The Showbiz Blog - Best/Worst Comeback Ever?

If Christianity and the WWF have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t beat a really good comeback. What, then, to make of the return of Britney?

A quick recap. Having conquered showbiz in around the year 2005, she then went a bit mad for quite a while. Now, she has allegedly ‘turned things around’, and is back with a new album (and hair).

Is she really the same old million-record a nanosecond selling Britney as before?

As everyone now knows, this very weekend she turned up on X-Factor, the self-proclaimed ‘biggest entertainment show in the UK’ and made a bit of a mess of it.

She mimed. She danced around a little bit. She didn’t really seem to know where she was or the nature of the show she was on. She failed to look all that bothered about it. Asked to give advice to the contestants by Dermot O’Leary, she said, “ummmm, keep doing ‘it’”. She looked a little unsure of what ‘it’ was exactly.

She left ‘under a cloud’.

‘Bravo!’, said the judges, who are contractually obliged to do so.

The Hoi Polloi, on the other hand, emboldened by the whole John Sergeant thing, have refused to play ball, basically reckoning she was a bit rubbish and saying so whenever and wherever possible.

But then. Britney was on the tellybox again barely 5 showbiz minutes later (Sky 1, Tuesday night), this time in a wonderfully sympathetic one and a half hour documentary throughout which the star quality that flickered only rather dimly on Saturday night was back to full global megastar levels.

She smiled. She cried. She danced. She did the family thing. She charmed.

So, is Britney a low-talent personality vacuum prima donna or a misunderstood America’s pop megastar who just wants to dance?

Confusing or what?

Brendan Cole