AI’s Simon Cowell has made a career out of crushing the egos of nobodies who hope to be somebodies (in the shallow, pop-singer sense of “somebody”), but it sounds as if he’s not above boosting his own ego with a little surgical enhancement. Louis Walsh, one of Simon’s co-judges on the wildly popular UK series The X Factor, claims to be the only one of the five judges on the show who hasn’t had cosmetic surgery. “Simon’s definitely had a boob job,” he added, and went on to say that Sharon Osbourne had the best surgeon. Walsh himself is certainly no pin-up, and he acknowledged that he’d like to get some dental work done. “I want to get really nice white teeth…. But not like Simon’s piano keys which are not his own.”

All of this might have something to do with a feud between Cowell and Walsh over booking the Spice Girls on The X Factor. Simon is desperate to get the group on the show, but Louis called the girls “ugly” and “overrated,” and said they were “well past their sell-by date.” (Their new video is here, so you can judge for yourselves.) That couldn’t have helped the negotiations. All I can say is that open emotional conflict like this is one of the elements that makes British television so special. Here in the States, we have to wait until PBS recycles this stuff to see it. And considering PBS’s indiscriminate hunger for anything with a British accent, negotiations for the American rights to The X Factor are probably under way this very minute.