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In 2020, a Los Angeles-based Twitter comedian promised to donate two dollars to a food bank for every “insane story” he received about Ellen DeGeneres “being mean”. Six hundred dollars later, the platform had become a hotbed of unverified tales of the apparently super-friendly star rampaging through shops, restaurants, studio backlots and down the corridors of her eponymous talk show. The queen of nice? More like Godzilla with a pixie cut, the stories claimed. Satan in sneakers. A grinning tyrant armed with nothing but a Lizzo CD and nasty intentions.

Four years later, the Ellen show is dead, brought to an undignified close following a behind-the-scenes investigation into allegations of a toxic workplace. And DeGeneres herself has dropped off the celebrity radar, having admitted to occasionally being “sad, mad, anxious, frustrated and impatient”, but denying ever being outright mean. What a strange pseudo-end to more than three decades in showbiz, you might think. That America’s most famous gay woman, who’d long been the face of queer respectability in the mainstream, could be so violently undone by her own hubris.

But if you were to be generous, the “secretly mean” hubbub could have been a real opportunity for DeGeneres to get her bite back. Rather than be shackled to the persona of a milquetoast and inoffensive Obama-era funny lady, she could turn inwards, grapple with her mistakes, and start anew.

Or there is option B, which is to buy some pet chickens, film a Netflix stand-up special, and tell the world that, actually, it was everyone else who was wrong the whole time. For Your Approval, which is streaming now, is a bizarre, unfunny and self-pitying missed opportunity. DeGeneres has stated that it’s her swan song, or a goodbye from showbusiness on her own terms. But it is frustratingly clean, devoid of any real anger or regret, and refuses to depict its star as anything other than an unfairly condemned martyr.

This is partly a result of the context: For Your Approval seems to have been recorded in front of a pre-selected audience of supporters, if not of Ellen fans then at least of Ellen friends. Oprah Winfrey is glimpsed cackling from the crowd at one point, while an enormous cheer goes up after DeGeneres mentions her chat show’s executive producer Andy Lassner – a name absolutely no one outside of DeGeneres’s inner circle will recognise.

It’s a decision that not only wraps DeGeneres in cotton wool, but indirectly speaks to one of the problems with her old talk show that she clearly hasn’t come to terms with – that this was a woman who presented as being one of us, but who really wasn’t. Over time, the gap between DeGeneres and us mere mortals at home went from a short leap to a chasm. You can only hear so many stories about Ellen fraternising with Jennifer Aniston or George W Bush before beginning to suspect she lives on a different planet.

Much of For Your Approval trades in the same anodyne observational comedy that made DeGeneres so agreeable if unchallenging in the first place. There is an extended bit on parallel parking and the trouble with modern windshield wipers, which is indeed about as funny as it sounds. Likewise she expresses her disappointment with pigeons.

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Of course, DeGeneres knows why you’re really here. It’s there in the special’s mortifying opening scene, in which a misty-eyed and terrified-looking DeGeneres stares directly into the camera while archive footage of her career and its loud implosion is projected onto her dressing room mirror. “I got kicked out of showbusiness because I’m mean,” she announces to her audience early on, before adding an ironic zinger: “And you can’t be mean and be in showbusiness.”

Missing, though, is any real explanation as to why she was “kicked out”. DeGeneres’s exodus is framed as a strange and mysterious thing that merely happened to her, and not something partly – or entirely – set in motion by her alleged behaviour. She suggests that the wind simply changed one day – the people “decided” she was mean, and that, really, she just wasn’t cut out to run a daily talk show, anyway.

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Her conclusion, somewhat inevitably, is that she simply #Girlbossed too close to the sun. Whereas men can manage and delegate forcefully and angrily, she says, women in positions of power have to be kind and placating. Anything that disrupts that unspoken agreement is frowned upon – and it was this, she insists, that got people’s backs up. “I’m honest, I’m generous, I’m sensitive and I’m thoughtful,” she says at the end of her 70-minute set. “I’m tough, I’m impatient and I’m demanding. I’m direct. I’m a strong woman.” The moment is cookie-cutter, second-wave feminist and cloyingly neo-liberal by design – I half expected P!nk to fly out on a trapeze to echo the sentiment.

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You wonder if DeGeneres’s resolute defensiveness is a product of the criticism she’s faced in the past. In 1997, upon coming out as gay, she lost her self-titled sitcom and was largely exiled from pop culture until the debut of her talk show in 2003. DeGeneres draws numerous parallels between that experience and what’s happened to her recent years, as if they were fuelled by the same impulse.

But it’s a wildly confusing comparison; one was fuelled by undeniable prejudice, the other by far more complicated allegations. By linking them together, it suggests DeGeneres has placed all forms of criticism under the same umbrella, and that for all the references she makes to being prickly and complicated – and not the “one-dimensional character who gave stuff away and danced every day” – she’s truthfully learnt little in her time off television.

For Your Approval renders DeGeneres an unimpeachable victim to an angry mob, her failings largely inconsequential, her imminent departure from the spotlight a tragedy. “Look what you’ve done,” it seems to insist. “And look at what we’ve now lost.”

‘Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval’ is streaming on Netflix

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The View hosts have weighed in on Janet Jackson’s recent controversial remarks regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

In a new interview with The Guardian, the singer and sister of Michael Jackson regurgitated a false claim made by Donald Trump that Harris is not Black.

“She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian,” Jackson said, admitting that although she hadn’t “watched the news in a few days,” she was told somebody had “discovered [Harris’s] father was white.”

“What she did was spread misinformation,” host Ana Navarro said on the latest episode of the daytime talk show. “I think it’s irresponsible when you have a platform the way Janet Jackson does, to use that platform carelessly to spread misinformation based on a racist allegation by Donald Trump. It was Donald Trump who tried to say Kamala Harris just turned Black.”

Last month, Trump made headlines when he made the unhinged assertation that Harris only recently “became a Black woman” to suit her political agenda.

Whoopi Goldberg, meanwhile, stepped in to defend Jackson. “You know, sometimes I’ve said stuff. And you know, I was wrong. But people want you to say something right away. You know, when people are coming at you saying, ‘Hey, you’re not paying – you’re dumb, you don’t know’ – you don’t want to answer people,” she said.

“And it is a pain in the butt, I have to tell you. Sometimes people get it wrong and they’re wrong, they made a mistake, they were wrong, it happens. Anybody who says it doesn’t happen to every one of us, multiracial or not, we all do it. So, okay, a little grace for the girl, alright?” Goldberg said, arguing that Jackson is “a musician,” not “a political animal.”

While Navarro acknowledged that Jackson has the “right to endorse, support, or not support” whomever she chooses, she noted that the singer has still not yet owned up to her mistake.

“We forget that we live in information silos. This is so different from how the media was even 10 years ago,” Alyssa Farah Griffin added. “My guess is she’s not looking at great sources of media.”

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Sunny Hostin went on to say that “regardless of whether Janet Jackson thinks she’s Black, white, or Indian, the very fact that she’s in the room deconstructs, in my view, the alleged societal norms we’ve seen in the nearly 250 years of this country of what a presidential candidate looks like.”

“I think that’s what matters most, and I think that when you’re biracial or multiracial, you do get to identify yourself in any way you choose to identify yourself,” Hostin, who is biracial, continued. “It’s unfortunate that Janet Jackson, an icon, admittedly said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the news these past few days.’ I don’t know if it comes from misinformation, I don’t know if it comes from a lack of information, all I know is I don’t want to give it this much air.”

Yesterday, it emerged that Jackson’s apparent “apology” for her comments about Harris was not authorized by the “That’s the Way Love Goes” singer.

It was widely reported by several outlets that Janet had issued an apology through a man named Mo Elmasari, who claimed to be her manager.

However, it has since been corrected that Jackson is, in fact, managed by her brother, Randy, and that the unusually worded “apology” did not come from Jackson.

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Strictly Come Dancing professional Jowita Przystal has revealed the secret code that she and her dance partner Pete Wicks use in training sessions.

The Only Way is Essex star Wicks is competing in this year’s Strictly competition along 14 more celebrities vying for the glitterball trophy. He is partnered with Przystal, who has worked on the show since 2021.

Appearing on Wicks’s Staying Relevant podcast, which he co-presents with former Made in Chelsea star Sam Thompson, Przystal discussed her bond with Wicks – and said they instantly “connected” when they first met.

Kicking the programme off, Thompson told Przystal he couldn’t believe she had been partnered with “Britain’s sexiest man”, to which the dancer replied: “Me too!”

Przystal reflected on the first time they met, saying they “didn’t dance much” as they couldn’t stop making each other laugh.

Speaking further about their special bond, she explained they sometimes don’t need to speak to each other to communicate in training – they simply look at each other.

“Me and Pete, we have a little code already. We don’t talk. Sometimes we don’t need to speak, we just know,” explained the dancer, demonstrating her stare.

Przystal added: “We went into a circle and all the female pros switch after one eight of the dance, and we just go around each other. Every time I went to Pete, we were just laughing. We didn’t even dance. It was fun.”

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She continued: “We had this final dance together when we learnt a little bit of the routine with the choreographer. Funnily enough, they video it and sent it around to the group so everyone can remember the steps and we were in the video!”

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Przystal said that when they re-met on the pairing day, they were both wearing cowboy boots and similar outfits.

Wicks’ co-host Thompson said that Wicks called him after he had met Przystal for the first time, and seemed completely overjoyed.

Thompson said: “I don’t want to embarrass Pete but he was like, ‘I couldn’t believe it, we had the same socks, she’s the same kind of person as I am’”.

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Przystal revealed later that Wicks calls her his “little ray of sunshine”.

Appearing on BBC Two’s spin-off It Takes Two on Monday night, Wicks revealed that his favourite part of being in the competition is being in the rehearsal room with Przystal.

Wicks told presenter Janette Manrara: “I am loving it, and I didn’t think I would.

“I am loving the whole learning experience and being in the rehearsal room with Jowita is my favourite bit. She makes me happy every day.”