THE good news is that the newly pregnant Britney Spears is to star in her own six-part reality TV show. The bad news is that Britney Spears has also directed and shot much of the footage. Of all Britney’s talents — going “Ay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay”, getting married cheaply, being able to walk down Sunset Boulevard simultaneously holding a Big Mac, a super-size Coke and a chihauhau — one senses that cinematography might not be her strongest. Not when it comes to shooting a documentary about herself, anyway.

One is so very rarely four feet away from oneself, with a video camera running, when one falls over, wrestles unsuccessfully with a ticket machine or accidentally refers to oneself as “Spitney Beers.” Still, any Britney is good Britney. Britney’s at a good place in her life for a reality TV show. Her last single stiffed, she’s a year into a relationship with a man with an untrustworthy bum-fluff beard, and she’s just bought her chihauhau a miniature four-poster bed and chandelier.

Furthermore, if you were still in any way a floating viewer on the project, this may be the time to tell you why Britney has decided to do the show. With “exclusive, never-before-seen home video” footage of her courtship of, wedding to and honeymoon with Kevin Federline — the bum-fluff husband — the TV series has been conceived as a “documentation of love”.

Of course, the last home-video “documentation of love” we saw involving a blonde millionairess and her bumfluff consort was the Paris Hilton porn tapes. They documentationed a lot of love. Love from all sides. Love that could have your eye out. Love hanging on to the edge of the bed for dear life, while its head gets shunted into a drawer. Given this, you can see why Britney and Federline have had to co-opt the word “documentation” for their project, to make it sound more spiritual.

And as documentationaries go, the Britney show does have some pretty lofty aims. First, it intends to show “what really happened” over certain events in Britney’s marriage — events that have been “misconstrued” by the press.

Let’s hope this includes the recent incident in which Britney was seen wandering around the lobby of a hotel, crying, with her mother. Although this was widely reported as a crack in the marriage to her bumfluff husband, Spears’s media representative claimed that the event could be explained by a wholly different sequence of events. Spears was upset, they claimed, because “(she)was afraid her dog, Bit Bit, was pregnant by (her brother) Brian’s dog, Porkchop — and that would be incest”. Perhaps putting a four-poster bed and a chandelier in her dog’s room gave out the wrong signals.

But Spears’s ambitions do not rest with just the truth. In perhaps the most exciting element of the forthcoming show — aside from the prospect of seeing forbidden dog-love taking place in a 1/12-scale mock-up of Liberace’s boudoir — Britney has explained her ultimate motivation for taking part.

“I am now going to be expressing my personal life through art,” she said, as she handed over her home videos to UPN, the channel behind WWE Smackdown! Well that’s quite a statement. There are about 50 ironies, misapprehensions and poignancies in it, the most pressing of which would be: DUDE, DON’T LET ON THAT YOU HAVEN’T ACTUALLY DONE THAT YET. In Spears’s videos we’ve seen her drown herself, assassinate a vampire, fly to the Moon in a red catsuit, be hounded to her death by the paparazzi, dance from sheer fury and loneliness down a school corridor, and have a bizarre sexual interlude with a chair. It’s all well and good to reveal that, contrary to appearances, these performances weren’t influenced by her private life. It’s just that, on the whole, the best time to reveal that your whole career was completely passionless is when you’ve got something better to replace it with than your holiday snaps and some verité footage of a bumfluff husband.

The saddest mistake, however, is that in trying to seize back the media agenda, Britney ultimately loses the one advantage she had. She has been a unique female sex icon. For the day job she loses a stone, scrubs up nicely and pretends to have sex with a chair. As soon as the director shouts “Wrap!” however, she clearly puts her head in a bucket of crisps, while her PA helps her into a pair of stained leggings.

There’s no pretence with Britney, as there is with, say, Kylie Minogue, that she is a sex icon at all times — even, pointlessly, when she isn’t being paid to be so. Britney never steps off a plane looking immaculate. She always looks as if she fell off the plane in a flurry of Boost wrappers. Britney is never snapped with perfect hair at the Ivy. They always find her leaning on the counter at Wendy’s, squeezing her spots. This small but important decision has always made very clear the distinction between her day job (being one of the world’s sexiest women) and her private life (primarily, homogenised fats and small dogs).

There’s never been a sex bomb who’s done that before. They all confuse their jobs with their selves, try to be sex bombs full-time, and eventually go mad in a welter of anorexia, plastic surgery and denial.

Of course, now Britney’s trying to make her personal life into art, she sadly loses that unique barrier between her job and her downtime. She wants to tell us the truth, when illusion has served her so well until now.

In the meantime, however, all we can do is wait. Wait for her and her bumfluff husband’s impending, magnificent homage to Super Size Me.