You know all the cliches about England being all stiff and polite and snobby and the United States being fat and coarse and obsessed with celebrity and all that?  One look at British tabloids will shatter that perception for you.  They’re way worse than the paparazzi and tabloids in the States.

The Daily Mail published a new Harry Potter-centric gossip column on Friday.  Let’s run through it:

Jamie Campbell Bower, a fast-rising young British actor, has gone to the dark side.

He’s playing a vampire in Twilight sequel New Moon, and is in final negotiations to portray Gellert Grindelwald  -  one of the most dangerous dark wizards of all time (in Harry Potter lore anyway), second only to Voldemort.

Campbell Bower might be playing Grindelwald.  I have no idea.  But the Daily Mail is the only place the news is coming from — do a search online, and all other mentions of it are mostly Potter fansites linking to their site — so the chances that only a gossip columnist would know an actor is in “final negotiations” to play a major Potter role are pretty slim.

Besides, Campbell Bower just booked the role of Caius in the Twilight franchise like, last week.

Bower won’t shoot his scenes for some time because director David Yates is concentrating on filming as many scenes with Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint as possible before Ms Watson decamps for university in September.

That’s not nearly as dire as it’s trying to sound.  Filming on Deathly Hallows began in February and the plan has always been to finish with plenty of time.

Daniel and Emma have been working with a choreographer for some big wedding scenes that will be shot in the summer.

Wow, not only are Daniel and Emma going to be in a wedding scene, they’re working with a choreographer for it!  Notice how the column singles out those two while failing to mention the wedding has nothing to do with them and features pretty much everybody else in the cast, too.

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince hits cinemas on July 17. The first part of Deathly Hallows is due sometime in 2010, and the second the following year.

Man, the one opportunity for the columnist to actually do a little research, and he instead decides to finish the column just by going all fuzzy on the dates.  The first part of Deathly Hallows will come out on Thanksgiving 2010 (as confirmed by the head of freaking Warner Bros. himself), and the second part is tentatively scheduled to come out one year after that.  Or, you know, “sometime.”