Once again, we're starting to realise that maybe, just maybe, The Catch Up might have been worth taping. And by taping, we mean 'us memorising transcripts of each show'.

From today's Mediaweek newsletter -

On the day that the final edition of The Catch Up goes to air, The Daily Telegraph reports that panellist Lisa Oldfield has made a public apology, claiming she was responsible for the program failing. “I think Australia has had an absolute gutful of Lisa Oldfield…I can't imagine me darkening anybody's TV screen again any time soon.”

The Herald Sun reports quasi-intellectual Mary Moody said she was lapping up thoughts of never needing to know another thing about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, while Lisa Oldfield declared their audience to blame. "Australia you should be ashamed of yourselves," she said. "Because you weren't watching our show, we've got two single mums and a granny on the scrapheap, and a redneck on the loose."

It's taken us a while to muster up the strength to write about Warwick Capper's latest career move. The nation's most cherished bogan mullet owner has decided to become a Gold Coast meter maid man.

Capper, who has also worked as a "stop-go" man on a road repair gang, will wear gold lycra hot pants and a gold sash over his jersey when he takes to the streets of Surfers Paradise three days a week to top up expired parking meters for grateful tourists.

"It's awesome," said meter maid Ashleigh Carr said to Ten News.

"You get more attention than usual. I think the girls like to have a bit of a perv as well."

That last bit may in fact speak volumes about the intelligence of the average Gold Coast meter maid.

The former Brisbane Bear and Sydney Swan said he was not worried about the reaction of former teammates.

"I think it's a bit of fun," Capper said.

"I think I'm looking OK for an old boy."

While the above speaks volumes about the intelligence of Warwick Capper.

Ten News also reported Capper was working as a "stripper to the stars" at night and was seriously considering a career in politics.

"I might go for mayor," he said.

Why stop at mayor, Warwick? We're on the verge of a federal election, you know!

INTERESTING MEDICAL FACT! Pouring Dettol directly onto ones retinas does nothing to stop the image of Warwick Capper's cock sleepily nestling in gold hotpants appearing whenever you close your eyes! Send help immediately!

Our dearest (MySpace) friend Vesna from Series Five of Big Brother - the last season we can recall being truly awesome even though it was ultimately heartbreaking - has launched her very own podcast, which she's delightfully labelled Vesna's Snatchcast!

You can download the first one from here.

Says Vesna -

Each and every week we'll be talking about all things Big Brother related, and on a Thursday morning you'll be able to download a new episode from my official myspace page, or from Adem's pop culture website.

We both make mention in episode 1 of doing it fortnightly, but after we finished we changed our minds and decided to it weekly instead haha. Sorry about the sound quality, Adem's amplifier blew up on the weekend so we're going to have to do the Snatchasts on his mobile phone until it gets repaired. Technology, man, I just don't get it!

She's now up to Snatchcast #2, and we've been told that in it Vesna "screams, talks about hotdogs, and discusses the most recent saga involving her vagina. "

Lovely. Subscribe away!

DEFAMER AUSTRALIA FACT! Vesna recently offered to give us a "buzz and colour". Which sounds a bit butch for our liking, but whatevs. It's the adorable thought that counts.

No guessing as to which of Lynne Spears would pick if she was, you know, forced at gunpoint/microphone to choose a favourite out of her three children.

"Britney Jean Spears is the sweetest and the most sensitive and loving of all my children," said Spears, the mother of three children with ex-husband Jamie Spears.

As our pal texted us this morning, "IN YOUR FACE, JAMIE LYNN!"

Our beloved Australian Prime Minister has denied breaking any rules when he decided to throw a Liberal Party cocktail soirée at Kirribilli House.

Prime Minister John Howard has denied breaking electoral laws by allowing Kirribilli House in Sydney to be used for a Liberal Party cocktail party.

About 225 delegates and business observers were fed prawns, oysters and gourmet soup in shot glasses and treated to a selection of fine wines as they took in the view over Sydney Harbour on June 1 - all for a cost to the Liberal Party of less than $5,200 or just over $20 a head.

The function was the official welcome reception for the Liberal Party federal council, which business observers paid $8250 to attend.

The $5200 repaid by the Liberal Party included food, wine and casual staff costs - but not venue hire.

Labor has lodged a Freedom of Information request for details of the full cost of holding the reception.

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese accused Mr Howard of donating the cost of hiring the prime minister's taxpayer-funded Sydney residence to the Liberal Party.

....

But Mr Howard rejected the claim.

Unless there is a law against the gathering of fuckwits en masse, in which case... we say "Guilty as charged! Throw the book at them!"

Arty smarty-pants David Hockney thinks that the popularity of the iPod has resulted in a less visually enthusiastic society and, in turn, has made people dress themselves in highly unappealing couture.

The artist David Hockney believes the ubiquitous music player is contributing to a decline in visual awareness that is damaging art and painting in particular. It even makes people dress badly.

Speaking on the eve of his 70th birthday, Britain's best-loved living painter said the proliferation of iPods - Apple has sold more than 100 million worldwide - and other digital music players has combined with a decline in art education to create a "fallow period of painting".

"We are not in a very visual age," Hockney said. "I think it's all about sound. People plug in their ears and don't look much, whereas for me my eyes are the biggest pleasure.

"You notice that on buses. People don't look out of the window; they are plugged in and listening to something.

"I think we are not in a very visual age and it's producing badly dressed people. They have no interest in mass or line or things like that."

Finally, Defamer Australia - and Mary-Kate Ashley, for that matter - has an excuse for their particular brand of "hobo chic" style. Damn you, Apple. Damn you.

Having discovered that everyone she thought held her best interests at heart - manager Larry Rudolph, babydaddy Kevin Federline, even her own mother - were conspiring to sabotage her once promising career, Britney Spears has turned to the only people she can trust, her fans, to help shape the arc of her impending comeback. In the latest of a string of recent, marginally coherent announcements posted to her Official Placeholder Website, Spears asks fans to vote on their favorite of five proposed album titles, compiled from a much larger list of rejected lower-back-tattoo ideas. Results have yet to be made public, but our strong instinct is that option #1 - a topical, eight-word homage to another fallen comrade-in-crotch-flashing-arms - will win in a landslide victory.

• "You'll Never See it My Way, Because You're Not Me" [BritneySpears.com]

A heartfelt thanks goes out to the Defamer Special Correspondent on Meaningless Honours Involving Personalised Stars And Filthy Slabs of Sidewalk, who braved the throng of crazed View groupies assembled to gape in awe as Barbara Walters took her place on the Walk of Fame today to send us the above photograph. Before seeing this indelible image, we feared that the Paris Liberation Front had lost all of its momentum, its message drowned out by the voices of an unreasonable mob who won't be satisfied until they can bathe in the heiress's privileged blood. But now that we know that her noble cause has been taken up by tireless crusader for justice Guy Wearing An Ill-Fitting Spider-Man Suit In Front of the Chinese Theatre, hope has been restored that Hilton will be freed from her unacceptable persecution sooner than any of us dare dream.

Keeping pace with the torrent of developments in the life of martyred socialite and pastry chef muse Paris Hilton has become next to impossible lately. We therefore offer the following compendium of the day's most noteworthy events: · Transferred last night out of the Twin Towers medical ward in downtown L.A. (a place nicknamed "The Dings," where the 200 inmates are called "dingbats"), Paris is currently under observation in Lynwood's far cosier medical unit, where she'll stay until officials determine she's ready to return to her original, solitary confinement cell. Oh - and she's still "a mess". [TMZ] · In order to determine if Hilton was serving a fair amount of time for her crime, the LAT analysed 2 million cases (surely securing them next year's Pulitzer), and determined the heiress is serving a harsher sentence than 80% of those who had committed comparable offenses. [LAT]

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Forbes magazine, America's most trusted source for lists of really rich famous people accompanied by little blurbs explaining why these famous people are so rich, has released its annual Celebrity 100, featuring highly recognisable titans from the world of showbiz, sport, and song, all ranked according to their proprietary four-point power-classifying algorithm. While Earthly deity Oprah occupies the top position, Brad Pitt is not far behind at #5, a full nine spots above do-gooding domestic life-partner Angelina Jolie. It's a juxtaposition that lies in humorous contrast to the reality of the couple's day-to-day lives, where Jolie can at any given moment be overhead shouting from behind a computer monitor for her chief orphan wrangler to pick up the pace of his playroom tidying efforts, if the couple plans on making it to that evening's black-tie charity fundraiser before the keynote speaker has begun.

• The Celebrity 100 [Forbes]

Just a little over one month away is the moderately anticipated release of Hairspray, featuring, as far as we know, the first fully authorised recorded drag appearance of Hollywood's second favorite OT-VIII family man, John Travolta. For those of you who simply cannot wait, however, the MTV Movies Blog has an exclusive sneak preview clip. The scene prominently features Travolta's Edna Turnblad, delivering her dialogue in an utterly inscrutable Southern-ish accent (doesn't it take place in Baltimore?) in a register slightly deeper than Travolta's own, and with none of the actor's trademarked, hip-gyrating moves - possibly all the result of reluctant concessions made to Church officials, who voiced serious concerns over how a flouncy, cross-dressing turn from one of their most high-profile lieutenants might affect the bottom-line numbers of their summer/fall 2007 recruitment drive.

• Exclusive Movie Clip: 'Hairspray' [MTV Movies Blog]

All around town, producers whose often-fuzzy roles in bringing together the various elements necessary to get prestige projects before rolling cameras are throwing open their windows and offering up an exultant "Huzzah! to the Hollywood heavens, as the Academy has ever so slightly loosened its Draconian rules about the number of people allowed to storm the Kodak Theatre stage in the unlikely event of a Best Picture win. Reports the NY Times:

Bruised by disputes over which of a film's producers are entitled to a best-picture award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, said it would now, "in a rare and extraordinary circumstance", consider crediting more than three producers as nominees. An eight-year-old policy had limited the number of qualifying producers to three. [...]

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Readers of the hard-copy of today's Variety were greeted by a promotional cover needily advocating the Emmy-worthiness of the entire Grey's Anatomy ensemble, including recovering castectomy patient Isaiah Washington, whose vaguely menacing photo is separated from that of nemesis T.R. Knight by a five-actor buffer.

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Proving there is literally no showbiz pageant title a resourceful programming exec can't magically produce from his ass during an afternoon conference call and quickly slap together into a television event for the ages, Fox Reality is proud to present its hunt for America's Next Top-Heavy Horror Movie Hostess. That's right, aspiring Mistresses of the Dark - Elvira needs a sidekick! From the press release:

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, is searching for an evil handmaiden to assist with her Halloween hosting duties on the Fox Reality Original "The Search for the Next Elvira", which debuts on Fox Reality, the only all-reality, all-the-time cable and satellite network, on Saturday, October 13 at 9:00 PM PT / 12:00 AM ET.

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· Critics who demand consistency from famous people about the various causes in which they dabble are going to shit themselves when they read this story about how Angelina Jolie didn't want to talk to Fox News (or about her orphan-collecting efforts) during the junket for A Mighty Heart, a movie in which she plays the widow of a reporter - the very same profession she sought to destroy with her truculence and speech-suppressing legal waivers. Have we so soon forgotten that she rocked a laudably frugal $US26 outfit at her premiere? Surely she deserves a pass on this one. · "An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch". You're really going to want to read the whole story. Trust us. · Sadly, there is a dark side to Space Chimps, but we're not going to let it dampen our enthusiasm for the project. Space Chimps! · This is all the Tony watching we'll ever need to do.

· Ladies and gentleman, we give you the next Snakes on a Plane. Coming soon from director Barry Sonnenfeld: Space Chimps. We'll say it again: Space Chimps. One more time? OK, if we must: Space Chimps. Begin erecting your unauthorised fan sites ... now. (And make sure to tell the studio it's only going to work if they make it a live action film.) [Variety] · A Tennessee projectionist is fired for telling Ain't It Cool News how shitty the new Fantastic Four movie is a week or two before Fox was ready to deal with the inevitable flood of negative reviews awaiting its superhero sequel. [THR] · We care so little about this meaningless milestone that we're loathe to even note it, but Pirates 3: Whatever It's Called reaches the $US500 million mark internationally in a record 20 days, a week faster than Spider-Man 3: We're Not Even Going To Bother Giving It A Real Title. Congratulations, winning multimedia conglomerate that released a successful movie-related project! [Variety] · Ben Silverman renames NBC Universal Television Studios as Universal Media Studios, a move intended to demonstrate that he's not too busy partying to enact superficial changes at his new company. [THR] · Hollywood Out of Ideas, Hollow Man Edition: Universal and Imagine hire David Goyer to write and direct a new take on H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Brian Grazer to superproduce. (Note: The Grazerhead is too tied up by regrettable personal business to make an appearance at this time.) [Variety]Brian

A vigilant reader (i.e., one who didn't get cross-eyed drunk to celebrate the return of Top Chef) noticed that the new round of commercials for upcoming Bravo offering Hey, Paula!, a serialised documentary on the effects of prescription painkillers... Read More »

Realising that even a Daily Inspiration from Fran Drescher ("Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep," counsels The Nanny, cryptically) and an online shopping spree for sassy "Wife Goes On" tanktops... Read More »

Sad news: The marriage of superproducer Brian Grazer and novelist/screenwriter/grudging blogger Gigi Levangie, which provided the rich source material for parallel publishing and basic cable miniseries empires, is over (again), reports today's Page Six, a seismic development that is... Read More »