There’s only three episodes until the winner of X Factor 2008 will be announced and it’s getting more exciting by the day (no sarcasm intended).

To make it easier for you to catch up on this week’s gossip,  news and rumours (however tenuous) we’ve placed them all in one easy-to-digest blog post - now you too can sound like an X Factor obsessive!

Britney & Miley

Viewer’s of last week’s show will know that princess-of-pop-turned-loopy-but-I’m-better-now Britney Spears will be performing on tomorrow night’s show (isn’t it weird how all the guest performers have albums coming out?)

But our moles (okay, a Guardian article) tell us that Miley Cyrus will be joining the bewigged performer on stage, which should be interesting considering the parallels between the two (both insanely famous as teens, both worked for Disney and both, umm, blonde).

Words of support from the PM

Newspapers are reporting that Gordon Brown has found time amidst preventing Impending Doom to send out 12 letters of support to the X Factor contestants.

Maybe Louis should watch his back - if this PM stuff doesn’t work out too well for Gordon he may have a new job waiting for him…

Is the show rigged?

The annoying thing about conspiracy theories are that once you hear the evidence for them, they become pretty compelling.

Case in point: The show is set-up for “little Diana Vickers” to win.

The evidence:

• She very conveniently had laryngitis on Mariah Carey week, even though The Mirror has “compelling evidence” that she was filmed TALKING on bonfire night three days previous
• This year’s Winner’s Song will be ‘Hallelujah’ - a song that Laura had sung beautifully in the auditions, much to the fury of the other contestant’s “fury”.
• And, err, that’s it.

Maybe not so compelling after all.

Most of us at studentbeans.com are avid watchers of the X-Factor, so we were very interested to hear the latest gossip: Ofcom is investigating claims that fans of Laura White had problems getting through to cast their votes for her.

After receiving a petition of 50,000 signatures, Ofcom launched their investigation lastnight, and will start by requesting the voting figures of last week’s show.

This, however, may prove a bit tricky - an X-Factor spokesperson has made it clear that revealing the voting figures now would “give contestants an unfair advantage and spoil the competition for viewers”.

Will X-Factor release the viewing figures? Will Laura return to the live shows? Will Louis Walsh continue to bring Westlife into every conversation? We’ll just have to wait and see…