Who would have thought that a cartoon family with yellow skin and four fingers could be educational, too? For a handful of Rushworth students The Simpsons show is proving to be far more than a laughing matter. Instead of having her students stuck in the classroom, Rushworth P-12 visual art teacher Anne Maree Klinberg decided her Year 9s should paint a mural - of the world's most famous cartoon family. "If you choose a topic the kids are familiar with, they will automatically be excited about it," Ms Klinberg said. "I thought about it a bit and decided on The Simpsons because they are so well known and are flat figures." This is the second term the students have been working on the project and the mural of the quirky family is all-but complete. As part of the mural project the students were also asked to complete an assignment on the show's creator Matt Groening.

The Simpsons have hit the cover of TV Guide once again. In the issue on sale tomorrow, our favourite family made it to #6 on their Top 25 Cult Shows Ever list. "Hiding behind the bright colors and big, happy eyes of TV's most functional dysfunctional family, The Simpsons is the most consistently funny and smart program on TV. Period. The comedy has sold more than 5 million DVDs, inspired more than 5000 products, and Bart has made his weekly chalkboard messages the most deciphered scribbling since the Rosetta stone." The cover is just one in a set of four.

Season openers and finales tend to bring in the big figures in the tv world, but Sundays season 15 finale 'Fraudcast News' failed to deliver. 9.2 million people watched the Burns themed episode, down 4.2 million on last years season finale double.

With the season over, the ratings this year have been disappointing overall. 16.2 million viewers watched the season premiere, while a couple of weeks ago the show achieved its lowest figure for a new episode ever. The finale was outrated by ABC and CBS's big guns 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition' and 'Cold Case' which will remain in their 8pm Sunday timeslots next year. Lets hope the Season 16 premiere in November can regain some of its lost viewers.

By the end of tonight, Season 15 will be over. While some might talk of the decline in quality, this season's final episode titled Fraudcast News sounds like one of the better ones. Homer causes an avalanche that buries Mr. Burns. He makes it back to his mansion, only to turn on his TV and hear Kent Brockman refer to him as a greedy tycoon, so he vows to "change this town's accurate impression of me." As he buys every news business in town, he runs up against Lisa, who has started a newspaper. Lisa's example inspires many of the residents of Springfield to start their own newspapers. "Instead of one big-shot controlling all the media," Homer says, "now there's a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions." It's the last new episode until November, so don't miss it!

The finale of The Simpsons' 15th season airing at 8pm Sunday includes pointed social satire, Capraesque small-town sentiment, broad physical humor and sly self-referential jokes. What it doesn't have, in a time when sitcoms like "Friends" and "Frasier" featured plot arcs that played out over the course of a year, is any reference to the fact that it's the last show of the season. In The Simpsons, everything is neatly tied up at the end of an episode. Bart is forever in fourth grade, and Maggie, the baby, will never talk. That consistency is one reason the show is one of the longest-running sitcoms in history. As actors on live-action programs age, "the viewer looks at it and says, 'The show isn't the show I loved 10 years ago,"' said Al Jean, the executive producer. "That doesn't happen to us." Since the writers long ago used up the obvious stories about the family, many plots now focus on the secondary characters who populate their hometown. Read More >>>

The end of season ratings slump continued this week. A viewer figure was not available this week (story will be edited it one arrives) but the episode titled 'Bart-Mangled Banner' got beaten by most of its main competition.

NBC moved into first at 8pm with the 6.9/12 for the second hour of "Dateline." ABC was up to second with the 6.3/11 for "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." CBS dropped to third with the first hour of "Helter Skelter." FOX was fourth with "The Simpsons" (5.0/9) and "That '70s Show" (4.7/8). The 9:30 Simpsons repeat also came in fourth place, which combined with other programming cemented Fox as the #4 network for the night. The season finale of The Simpsons airs this Sunday.

Warning: The following story originated from British tabloids, previously famous for spreading news of a David Beckham cameo that wasn't to be, and are generally unreliable. The six actors from Friends are to reunite for an episode of The Simpsons, the Daily Star newspaper reports today. In the episode - which has been rushed into production for transmission early next year - the cast will provide voices of guests at a gay resort accidentally booked by the Simpsons family. "The writing team has worked overtime to produce the perfect script," an unnamed source said (convincing, huh). "It's funny but shocking, with all six playing gay characters." The episode is said to be lined up for a possible post-Superbowl airing on FOX. Personally I wont believe a word of it until I hear it from a reliable source, and you should do the same.

The Simpsons ratings will be put to the test tonight with the second-to-last episode of Season 15 airing on Fox. Its competition is nothing that should leave the show with a figure similar to last weeks disappointing effort. The episode titled Bart-Mangled Banner hasn't shown huge promise in description and previews, but as last week displayed, a good episode doesn't necessarily mean good ratings. In the episode, Bart really is a victim of circumstance when he appears to moon the flag, but Marge's defense of him paints the whole family as un-American and they are thrown in jail. A repeat of The Wandering Juvie airs soon after at the special time of 9:30pm this week. Keep those figures up, don't miss The Simpsons tonight.

Remember when Homer seeked the assistance of Lionel Hutz after being thrown out of the Sea Captain's All You Can Eat restaurant? When three tubby American tourists were thrown out of a Scotland 'All You Can Eat' restaurant after scoffing the buffet, one had to wonder if they'd got inspiration from the Season 4 episode 'New Kid On The Block'. The greedy trio were asked to leave a Pizza Hut branch after mowing their way through a series of giant pizzas. Staff called a halt after the Americans demolished plate after plate of pizza, pasta and salad. The visitors had arrived at Pizza Hut and ordered the ?5.49-a-head All You Can Eat buffet special. Most people manage three or four slices as well as filling up on a selection of pasta dishes, breadsticks and salad. But the hungry golfers guzzled three 12-inch pizzas each along with countless helpings of side dishes the equivalent of 10 meals. Read More >>>

Our last four or so ratings reports weren't much to be proud of, but this week is the icing on the cake. The Simpsons episode "The Way We Weren't" finished up on Sunday with a record-low Nielsen figure for a new episode. Only 6.2 million viewers tuned in to the flashback episode, down 3.1 million viewers on last week's already abysmal performance. At 9pm, Malcolm In The Middle also suffered an all-time low of 5.9 million viewers.

It's plainly obvious that viewers this week switched over to CBS for the finale of "Survivor: All-Stars", which brought in 24.1 million viewers, peaking at 25 million for the reunion special that followed. So Fox wont be panicking over the figures, but there is cause for alarm as the season's performance as a whole has been struggling. It'll be interesting to see how the next two episodes fare.

Three episodes to go, another one down tonight. Here's a rundown of what to expect in tonight's episode titled "The Way We Weren't". "When Homer admits that Marge was not his first kiss, he recounts the story of his first smooch at summer camp with an anonymous girl ? who turns out to be Marge! Following their first kiss, young Homer and Marge planned to meet again, but Homer accidentally returned to the wrong camp and wound up at Camp Flab-Away ? a fat camp for young boys. Marge admits to Homer that believing her first kiss had stood her up caused her 30 years of heartbreak. But soon they discover something from their past that proves their love was destined." It's a flashback episode with promise, followed by a rerun of "Marge Vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens and Gays." You don't want to miss it.

In our weekly ratings reports we keep mentioning a drop on last seasons Simpsons episodes. This article takes a closer look. "While The Simpsons remains as smart as ever, ratings aren?t at a peak. In fact, the show finished behind ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" head to head in 18-49s on Sunday, the first time an original episode wasn?t first in the 18-49 demographic in nearly three years. Among younger viewers, Simpsons still does well but doesn?t possess the aura of invincibility it once did on Sundays. Among 9-14s, Simpsons was still the highest-rated show on Sunday with a 5.3 rating for the 8:30 p.m. episode but was followed closely by "Drake & Josh" on Nickelodeon and "Home Edition" on ABC. Next season if "Home Edition" stays in the same time slot, chances are it could start edging even closer among teens, where The Simpsons was Fox's top-rated sitcom last season." Read More >>>

"The voices behind the animated Simpson extended family learned from Friends that there was strength in numbers, but their negotiations still turned into a true bloodletting because Fox at first assumed that since the characters were animated, the actors behind them were expendable. Even though there wasn?t any yelling and screaming or Ovitz-ian ?You?ll never work in this town again,? the implied threat was always hanging in the air like a guillotine, not just for the actors, but also for their reps. Not only would the plug be pulled on the Fox series, but on a Simpsons appearance scheduled for the 2005 Super Bowl. It was so tense at one point that, when the two sides broke for lunch, they sat at opposite ends of the studio commissary." Read More >>>

The ratings aren't improving for Fox and The Simpsons alike. Still down on Season 14's ratings, Simple Simpson scored a total of 9.3 million viewers on Sunday night. NBC came out on top amongst the adult demographic, while Fox and ABC came equal second with CBS lagging behind. In total viewers though, CBS was first and NBC second.

At 8pm, The Simpsons competition was hard to topple. CBS's Cold Case came out on top for the hour, while ABC had impressive enough figures with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to make it into second place. The two Simpsons episodes were outrated by both networks, while NBC's Dateline and WB's Charmed came in fourth and fifth respectively.

There's just four episodes remaining in Season 15, and one of them airs tonight. The new episode titled 'Simple Simpson' sees Homer confront Springfield's evildoers in the form of his crime fighting alter-ego, the Pie Man. But when Mr. Burns unmasks him and exposes his secret identity, Homer is blackmailed into tossing a pie at ? of all people ? the Dalai Lama. Nichelle Nichols (of Star Trek fame) guest stars. A rerun of the episode 'I, D'oh-Bot' follows at 8:30pm. Remaining episodes this season include 'The Way We Weren't,' 'Bart-Mangled Banner,' and 'Fraudcast News,' which will air every Sunday from now on, with the final episode airing on May 23. Don't miss tonights episodes!

"A month after stalled contract renewal talks led the voices of 'The Simpsons' to stop work, both the actors and Fox are getting more 'D'oh!' Terms of the deal were not announced for the actors who provide the voices for Homer and Marge Simpson and other characters on the long-running animated series.

'We couldn't be happier to have reached a multiyear deal with the enormously talented cast of The Simpsons,' series producer 20th Century Fox Television said Friday in a statement. Despite speculation the dispute would shorten the 2004-05 season, the studio said it was optimistic that all 22 planned episodes could be finished." Read More >>>