British singer Sting has waded into the X Factor debate. In a week where the show’s most famous judge Simon Cowell came in for some fierce criticism for what British viewers saw as a cynical ploy to fix the results, Sting has called the popular television show “preposterous” and “appalling”.

In an interview with London’s Evening Standard, ostensibly to promote his new CD “If On a Winter’s Night”, the Police frontman-turned-solo star launched into the music talent contest which regularly attracts peak audiences of more than 15 million in the UK.

“I am sorry but none of those kids are going to go anywhere, and I say that sadly,” he said of the contestants. “They are humiliated when they get sent off. How appalling for a young person to feel that rejection. It is a soap opera which has nothing to do with music. In fact, it has put music back decades. Television is very cynical.

“They … are not encouraged to create any real unique signature or fingerprint. That cannot come from TV. The X Factor is a preposterous show and you have judges who have no recognisable talent apart from self-promotion, advising them what to wear and how to look. It is appalling.”

Whether the 58-year-old’s comments will bother Cowell, the show’s other judges or the ITV channel which airs the hugely successful series is far from clear. They may be watching the upcoming viewing figures closely, however, after many fans vowed not to watch the programme again after Cowell’s recent antics.

Aerosmith without Steven Tyler is like cocaine without a straw, or alcohol without a hangover.

But as fans come to grips with the very real possibility that the rubber-faced singer may abandon his scarf-draped microphone stand at the helm of one of America’s most successful rock bands, the next question is: Who should replace him?

Guitarist Joe Perry said on Monday that the band is “positively” seeking a new singer, apparently having tired of the silent treatment Tyler has meted out to them in recent months. The final straw was an article published last week by Classic Rock magazine, in which Tyler said he was going to focus on “Brand Tyler.” Perry – Tyler’s musical foil for 40 years – was not happy to learn about the singer’s plans online, and upped the ante by saying Aerosmith would continue without him.

One candidate to replace Tyler could be Hagen Grohe, a German singer plucked from obscurity to sing on Perry’s newly released solo album, “Have Guitar, Will Travel.” Perry has taken the solo project on the road, and Grohe does versions of such Aerosmith nuggets as “Walk This Way” and a reggaefied “Dream On,” in a soaring vocal style reminiscent of Axl Rose. When Reuters asked Perry last month about Hagen eventually replacing Tyler, a somewhat outlandish idea at the time, Perry did not exactly rubbish the proposal.

Bands who replace lead singers have a mixed track record. AC/DC went on to bigger and better things with Brian Johnson, although many fans three decades later still long for his late predecessor Bon Scott. Deep Purple moved into the big leagues after Ian Gillan replaced Rod Evans in 1969. Van Halen survived the 1985 replacement of David Lee Roth with Sammy Hagar, but the rock band stumbled badly in 1996 when it brought in Gary Cherone.

And then there’s INXS, which struggled to replace late singer Michael Hutchence, despite or because of a reality-TV contest. Sublime’s recent attempt to reunite with a new singer was shot down by a judge at the behest of the family of the ska-punk band’s late frontman. Others like Queen did not even bother trying — at least until 2004, 13 years after the death of Freddie Mercury, when two-thirds of the group’s surviving members joined up with British blues singer Paul Rodgers.

Which brings us back to Aerosmith. Rodgers, the former frontman of Bad Company, is Perry’s favorite singer. People magazine facetiously (we hope) suggested Adam Lambert or Roth as replacements. Maybe Chris Cornell, of Soundgarden and Audioslave fame, would be a good fit? Or Pink, especially since Aerosmith had a hit song of that name? Or a merger with Run-DMC, whose rap version of “Walk this Way” reignited Aerosmith’s career? Or perhaps the answer is staring at Perry in the mirror?

Beauty queen Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who became the darling of conservatives when she spoke out against gay marriage at this year’s Miss USA pageant, has another work getting her plenty of attention. No, it’s not her memoir, the defiantly titled “Still Standing,” that has people talking. It’s a sex tape that few have seen, but that plenty of people are jabbering about.

On Tuesday, Prejean herself went on television news shows and talked about the sex tape. In this interview with NBC’s “Today” show, Prejean defended herself and said that “nothing is private anymore.”

“It was me by myself, there was no one else with me, I was not having sex,” she told NBC News. “I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I was a teenager, I cared about him, I trusted him.”

She added that it was “for private use” but that making the solo sex video was the “biggest mistake of my life.”

Prejean added that she does not know how officials with Miss California got the solo sex tape, as was reported gleefully in recent days by celebrity website TMZ.

One reason the video is just being talked about — and not viewed on the Web or DVD or any other medium — is that Prejean was apparently 17 at the time, which would make her underage and a crime to distribute the footage.

On “Today,” Prejean said she has been under attack for criticizing gay marriage at Miss USA, and she hit many of the conservative talking points, slamming the news media for being too “liberal,” name checking Sarah Palin and taking a glancing shot at right wing punching bag Keith Olbermann.

Meanwhile, some of Prejean’s critics are sharpening their knives for her.

Business mogul Donald Trump, who runs the Miss USA pageant, was one of those critical of Prejean. In her book, the beauty queen said that Trump would divide beauty contestants based on looks.

Wait a minute, isn’t that a big part of what beauty pageants are about? … Beauty?

The Donald wasn’t having any of Prejean’s accusations. “Carrie should be ashamed of herself,” he told celebrity news show Extra.  “… I don’t stand the ones that are less attractive to one side, and the beautiful ones on the other side. It was total nonsense — it was fiction in her imagination.”

And model Shanna Moakler, who left her job as an official at Miss California but came back after Prejean was replaced by another woman, told chat show host Wendy Williams that despite Prejean’s comments that she was targeted based on her views on gay marriage, the problem was that she breached her contract by posing topless and not being truthful about that to pageant officials.

“We have tons of religious conservative beauty queens all over the country, there has never been a beauty queen who has been dethroned because of her religious views,” Moakler told Williams. “But there have been many that have their crowns taken away for breaching their contract.”

But has there been a beauty queen who has turned a normally staid beauty pageant question-and-answer into a book deal and more? No, it seems Prejean has accomplished that one all by herself, going solo.

Robbie Williams looks set to maintain his impressive UK chart record this weekend, with his latest album “Reality Killed the Video Star” on course for the number one slot come Sunday which would make it eight chart-topping studio albums out of eight since he went solo after leaving Take That in the mid-1990s.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing for the 35-year-old, whose previous album “Rudebox” was poorly received and recorded sharply lower sales than his previous efforts. He failed to make it big in the key U.S. market and has said he suffered from chronic stage fright — a surprising admission from someone renowned for his cheeky grin and apparently indomitable character.

A statement from his spokesman says Williams is at number one in the midweek album charts in the UK, with over 85,000 copies sold in the country on the first day of release on Monday. It is also number one on the iTunes chart in 16 countries, including Germany, France, Austria and Belgium.

That, however, is not enough to stop the questions about his eventual reunion with Take That, a group which has enjoyed a remarkable comeback of its own in the last few years. Robbie has proved he has what it takes to go it alone, but everyone, it seems, wants to see him back with the band.

Bette Midler will allow one lucky fan to see her in concert, and not “from a distance.”

The Divine Miss M., as she likes to be known, is participating in an online auction that ends on Friday. One of the items in the auction is the chance to meet the “Wind Beneath My Wings” singer and watch her perform from the front row at her Las Vegas show. The auction is handled by CharityFolks.com with proceeds going to the New York Restoration Project, a group Midler founded 15 years ago to put a green shine on the Big Apple by restoring parks and community gardens.

Midler will perform the last show in her nearly two-year Las Vegas run on Jan. 31, and that’s the ticket fans are getting a chance to bid on.

As of Monday afternoon, the latest bid for that ticket stood at $2,000. This for a package that comes with round-trip airfare. Is that the best Midler fans can do?

Britney Spears? Lip-synching? “Whateverrrr” as the pop princess might put it herself.

Britney has been lip-synching her way through her “comeback” world tour for the past six months, so it’s a bit of a mystery why it’s caused such a fuss in Australia.

As singer John Mayer , who has been in Australia promoting his own album, put it in a wry weekend tweet,  “If you’re shocked that Britney was lip-synching at her concert and want your money back, life may continue to be hard for you.”

Britney’s not the first performer to lip-synch during fast-paced, live song-and-dance performances, and she’s certainly not the last — even classical musicians Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman played to a recording at President Barack Obama’s outdoor inauguration in the bitter January weather.

But the practice seems to be news to some Australian politicians, who are suggesting that tickets should carry a disclaimer about whether parts of concerts are pre-recorded or mimed.

Britney’s fans — in Australia and elsewhere — are coming out in support of their idol, whose slick “Circus” tour went around the United States before going Down Under.

“oh my god Britney i’m so embarrassed by how Australia has treated you since you arrived in our country. You have been nothing but slammed and put down since arriving and it’s pathetic. I’m from Australia and my entire family is beyond inspired by yourself, your music, your life and your morals,” wrote one fan, Katie D, on the official Britney Spears website.

So if most fans seem happy, does it matter anymore whether Britney, or anyone else, lip-synchs at “live” concerts? After all, as Britney sings on the title track of her latest album “I’m runnin’ this like-like-like a circus.”

Or are audiences at pop concerts getting short-changed after sometimes handing over more than $100 for a ticket?

When Disney’s animated “A Christmas Carol” debuted over the weekend in U.S. movie theaters, it marked the beginning of Hollywood’s holiday season — the second most-trafficked period at theaters after the summer. But the movie failed to generate a huge amount of excitement with fans judging by its box office tally of $31 million. By contrast, last year’s animated film that opened on roughly the same weekend, Dreamworks’ “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” took in $63 million.

But does that spell “humbug” for “A Christmas Carol”? Maybe not.

You can read about the movie here and the box office here. Or, you can watch the video below and see what people coming out of the theaters thought.

(Video by Marc Price)

Fans might remember that the same scenario played out for 3-D adventure “The Polar Express” from the same director, Robert Zemeckis. Like “Christmas Carol,” “Polar Express” was an expensive, motion-capture animated movie, and it too opened in November to just over $30 million. At the time, that figure was deemed a disappointment by  box office watchers, but the film kept on chugging along at box offices throughout the holidays. It eventually earned more than $180 million in total domestic ticket sales ($300 million worldwide) and has become something of a modern holiday classic.

Meanwhile, Oscar hopeful “Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire” also debuted over the weekend in a limited number of theaters, 18, to a whopping $100,000 per theater for a total $1.8 million. This dark drama about a young woman who must overcome a dismal urban life, is widely picked among Oscar watchers as an early awards favorite for the movie and for its two key actresses, newcomer Gabourey Sidibe and comic actress Mo’Nique. You can read about it here and here. And we asked fans about it, too,  which you can see in the video above.

X Factor judge Simon Cowell faced accusations of rigging the result of last night’s X Factor vote as the tabloid newspapers, so often the champions of the hugely popular show, began to turn on the man they like to call “Mr. Nasty”.

Twin act John and Edward Grimes (aka Jedward) survived a popular vote while singer Lucie Jones was shown the door. The two acts ended up at the bottom of the heap in a phone vote, and it was up to the judges to decide which one to throw out. But if the judges are split 2-2, the results of the public vote come back into play. Cowell had the deciding vote with the panel split 2-1 in Lucie’s favour, and he decided for the twins.

The Daily Mirror’s headline (because the X Factor has long been headline news in Britain) was “Farce Factor” while rival The Sun wrote: “‘Ward a Load of Cobblers“. Quoting fans, the latter newspaper added: “Cowell’s gone too far … show is ruined.”

Readers may reasonably ask if any of this matters. Well, it may matter to Cowell, who has become one of pop music’s most successful managers through his appearances on X Factor and similar singing competitions here and in the United States. It may also mean something to ITV, the channel which airs the show in the UK. With peak audiences approaching 15 million, its advertising revenue from the biggest show on British TV must be healthy to say the least.

 For those who follow the show, and care about it, many feel that Cowell’s decision to refer the decision back to the popular vote, rather than voting off Jedward, smacked of a stitch-up. He had been Jedward’s most vocal critic for weeks, and popular opinion would appear to support the argument that loser Lucie had far more talent than the twins, whose performances have been variously described as “bizarre” and “ridiculous”.

Theories abound as to why Cowell might decide to save the twins. The most popular is money — like them or loathe them, the twins seem to get the crowds going and Cowell might be looking ahead to the X Factor tour when the show is over. The removal of strong vocalist Lucie may also remove a potential threat to the singing acts on the show which he endorses.

Will his decision backfire? Will less people tune in to the show because they feel the whole thing is rigged? Or has Cowell pulled it off again by ramping up the stakes and getting the nation talking about the show again? It wouldn’t be the first time.

The upcoming threesome episode on “Gossip Girl” seems to be getting everyone’s knickers in a twist, even before the much-anticipated episode of the scandalous TV show about rich New York teens airs on Monday.

The TV watchdog group the Parents Television Council says the “3SOME” tryst is “reckless and irresponsible” in view of the “impressionable teenagers” that it says are the show’s main target , and has urged affiliates of the CW network not to air it.

Fans of the show however, seem to be more concerned about trying to figure out which of the fabulously rich, beautiful young things  — now out of high school and supposedly at college — will be involved in the three-way hookup.

Judging by the bed-hopping enjoyed so far by the characters on the show,  pretty much any of them could be persuaded (or maybe tricked?) into a brief menage a trois,  although we’re betting that bad boy Chuck (Ed Westwick) and scheming Blair (Leighton Meester)  will be playing a major role.

Like all publicity ,  good and bad, the PTC warning may have the opposite effect in whetting the appetite of lapsed “Gossip Girl” fans to the scandalous story line.

As Britney Spears sang in her recent No. 1 single “Three” (on the same subject) “Three is a charm, Two is not the same.”

“Gossip Girl” is currently getting an audience of about 2.2 million a week, and although the CW as a whole is aimed at women between the ages of 18-34, the network says the median age of “Gossip Girl” viewers is 27 years old.

Try telling that to your teens.