First we had grouchy receptionist Frank in TV hospital drama "ER" getting a rare hold of a celeb tabloid and commenting "What's Britney done now?!" I love how her name can be spat out with such vehemence. It could be a new expletive for the new century.

Then we had a scene with a mysterious nanny and her young charge in "Six Degrees". It went like this: Little girl: "I LOVE the Rolling Stones!" Nanny: "What about Britney?" (spat out again....) Little girl: "My mommy says Britney's the devil and Keith Richards is god." Nanny: "Smart lady!"

Next, UK crime-comedy caper series "The Invisibles". Here a character was compared to "Britney Spears and the Royal Family put together". An impressive juxtaposition and a fine level of fame for the girl once known in New Orleans as the Bayou Bunny.

Then while driving in Ireland, I turn on the car radio and within ten seconds they're playing "Piece of Me". When it finishes, the DJ just says one word: "Britney". No ironic remarks or social commentary, because playing Britney on Irish radio is totally acceptable to the audience and to them she's still a megastar.

The latest episode comes from "grotequely obese and proud of it" singer Beth Ditto. To her, Britney is the OBVIOUS poster-girl for celebrities who have beautiful bodies and aren't fat. To her, Britney is therefore "hideous". There a lot of skinnier celebs than Britney, but she was the one who sprang to mind.

The world is talking about Britney, at the very moment that the lady herself is doing nothing more controversial than going to the gym most days.

And, in that context, it’s been interesting to see the character of press comment on Britney’s bikini pictures over the past couple of weeks. It tells us a lot about the nature of the whole celebrity commentary business.

It’s becoming obvious that gossip columnists don’t really look at a picture of a celebrity and write a remark based on their observations; nor do they construct a “story” based on a consecutive series of such observations. What they do is create - in advance - a storyline for the soap opera of a celebrity’s life, then interpret all available facts and pictures in ways that fit and support the storyline.

In other times, the media would have jumped all over the pictures showing an apparently very obviously pregnant Britney smoking out back of her house. There would have been a lot of adverse comment on her unfailingly fertility and seeming ignorance of birth-control, the lunacy of having another baby at this crucial time of her life, the sluttiness implied by the fact that we don’t know which of various men the daddy would turn out to be, the irresponsibility of having another child when she’d already lost custody of two... and much more.

In the not-so-distant past the gossipers wouldn’t have hesitated, or held back till they were sure that she WAS pregnant. They’d have gone for the jugular in a second because all of this would have fitted perfectly with their expectations and asssumptions and would have been the natural continuation of the storyline they’d been writing for her for so long.

But in fact, the predominant media reaction was doubt and caution. The tabloids went so far as to talk about a “suspicious-looking bump” and wondered with an almost endearing bewilderment if it could possibly be that she was pregnant again. Nobody seemed to want to believe it.

Similarly, the recent pictures of Britney on the beach in Costa Rica would in the past have provoked a great deal of ridicule concerning her “flabby” tummy, her fat bottom, her thunder-thighs, etc. etc. But in fact, all of the media comment I’ve seen has been almost perversely positive, and has concentrated on how healthy she looks, how she’s steadily improving, and how her body looks “great”.

It has rarely been more obvious that the interpretation of, and commentary on, celebrity pictures is “in the eye of the beholder”. Paparazzi pictures aren’t just pictures in a vacuum. They have to be invested with meaning, and the meaning is taken from the current consensus on the state-of-play in a celebrity’s life.

Gossip writers have a strong moralistic streak and their present mindset is to reward Britney’s genuinely strenuous efforts to get her life back to where they think it should be. What we have to watch for now is what happens if Britney shows signs of deviating from the script they have already written for her. It will tell us a lot more about gossip writers and about the script than about Britney herself.

Well, Britney actually recorded the songs for "Blackout" a long time ago, and it probably doesn't feel like "too soon" to her. Also, she's beginning to look as if she's finally accepting the changes that had to be made in her life. It looks like she's a more willing participant in the "new, reborn Britney" project. For months she was scowling for the cameras, but now we often see her in a brighter mood.

In addition to THAT, we hear reports that both her Conservator dad and Larry Rudolph believe that to aid her lengthy process of psychological healing she needs to be kept busy, and to have the sense of structure created by a work program put back into her life. OK, she may just be laying down some tracks for fun, or to bank them for the future, but she probably needs some kind of target or timetable to give conviction and reality to the next year or so, and the release of a new album would provide that.

Personally, I can't see a new album being released at the end of this year, but some people are already talking up the head-to-heads it would create, and who would win them. A revitalised Whitney Houston has been mentioned, for example. Another is Britney's traditional supposed-rival Christina Aguilera, and some have been so rash as to assume that Xtina would automatically whip Britney's ass.

But why? It's not as if Britney would fail to get marching on the promotion trail this time around. The regulation answer is always that Xtina has "credibility". I'm not so sure how much that's worth when you unpack the concept. Indeed, I think that in many people's eyes Aguilera actually lost some credibility with her last album. It was like she had become a jobbing singer rather than a "conviction" artist, and wasn't too sure where to go with her music.

But, in any case, countless musicians have "credibility" if they make their music to a high standard, have their distinctive styles and uniqueness, and retain their fans. What annoys me is the suggestion that Britney - who has those attributes in spades - somehow lacks credibility. Those who make this suggestion may be confusing a chaotic life with a creatively invalid one - and a look at music history shows how dumb THAT is. Many great artists have had lives that were a mess.

What intrigues me is that the UK tabloids that take such joy in making fun of Britney's life are the same ones who rate her highly as an artist. The Sun's Victoria Newton has called her "one of our brightest and best stars" and The Daily Star's Joe Mott has reported enthusiastically on all her new releases since 2003. Meanwhile, turning to the "quality" newspapers, the Observer/Guardian has never written a bad review of her music, and has compared her favorably with her peers, including Kylie, Beyonce AND Xtina.

But what is particularly telling is that, in its revelations about this alleged new Britney album, The Sun had no problem in reporting that Britney was "on fire" in the studio. You don't say that kind of thing about lightweight artists, or about those who have no credibility.

But here we have this guy claiming that she hit him at "15 to 20 mph" and she "may have been putting make-up on just before the crash" and now he has to see a chiropractor urgently. Well, pal... if she hit you at 20 mph the back of your car would be bashed in by about 3 feet and HER car would be undriveable. In fact there was barely a scratch on either car. I would estimate the ACTUAL impact speed at around 1 to 2 mph.

About the "make up" story? Well, it's a traditional scam to pile the pressure on someone who is clearly to blame for an accident. If you can throw some rumors around that they may have been doing some dangerous or careless driving, they'll be in a BIG hurry to pay up and pay well, won't they?

And as for the chiropractor..... Just about EVERYONE who gets hit gently from behind says they're OK - and indeed they ARE OK, but when they think about it later they realise they can claim for back pain because nobody in the entire medical profession can prove or disprove their claim.

Anyway, that's all standard stuff. What's disturbing about this "story" is that it IS a story at all. The media still want a piece of Britney, despite her Dad's best efforts to impose a low profile on her. They're hungrier for Britney news than ever, and getting increasingly desperate.

But because they're getting so little from her now, every tiny little thing that happens in her life is being picked apart and blown out of all proportion. If she scratches her butt on the street now, it'll be a news story. And I'm not joking or exaggerating.

The mindset that motivates people to make those kinds of remarks is an extremely depressing one because -

(i) it seems to arise from arrogance - the specific meaning of which, in this context, is a tendency to claim the right to make assumptions about OTHER people's states of consciousness and the deliberateness of their intent;

(ii) it seems to go along with a tendency to want to bully everyone else into sharing that mindset by calling them "retards", "deluded", "weak", "sheep" and "naive", accusing them of "making excuses" and so on... and to refuse to accept that anyone else's viewpoint is a valid one;

(iii) their position doesn't actually LEAD anywhere, except to a load of frequently baseless assumptions. Some people seem to have difficulty understanding this point, so let me explain. Once you have pointed your finger at someone and decided they're guilty of something ("it's her own fault" etc. etc.) you really don't have anything left to say because you've already acted as judge and jury and found the accused guilty of whatever it is you think he or she has done. The case is over. You've said all there is to say, apart from passing sentence;

(iv) people who think like this see EVERYTHING in terms of "guilt", "fault" and "who's to blame". It's a tabloid journalist's (or celebrity blogger's) mentality. The former editor of one of the UK's biggest-selling tabloids once articulated this activity as follows: "We give everybody somebody to hate every day". He seemed proud of it, but this encouragement of tabloid readers to make judgments on others has led to a cynical, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, "I would never do it" attitude. To me, the old "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude of humility seemed a lot healthier.

(v) the "guilt allegers" and "fault attributers" don't leave the discussion with anywhere to go. While most of the "retards", "sheep" and "deluded fans" are actually trying to find out what really happened and pick the bones of reality out of the morass of speculation, they're being lambasted by these judgmental bullies for "making excuses" and not rushing to judgment themselves.

But what's worse, the "judgmentalists", by their "she's to blame and that's all there is to say" attitude, also have the effect of distorting and inhibiting discussion of how their "blame figure" (in this case, Britney) should take positive steps to get herself OUT of the mess she's in. By insisting that "it's her own fault and she should take responsibility for her actions" they don't seem to be leaving her with many options other than to confess her guilt.

But THEN what? Their position seems to imply or assume that everything she has done has been done consciously, deliberately, and either maliciously, recklessly or irresponsibly. Society usually considers that when somebody has "fessed up" to a bunch of that, punishment is in order.

So is the problem for "judgmentalists", and the cause of their bitterness and frustration, their unease that Britney (or Jamie Lynn or whoever) has somehow managed to ESCAPE punishment and that the "retards", "sheep", "deluded fans" etc. etc. seem content to let her get away with it by "making excuses"?

The whole "judgmentalist" mode of argument seems to hang on the twin assumptions (whether conscious or unconscious) by the people who take that attitude that (i) THEY know what Britney (or whoever) is REALLY thinking and why she REALLY did what she did (and anyone who disagrees is deluded, dumb or insane - or all three); and (ii) that everything that's happened was because of her own deliberate choices.

The fact that she's turned out to be mentally ill has thrown some of them into disarray but the more determined "judgmentalists" are now trying to rewrite history. The latest twist is that the "retards", "sheep" and "deluded fans" didn't want Britney to get help. They wanted her to drive around Hollywood forever with Sam, Adnan, Alli and her 50 personal paparazzi. They didn't care if she never got her babies back. They didn't care if her career had hgone to hell. Apparently THEY were the ones who believed that she wasn't mentally ill.

Judgmental people seem to be an irony-free zone but to the rest of us it seems ironic that they've tried to hijack the very reason why the "retards", "sheep" and "deluded fans" were "making excuses" for her in the first place. Now it's not an "excuse" - it's an explanation. Ironic too that the entire judgmentalist case ("she's to blame" "it's her own fault" etc. etc. - remember?) has always been based on a firm belief that all of her actions were conscious, but reckless and irresponsible, and that's why she was fully liable for "blame".

That's the problem with psychiatric facilities. They often confuse a tendency to occasional manic episodes with an overall mental incompetence that includes an inability ever to think clearly and thus to take important decisions concerning a patient's own life.

To make matters worse, mental health professionals acknowledge that people admitted to these facilities become "institutionalised" in only 3 weeks. That means in effect that they surrender responsibility for their lives to their carers. And that makes full recovery to independent living and decision-making a very lengthy process. In some cases the institutionalisation becomes permanent.

Most tests of psychological competence focus on consistency, "joined up thinking" if you like, to show that a subject's mind is functioning in a way that allows for competent decision-taking and the assumption of responsibility. If a person's consciousness seems to present itself as a series of disconnected episodes, it would be judged that his/her cognitive functions were significantly impaired.

But Britney's brain has worked like this for a very long time. After considering the behavioristic evidence, I wrote in 2005 that throughout every waking hour...idea after idea rockets into her mind. But it's like she's a radio receiver auto-tuning over a hundred wavebands. There's no real consistency or continuity or logic. The same idea may occur more than once, or many times, but it's like finding the same song playing on several stations. There doesn't seem to be a central, co-ordinating mechanism that pulls everything together and turns it into one coherent history or story or personality. She changes her mind with breathtaking frequency, and sometimes she tries too hard to make harsh reality fit her fairy tale. The only thing that ever made a consistent thread in her whole life story was her intense focus on her career. But now that has gone.

Can the psychiatrists treating her now do their work so well as to give greater consistency and continuity to her cognitive function than she had before anyone even had suspicions that she was mentally ill? It seems unlikely. So how are they going to decide that she's competent to take decisions? Already it appears that Britney has lost the battle to convince the authorities that she's competent to make her own choice of lawyer! It seems that she's already being taken down the long, dark road towards loss of her independence. Yet bipolarity - if that's what's wrong with her - is usually associated with emotional problems, not with loss of reasoning ability. Could it be that her strange way of thinking is already telling against her?

My fear is that, if we don't see her released from psychiatric care after the present 14 days, we may not see her again as an independent adult for a very long time - if ever. And as for seeing her again as Britney Spears, megastar......?

Now I'm wondering if these were early signs of bipolarity, before the condition took such a hold of her. It's probably no good looking for causes among the many adverse things that have happened to her. The breakup with Justin is said by many to have left a permanent scar on her, and her behavior seemed to degenerate gradually into craziness after that. Yet, following her wedding to Kevin, she seemed calm, approachable, articulate and blissfully happy.

The divorce from Kevin must have had its reasons. I can't believe Britney, having witnessed her parents' divorce, would have ended her marriage lightly. So she must have experienced some more bad times there. The stress and trauma of divorce can break a lot of people and it could do severe damage to someone who's already mentally fragile.

Then there was the question of Post Partum Depression. Almost every media outlet, in consort with Rent-an-Expert, diagnosed this for Britney, and later claimed that SHE thought that was the problem too. Maybe it was. And it's a very serious condition. But all these sources of stress aren't the causes of bipolarity, even though they could make her mental state a lot worse in her depressive phases. Bipolarity is a problem arising from chemical imbalances in the brain and it has to be treated with medication. It can take a while for the precise prescription and dosages to be established.

Now! Cast your mind back to Britney's Dad's comments around the time of rehab. He said that she was a sick little girl and that what was wrong with her wasn't what everyone thought. He didn't go into detail, but I think he may have been more insightful than we realised. I think he understood the problem when nobody else did. I think some of the things that have been reported over the past couple of years can now be seen as Jamie's frustration at the way his elder daughter's life was heading and the fact that NOBODY seemed to be recognising her problems and NOBODY seemed to be in control, including Britney.

And that's one reason why I'm glad he's taking charge at the moment. Jamie has been involved in some of the biggest decisions in Britney's life. It was Jamie, not Lynne, who wrote the letters recommending her to agents, etc. when she was a child. I think he has the courage and sense of responsibilty to take control now.

I'm a bit confused about what's going on between Lynne and Britney. I don't think she can have been unaware of her daughter's mental health problems, but I think she was anxious not to get even further on to Britney's bad side and bring about an animosity so bad that it could never be mended. She has always said she loves Britney, without reservation or qualification. But she probably felt that trying to intervene again in her life (when she saw what happened after the rehab stint) would just make Britney madder and more alienated than ever. I think she wanted Britney to come back to HER, rather than make an approach that could be rebuffed, or risk sticking her nose in. But lately she must have seen that there was no alternative.

I'm very reluctant to criticize Lynne. I think she's a genuinely nice woman and a very loving mom and just about everybody who knows the Spears family personally, or worked with them before Britney became a star, has said that she was supportive of what Britney wanted and was never pushy. She wasn't a Showbiz Monster Mom. And I think that has become clear in recent months, even while so many fans have been taking her to task for not intervening.

Sam Lutfi may have been Britney's pal and confidant, and I do actually believe that he had the best of intentions towards her, but I think he ended up acting as an enabler. He got too close to Britney, too close to see that there was something wrong inside the little bubble that he and she inhabited. He listened too much to what Britney said and what she asked for - and we all know how charming and irresistible she can be. So I don't blame Sam. But I think it's for the best that Jamie Spears is in charge now. Goodness knows how Britney feels about it.

It seems to me, picking my way through the morass of hysterical reportage, that the sequence of events was as follows: Britney thought that because of the time she spent on giving her deposition earlier in the day, she was entitled to keep the babies for another two hours in the evening and refused to hand them back when Kevin's bodyguard turned up.

The bodyguard then called Kevin, who sent his lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan to exert some legal leverage and "lay down the law" with Britney. He didn't get an instant compliance from her, and called the police. The police mistakenly thought that she was under the influence of an "unknown substance" and could under the circumstances be a danger to herself or others. So they had her carted off to hospital under a compulsory restraint order.

The media immediately jumped on the story and fantasized all kinds of things. Most of them printed it as truth that she was under the influence of drugs, threatened to kill Jayden and/or herself, had a gun, bit somebody, trashed her hospital room, etc. etc. etc. As the days go by, all of these juicy fictions are unravelling. But the damage was done, and almost everybody now firmly believes that Britney is clinically insane and should be involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

Anyway, the hospital carried out tests, but found that she was clear of drugs and alcohol and had no other reason to detain her, so they released her with the minimum of delay. In the meantime, Kaplan had seized his moment and put the wheels in motion to remove her visitation rights.

On her release, Britney was therefore faced with a period of loneliness and heartbreak. And she realised that the only thing that ever calmed her down when she felt that she was going crazy was male company, cuddling, comfort, caring and sex. So she hooked up with paparazzo Adnan Ghalib.

The hysteria with which this relationship has been met has been nothing less than unbelievable. And the reason is purely that completely unproven and probably untrue stories were published alleging that Adnan had been hawking some compromising pictures of Britney around the media, looking for millions of dollars. It was claimed that the pictures showed her "semi naked", "wearing only a shirt", "wearing only a bikini bottom" or "naked".

But, as with the regularly-reported yet mythical Britney "sex tape", none of these pictures has actually appeared anywhere. The snide little follow-up in some UK tabloids that Adnan had finally agreed to sell the near-naked pix to an Australian tabloid for $25,000 is beyond ludicrous.

The latest situation is that Britney seems to be spending most of her time with Adnan. Are they in love? Who knows?! Is he using her? Maybe!! Most guys do, and she probably knows that. But, at the moment, what she needs most is a relationship with a boyfriend. Before she met K-Fed she was going crazy, as the "Chaotic" TV series showed. But after she met him she entered one of the most serene periods of her life.

It could be that the same is going to happen now. I'm not convinced that we should be making a long-distance, remote-control diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She does have some strange episodes, but we only seem to see manic ones and I've neither seen nor heard any evidence that she experiences the depressive end of the spectrum.

AND it's hard to deny that, based on pap pix and videos, she seems to function in a fairly mundane fashion most of the time. She eats, shops, drives her car... we haven't seen her foaming at the mouth yet, nor going around on all fours barking like a dog, nor trying to fly off the roof of her house. I'm not saying she's normal - my article "Shadow - the elusive personality of Britney Spears" on this site pointed out her abnormalities away back in early 2005.

What about her babies? Is she not trying her best to get them back? I have no idea. Maybe she's just concentrating on getting herself into a better place emotionally and mentally before she tries again. Maybe she's just filling the days when she can't have her babies with Adnan rather than be lonely and end up doing something foolish.

I may be the only person who thinks this, but I'm actually glad she's with Adnan. This is a girl who CANNOT be on her own. If he can see her through this awful time, keep a watch on her through the nights and be a calming presence in her life, then that's fine with me.

In fact, if Britney was a maker of bubblegum pop, her career would have already been over - and it would have been over in 2003/4. Before “In The Zone” came out, almost every newspaper carried an article on her imminent comeback and speculated that she would never be able to make the transition from Tweeny Star to young adult audiences. And they were right in saying that if she hadn’t been able to do that, there was nowhere else for her to go.

However, it turned out that “In The Zone” was NOT bubblegum pop. It was cool, smart, bang-up-to-date, chilled out, highly clubbable dance-pop and Britney’s audience followed her willingly. At that time, industry analysts noted that her demographic was now the 18-26 range. Pop “experts” and kewl-as-f@ck DJs - who blamed her for the turn-of-century pop revival - had wanted her demise soooo badly, but she confounded them yet again.

None of this had anything to do with her having an excellent media image. As far back as 2003-4 people were talking about her having gone “off the rails” following the Justin debacle and media talking-heads were already commenting that she was more of a celebrity and gossip-magnet than a musician.

Anyway, we all know what has happened since. The only person she falls short of in popular estimations of the runners and riders in the “wacko” stakes is Michael Jackson and he doesn’t get 5 percent of the stories written about him that Britney does. So anything she does to sell product is now faced with considerable and unprecedented levels of consumer resistance.

In that situation, if “Blackout” had received bad press and equally bad word-of-mouth it really WOULD have been the end of her career. But this time, the critics seemed to remember the leap in credibility and change in audience demographic that came about with “In The Zone” and treated her like a relatively significant, influential pop musician. The vast majority of reviews have been excellent, with “her best album ever” assessments flying around. Word-of-mouth too has been highly favorable and almost everybody who has heard the album a few times seems to love it.

Yes, sales have been disappointing so far - although there is the chance of “Blackout” being a slow-burner. But what is more important is that almost everyone agrees it’s a great album. It’s complete rubbish to give all the credit to the producers. Artists like Kelly Rowland and Jennifer Lopez have had the best of production too, yet their recent albums have flopped - not because these girls had a bad public image but because their albums were below-par.

If “Blackout” had sold twice as many copies but gotten bad reviews and a lot of fan disappointment, I’d have been a lot more worried. It would have looked as if her time was coming to an end, she’d had a good run but didn’t really have what you could call a CAREER in front of her. But the quality of “Blackout” and the great reception it has had ensure that she DOES genuinely have a career now. A career based, not on the “best PR in years”, not on being beautiful and sexy, not on being America’s sweetheart, but on musical excellence. People, including critics, have set the bar high for her. They EXPECT good things from her albums - good ADULT things - and she is delivering.

How to build on this highly favorable climate, step up to the next rung of the credibility ladder AND make new fans is the true challenge facing Britney. It’s all in her hands now.