms to seep from the good ol’ US of A in sometime.

Barney, Ted, Lily, Robin and Marshall all have their fair share of high jinks and Season 5 doesn’t skimp on the chuckles.

With Barney and Robin now together, Ted a teacher and Marshall and Lily being, well, a couple, the wheels are set in place for some obvious comedy lovelyness.

Canada gets a poking, Barney’s sexcapades continue and, like when the show is at its best, its represents friendship at its best/worst.

Before you all fall into seizure from an overload of schmaltz, check out the DVD extras for a selection of commentaries, outtakes and deleted scenes, all geared to tickle your funny bones in that nice way you like it.

How I Met Your Mother may be full of flimsy cardboard characters, but there’s still life left before they begin to get soggy around the edges.

‘Spray Rating: 4/5

Courteney Cox must have been sad when Dirt was cancelled – her one chance to feel up a string of younger men for cash, gone.

So Courteney Cox must be thanking her lucky stars that she’s just signed up to star in a new ABC sitcom by the creator of Scrubs called Cougar Town, where she’ll get to play a woman in her forties who basically has it off with a string of younger men a lot.

Look, we know what you’re thinking – first Dirt, then Cougar Town. Courteney Cox is a really big fan of these salaciously-named TV shows, isn’t she? That’s good news for us, because the last three scripts we’ve written have been entitled Giant Slag, Tits! and Sluttybum McHussyknickers. We’re going to be rich, we tell you. Rich!

Former Friends stars basically have three career options – 1) they can make talky pseudo comedy shows that take themselves far too seriously, 2) they can make hopeless new sitcoms that die a quick death, or 3) they can enter the world of less than mediocre movies.

Courteney Cox already did the first one when she made Dirt, and she’s dabbled with the third by doing one of the voices in Barnyard – so that just leaves number two. And never let it be said that Courteney Cox isn’t a fan of number two.

Even though Dirt was incredibly accurate – it was just like working here, right down to the mentally-ill nutter in the hat who follows us around and our constant use of vibrators – it hasn’t been picked up for a third season, and that’s why Courteney Cox has leapt to ABC, where she’s signed up for Cougar Town, a sitcom by Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs. The LA Times reports:

“Forty-year-old women on TV are so beautiful and perfect and wrinkle-free,” Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter. “People don’t do the reality of it, and there is a real comedy area about a woman who is talking about Botox, about having sex with the lights on and how her body is changing.”

We have to say that Cougar Town sounds like quite an exciting show, not least because Bill Lawrence’s involvement guarantees that every episode will be a zany, fun-packed laughorama right up the final five minute, at which point someone will die, the lead character will narrate a self-helpy voiceover monologue and some drippy music – probably performed by sodding Keane – will play in the background.

But we’ve still got that to look forward to. For the time being, Courtney Cox has to get in training for Cougar Town. What resources could she possibly tap to learn the internal workings of a neurotic older woman with an unnatural tendency to sleep with boys young enough to be her son? Who knows…

In a move almost as shocking and drastic as the time someone thought it’d be a real good idea to make something called The New Monkees, people have gone and announced a very intentional remake of the Partridge Family.

Maybe it won’t be so bad though. The entire old cast is returning to reprise their roles, and to once again live with their really old mother. Sure, it sounds improbable, but the scriptwriters are supposedly coming up with all sorts of ways to make the transition go off real smoothly – for instance Danny Bonaduce‘s character moves back home because he’s hiding from a newly resurrected KGB, and David Cassidy‘s character retreats to his mother’s residence after losing half his brain in an industrial mining accident.

See, Hollywood has ways of making this kind of stuff work.

NBC has reportedly just picked up rights to a brand new version of The Partridge Family. It will be packed with all new cast members despite what lazy research caused us to write in a preceding paragraph.

The plot for everything is supposed to basically remain the same, except the mother will be more of a stage mom who dresses her kids up in that red martian Britney Spears-jumpsuit before she allows them to perform in front of anybody. It should really be pretty sexy.

For paedophiles.

To everyone else though, the idea pretty much screams mistake. Here’s what the Hollywood Reporter knows about it:

“The Partridge Family” has found a new network home at NBC. The Peacock has picked up a contemporary single-camera take on the classic ABC sitcom to be written by Jeff Rake…A fan of the 1970s series, Rake plans to “turn the premise on its head.”

“In the original, the kids actually recruited their mom to front the band, which I can’t see happening in any family on this planet,” he said. “The new version will reflect what seems to me to be the more realistic family band scenario these days: a struggling, sort of well-meaning mom pimping her kids in order to create a wholesome-slash-sexy cash cow.”

If all this ends up to not be the ratings juggernaut Rake seems to expect, it won’t effect him too much. That’s because he’s already got partially written scripts for newly conceptualized versions of The Brady Bunch, The Monkees, and a younger, more musical take on the Great Grape Ape.

That last one will probably feature animatronics. If it’s good it will, anyway.

This kind of old classic remake-thing has happened before, you know. We’ve got a clip it. It’s The New Monkees. Take a good look at it and then tell us if you think this Partridge Family thing is a good idea.

If you want to look prettier than you actually are, the old saying goes, then go and stand next to a disfigured old gargoyle of a sweatpig hag. We're paraphrasing.

It's a saying that the producers of sitcom How I Met Your Mother know only too well. In a desperate attempt to look funnier than it actually is, How I Met Your Mother has signed up the most harrowing, ashen-faced, unquestionably tragic celebrity in the world right now for a cameo in an upcoming episode.

Yeah, it's Britney Spears. How did you guess?

We've long been under the impression that Britney Spears' father Jamie is a wise, wise man. As soon as Britney Spears tipped over from 'endearingly kooky' to 'disturbingly psychotic' Jamie was right there to keep Britney under control and only charged a couple of thousand dollars a week for the privilege. 

But although Jamie Spears is our brand new hero, he might be losing his grip on Britney Spears just a little. She wants to start doing things again, you see. Actual things. In public. And that's a worry. You see, Britney Spears teaching kids to dance is good mainly because it happens behind closed doors and if the worst happens she'll only ruin the lives of 15 or so toddlers. But Britney Spears doesn't want to stop there.

No. Britney Spears is going to make a cameo on How I Met Your Mother, the middling twentysomething relationship-based American sitcom, where she could end up potentially ruining the lives of millions of hapless viewers. The Associated Press reports:

Spears will guest star in a March 24 episode of the cult series, CBS spokeswoman Kelli Raftery told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The pop star will portray a receptionist in a dermatologist's office named Abby who becomes "smitten" with Ted (Josh Radnor), Raftery said. Craig Thomas, the show's creator, told Usmagazine.com that Spears attended a table reading with the cast on Monday, and that her scenes will probably be filmed later this week. He said representatives for Spears approached the CBS about "Mother" because "she was looking for a small part on a funny show."

Dear God, no. By now you've probably formulated your own list of two or three hundred reasons why Britney Spears appearing on How I Met You Mother is the worst idea in history, and chances are that these are your main bulletpoints:

1) Last month Britney Spears was deemed clinically unable to feed or dress herself. That's hardly laugh-out-loud material.

2) Nobody's going to be watching Britney Spears for see how funny she is. They'll be watching to see how haggard and joyless her eyes are. Again, not exactly ha ha stuff.

3) Considering that Britney Spears has such infrequent visitation access to her own children at the moment, an appearance on a show called How I Met Your Mother shows such a staggering lack of self-awareness that we're just pleased there isn't a sitcom called How I'm A Perfectly Normal Person Who Never Smashes Up Cars With Umbrellas.

4) Did you see Britney Spears' cameo on Will & Grace? That was about as funny as coughing up blood, and she wasn't nearly as mental back then. 

Still, though, at least Britney Spears' appearance will be able to clear up the mystery of how the main character met his future childrens' mother. SPOILER ALERT: it was when he sent her all those dildos.

Read more:

Britney Will Guest Star on CBS' 'Mother' – Associated Press 

If you're anything like us, you've spent every day since the last Will & Grace episode slamming your head into a pile of shattered glass and shouting the word 'why' into the sky a lot.

Because, let's face it, without Will & Grace on TV, there's nobody to give third-rate, painfully unfunny walk-on parts to Madonna any more.

However, all's not lost because the creators of Will & Grace – David Kohan and Max Mutchnick – are making a new sitcom pilot about a gay person who's friends with a straight person. We can only marvel at where Kohan and Mutchnick – a gay person and a straight person who are friends and had a successful long-running sitcom about a friendship between a gay person and a straight person – got this wickedly original new idea for a TV show from.

The writers' strike, as you may have heard, is well and truly over. That's great news for the writers, and for the below the line crewmembers who'd all been forced out of a job, but less good news for us, for three reasons.

1) No striking writers means that the Oscars can carry on as normal, so it's their fault that you'll be sick of hearing about Kate Hudson's shoes come Monday morning.

2) No striking writers means that scripted drama will return to the airwaves instead of all those cheaply-produced brainless reality TV shows. That's bad, but Grey's Anatomy is far, far worse.

3) No striking writers means that the two people who invented Will & Grace are allowed to run their one semi-decent idea even further into the ground that it already was.

If you've been yearning for a return to all the Will & Grace trademark japes that have been missing from TV recently – like dreadful Britney Spears cameos and dreadful John Cleese cameos and dreadful Sharon Osbourne cameos – then you're in luck. Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick have just been ordered to make a sitcom pilot about a subject that some of you might think sounds a bit familiar. Reuters reports:

In one of the first major TV deals since the Hollywood writers strike ended last Tuesday, ABC has ordered a comedy pilot from the creators of "Will & Grace." The untitled project revolves around two men — one straight, one gay — who are lifelong best friends and business partners. Both of them are in serious romantic relationships and try to find a balance between their allegiances to each other and to their significant others.

Ah, the old gay thing again. However, despite the obvious similarities to Will & Grace, a previous pilot they wrote about a straight person and a gay person working together and Kohan and Mutchnick's own lives, this untitled sitcom will be completely different from anything they've done before because, um, none of the people in this new one will have ginger hair. And nobody will be called Will.

And this one might actually be slightly funny in places. But, you know, probably not.

Read more:

ABC and "Will & Grace" duo team on gay-themed comedy – Reuters