Praise be! The Almighty has given His blessing to the former Pussycat Doll’s lucrative new acting job – just so long as she uses it to teach the masses about the perils of abortion

To the career of Nicole Scherzinger, now, and a reminder that unlike the rest of us, actors never take jobs for a payday. They are better than that. There is almost always a desire to educate and inform the benighted public about a moral issue close to the star’s heart. How else do you think things like ABC’s sensationally unnecessary Dirty Dancing reboot get made?

It is certainly what prompted the former Pussycat Doll singer’s decision to refuse whatever other offers may have been out there – anyone? - in favour of playing Penny in the forthcoming drama. Now, if you don’t watch Dirty Dancing biannually while getting wasted with six girlfriends, I should probably remind you that Penny is the resort dance pro who gets pregnant by a no-good chancer of a waiter, and ends up having a backstreet abortion, the complications of which are eventually sorted out by Baby’s doctor father.

Alas, the offer of this role put Nicole in a corner. You see, as she is at pains to stress, she is profoundly anti-abortion. “I was like a crazy thing,” she reflects, “because my family … my papa’s a bishop and my family’s really hardcore against abortion. So I got the role and I almost didn’t take it because I didn’t want to promote abortion, because my character has an abortion.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cynthia Rhodes, as Penny Jones, in the original movie version of Dirty Dancing, with Patrick Swayze. Photograph: Allstar/VESTRON PICTURES

If you’re wondering how Nicole managed to square taking this high-profile, lucrative role that finally allows her to graduate from talent-show judging and move decisively into acting, she can explain. “I was like, hopefully they can learn from, you know, her ways, and I can be a positive influence.”

“Her ways”? Oof. Nothing says “well-rounded character” like a performance specifically delivered to remind us that with their “ways”, little tramps like Penny always end up getting what they deserve. Even so, Nicole is anxious to eliminate any last vestige of doubt you may have that she is playing someone who is 100% in the wrong here. As she puts it: “I just want to encourage everyone to, you know, keep their babies.”

Also, to cast her in things in future. That said, Nicole didn’t get to the decision without the help of her family. Her grandfather prayed on it, apparently, and got the green light from God. Though she doesn’t reveal the Almighty’s exact words on the matter, they were clearly something along the lines of: “I think Nicole should deffo take the part, which is to My glory, though can you ask them to change it so that Penny has the baby and has to marry the horrendous amoral prick of a waiter? If that’s not doable, can it be clear that at the end of the movie, Penny is cast from the Kellerman’s firmament to the moral hellfires of New York, where she maybe dies penniless, unloved, and of a her-ways-related illness at some point in the 70s?”