Denise Van Outen ordered to get Joss Stoned

US TV bosses have instructed Denise Van Outen to do a Joss Stone and lose her Brit accent - because audiences over the pond have not warmed to her chirpy Essex twang. Van Outen, 32, was signed to present Grease, "a reality show which is aiming to find a new cast to play the characters from the hit Seventies movie", the Evening …

[Tyson Boellstorff]

Our (the rest of the US) apologies for Hollywood perfecting stupid.

Let's see. Hire somebody because her accent is popular in the US. Tell her to lose said accent. Maybe they can then have Dick Van Dyke do the voice overs. This comes from the same brilliant minds that chopped classic Benny Hill episodes down to 30 minutes, because they figure the public can't understand the accent and the intellectual humor. ;-)

I have to admit, convoluted plots and cerebral humor like Benny Hill and Monty Python do keep the average LA media exec sounding stupid, or is that just their total failure to comprehend that they base their estimates of what is popular on what the other networks are doing, and it's all one long, rapid slide into the lowest common denominator.

They didn't invent stupid, but they've gone a long, long, long way towards perfecting it. The first step was when they started believing their own BS.