Let us be more specific. When you’re famous, it’s not the best idea to cheat on a woman who has access to the popular media/ the mental faculty to write an open letter which curses out your name. We gather cheating on one’s spouse is perfectly fine, so long as they’re illiterate or mute.

We jest. As that’s what we gather is the done thing, when discussing entitled, graceless, remorseless cheaters. Specifically cheaters who impregnate three women in the space of around four years and only acknowledge two of them. Should you be totally lost at this point, don’t worry. We’re talking about famous cheaters.

Two of the people in this mess, at least, are award-winning musicians. We know, phew. The other two are not. Which, for the most part, seems to mean public sympathy quickly reaches its limit and they should stop talking about being cheated on as soon as it’s no longer good column filler.

The main couple in all of this are the two accused of having an affair – Grammy winner Alicia Keys and her music producer husband, Swizz Beatz. To summarise, the cheating (allegations) timeline is as follows: Swizz was married to a woman called Mashonda Dean, and their youngest was only eight-months-old when Swizz’s affair allegedly began with Alicia. Yeah, baby at home and he’s sleeping with his mistress and wife. Oh, and there’s another baby mother, in the UK, Jahna Sebastian, to whom he’s yet to cough up child support.

There’s also something of note, in addition to unpaid child support, about millions he owes in back-taxes. That, and the woman he knocked up in the UK seem to be incidental in this saga. So, don’t worry your pretty little head about either of those things.

Last year, now ex-wife Mashonda called out Alicia and Swizz for their affair – something that didn’t win her a lot of fans. You see, as we mentioned earlier, these things are incidental when the one doing the cheating is famous. We gather one is supposed to loosen one’s diamond slippers and move on with their life in this scenario. Mashonda is refusing to do so. Despite calls for her to get over being cheated on, and move on with her life, she’s really doing no such thing – the big spoil sport.

She’s calling the couple out for their cheating, again. This time in rather more blunt language than last year.

Swizz married the now pregnant Alicia in a shotgun wedding that seemed to greatly appease the consciences of those involved. This has lit another fire under his ex-wife, who spoke to Sister 2 Sister Magazine (via Bossip).

Were you guys dating other people before he got with Alicia… were you guys separated: We were married. Sleeping in the same bed and having sex every night while he was seeing Alicia. Okay? It was an affair. 100 percent. I don’t know why people want to change that rule so much. We had just had a kid, for crying out loud. Our child was 8 months. I found out about Alicia two days before my son turned 1. They had been doing their thing for months before that.

And the distinct undertone, that she should just move on despite being screwed over, continues:

Why are you still speaking about the affair if you claim to have moved on: People ask me why am I still talking about this and why don’t I just leave it alone. I’m like, this is going to help somebody. My story is a universal thing. This is not just something that only happened to me: This happens to women every day. Mine was just ugly. If I can help the next woman get through and be positive, then I’m going to talk about it.

This was a blog post by Amy Grindhouse, who is actually quite famous

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There’s something of primary school about this last bow of Big Brother on Channel 4, with an air of end-of-term relaxation and everyone is bringing their board games in… however, people playing means people fall out over the rules and competitiveness creeps its ugly head in.

If that’s the case, then when Davina McCall sneaks into the Big Brother house, there’s a weird excitement like when a dog runs into the yard.

And that’s exactly what she’s done today as she went in (without a gorilla outfit on) and was ordered to complete a task by the Chest Of Drawers Of Temptation.

You can see the footage of Davina’s entering the house whenever it gets shown (tomorrow presumably, because it happened this afternoon).

She was asked to get each housemate on their own and tell them they were their favourite before reading out letters from home from loved ones.

Naturally, everyone cried.

Then cried some more.

And a bit more again.

Even though they have only been in there for about 3 seconds.

Anyway, here are the pictures and, please observe Davina’s face in the last one. We can only guess what might be happening there.

One day I’d like to conduct an anthropological study into the differences between British and American cultures –  really dig deep into the history and find out what makes us so different from our former colonial cousins.

However, since I lack the necessary resources (patience, library card, air miles), I’ve decided just to sit in front of the telly and conduct a study into home makeover shows instead.

On a bank holiday weekend, it’s possible to tune into the Home channel and watch entire marathons of the chummy British fixer-upper programme DIY: SOS, followed by eighty-seven hours of its US equivalent, the glossy, life-changing festival of hope that is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

The two programmes share the same basic structure: a friendly host leads a design team into a community, where they meet a family whose home is in a state of disrepair. The family are sent away for a week, their house is done up by the design team who all learn a valuable lesson, and the family returns for a tearful reveal of their shiny new abode.

However, despite these identical skeletons, the meat on these two programmes is as different as chicken and pterodactyl, and consumption results in two very different after-tastes. Extreme Makeover is more than a clever name – these people don’t just repair the house, they knock it over and build a better one – it’s bold, brash, unashamedly inspiring and earnestly hopeful. DIY:SOS just shrugs and gets the job done with a knock-knock joke and a pint of cider at the end. It’s low key, understated, even apologetic. Here, so that you don’t have to think about it, are the differences:

The Host:

Extreme Makeover is hosted by designer and former model Ty Pennington. He is like an ageless Zeus with ADHD and hair gel. As well as leading the team, he works on a secret project, and is contagiously upbeat all the time.

Ty Pennington. He’s coming to make you feel warm and safe.

DIY: SOS is helmed by failed actor Nick Knowles, an unshaven muppet who trudges around like Wolverine’s cousin in a purple fleece. His leadership style consists of questioning his team’s abilities and muttering mild sexual innuendos.

Nick Knowles. He's got your keys.

The Design Team:

Devotedly following Ty Pennington, Extreme Makeover‘s rotating design team usually includes two or more of the following:

Paul DiMeo – a friendly uncle type who likes baseball, apple pie, and the FDNY
Paige Hemmis – a pink tool belt, strapped to a carpenter who has now had so many face lifts her ears are in danger of meeting round the back.
Ed Sanders – he’s an Englishman, but he’s an American version of an Englishman. His accent is 150% cockney.
Michael Moloney – An amalgam of all Americans, his head resembles a leather cube with teeth. He buys furniture.
Tracy Hutson – I won’t hear a bad word said about Tracy Hutson. Just back off, ok?

DIY: SOS‘s motley gang of ne’er do wells is made up of:

Billy Byrne – a cheeky chirpy electrician who gets teased just for being in the room.
Chris Frediani – a West Country plasterer who has taken watching paint dry to the next level.
Julian Perryman – the other half of Chris’s gently comedic double act (ie, he’s the one who says ‘Who’s there?’).
Julia - the most recent designer, and token female. She’s done a better job than her predecessors of being accepted by her male counterparts, but they still haven’t bothered to put her surname on the website. It’s as if they find it weird that there’s a girl on a building site.

The needy family

In Extreme Makeover, we meet the family through their application video, as the designers watch and cry from the comfort of their luxury tour bus. The couple are high school sweethearts – one a fire fighter, the other a stay-at-home mum who runs a local basketball team for recovering gangsters. They are about 23 and already have a full spectrum of children. One is a quarterback who LOVES the Pittsburgh Donkeys; one is a future kidney specialist; one is too young to like anything but dinosaurs; the other has spina bifida and is Mexican. The parents may also have adopted five local kids whose tragic parents were tragically killed in a tragic car crash. They all love each other so much you want to cry.

Extreme Makeover: Selected members of the Rogers family

Their British counterparts on DIY: SOS resemble those two berks who held you up in the queue at Asda by continually placing unexpected items in the bagging area. They are a recruitment consultant and a lost claims officer for the local tumble weed centre.

The house

The Extreme Makeover application video forces you to fall hopelessly in love with the family before revealing that a) tragedy struck, or b) it wasn’t always easy. Cancer, tornadoes, stray bullets, and rare muscle-wasting respiratory diseases all rear their ugly heads and, despite the family’s greatest efforts, they are left with medical bills piling up, the family business in tatters, toxic mould spores in the air, and – worst of all – the house falling apart.

Back on this side of the pond, the tragedy is slightly less dramatic. We learn that Steve tried to do up the kitchen and the bathroom last year and then just sort of never got round to finishing it really. Less a phoenix trying to rise up from the flames, and more a chimpanzee falling asleep on the toilet.

The meeting:

Having seen what they’re up against, the Extreme Makeover designers stride up to the front door and Ty extracts the family from the remains of their house with a megaphone. As they pour out of the front door, the dad jumps up and down in rapture, the mum falls to her knees in tears, and the kids flock to touch the hem of Pennington’s magnificent garment. They invite the designers in for a tour of the house and are then dispatched to Disney World in a limousine. While they are away, they will perform a duet with LeAnn Rimes while tackling the Pittsburgh Donkeys in front of the actual president.

Here in Blighty, Knowles swans into the family’s gaff like he owns the place, and lords it over the unfinished rooms. He does a smug “get-a-load-of-this-guy” face and delivers a run down of the shoddiness of the work. He appears to be completely ignorant of DIY or design, but does a good job of making everyone feel uncomfortable.

The build

In Extreme Makeover, the build itself is just a sub-plot; a convenient backdrop to frame the real story of family and community. A local builder is contracted to build the new house in seven days. He blubs to camera as he tells us that the family’s story touched his heart and that this week is all about the family, and not about him, or Jessop Homes dot com forward slash bookings.

A new house is swiftly erected, and the designers huddle to talk about the kids’ bedrooms, pretending to come up with ideas from scratch. The kidney boy gets a kidney room; the football kid gets a football room (cockney Ed inexplicably saws footballs in half and glues them on the walls), and so on. Pretty much any noun the children uttered to the designers becomes the theme of their bedroom and will stay that way until they grow up and move out. Years from now, the dinosaur boy will have to squeeze his gangly 17-year-old frame into a tyrannosaurus shaped bed.

Meanwhile, on DIY: SOS, Billy Byrne bumbles around the house connecting up the wiring and poking cables through walls like a child building a train set. He is unaware that Knowles has just attached a piece of paper to his back that says ‘tease me (in a way that undermines my confidence but doesn’t quite fall within the BBC’s anti-bullying regulations)’.

The others go about their business, building the wrong walls and installing the wrong ovens as Knowles shakes his head and re-describes the errors as sarcastically as possible with his hands on his hips. Eventually, the team gets tired and goes to the pub, returning on the last day to finish off the furniture. When they’re done, it looks like a regular house, albeit with some questionable original artwork on the wall, such as a pair of shoes glued to a canvass that will be on ebay ten minutes after the film crew leaves.

The reveal

The Extreme Makeover reveal sequence is so iconic that has its own catchphrase. Ty, the family, and the gathered mortals incant the sacred words: “Bus driver! Move that bus!” and a miracle is unveiled.

The bus drives away, the music swells, and the family erupts into a full-volume mixture of relief, joy, shock and gratitude as they feast their eyes on the new dream home that looms over the space where their nightmares once stood. Even though we have seen this moment six or seven times in the ad break flash-forwards, it still tugs the heart strings enough for the most hardened viewer to develop a mild case of the tears.

As the great American family gets used to the idea that this house now belongs to them, the contracted builder lets slip that he’s just paid off the mortgage and also put another hundred grand in a medical fund, to go with the scholarships paid for by a neighbourly whip round. The family thanks everyone involved and the ABC network, and one of them usually says, ‘What word means more than thank you?’. The designers all nod silently and, as the sun sets, they’ve all learned something (again) about why it’s so important to put others before yourself.

In the UK reveal, “Move that bus” is replaced with “OK, you can open your eyes now”. The family, already standing in the finished room, raise their eyelids and gaze upon the off-white glow of a job they now longer have to think about getting round to. If any tears are shed, they are quickly brushed under the carpet, or forced back down the tear ducts into the cranial lobes to gestate into poetry or tumours.

The mum nods and says she likes the colour. The dad checks with the mum and then agrees that he likes it too. Nick Knowles thinks it’s all about him, as he milks the reveal for all its worth. He drip feeds the hint of another surprise: “We, uh… thought about you, and, uh… what you might need, and so… we, um… and then… well, um…” eventually admitting that they have fixed up the bathroom AND the kitchen. The family seem stunned and sedated, rather than relieved or grateful. It’s as if the British mentality malfunctions in the face of unexpected generosity. They’re not speechless; they literally don’t know what to say.

Knowles turns to camera and reminds us how important and hilarious he is for helping this family, high fiving himself as the credits roll. The same thing has happened as on the American show, but the feelings are completely different for all concerned.

In conclusion, Americans and Brits are clearly not the same but, despite our differences, we all want someone to come round and sort out our plumbing while we’re away. Since beginning this anthropological study, I’ve developed a yearning for a new kitchen, but also for fuller lashes, gravity-defying hair, and a happy period always. Perhaps I’m not the target audience for the Home channel after all.

This was a guest blog by Jimi Odell, whose Blogtired is a work of genuine majesty

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Dancing Pre-born, Justin Bieber, has fans that show similar fanaticism to that of insane speaking in tongues Christian types. They become overwhelmed at the very notion of their favourite miracle boy and are known hence forth as Beliebers. Or weirdo-stalkers. It’s really up to you.

Anyway, the internet itself begins to cry when all of Biebers oddball fans come rushing toward it, screaming and doing whatever the tween version of frigging is. Quite often, it just hides in a massive sleeping bag, hoping that the miniature wailing harridans just go away.

And this is shown in some arbitrary facts about Twitter. Never mind how many records he has sold or how many tickets he’s sold at lip-synced concerts… we all desperately need to know a percentage of some kind.

Well, for a really super-modern beacon of Bieber’s puzzling popularity, a Twitter spod called Dustin Curtis says:

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3 percent of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him.”

Bieber is due to perform at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, which means that we can all pretty much guarantee that Twitter’s fail whale will be a regular feature for anyone trying to send a distress signal out a la Perez Hilton when he got socked in the mouth by one of will.i.am’s chums.

Curtis later tweeted that “most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts,” which means that a whole host of pointless humans like Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian have their own servers dedicated to them.

In England, we like to name trains after our stars… and to be honest, we’re having difficulty trying to work out which one of  Twitter and trains is most useless and unreliable.

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Bungie, the developers behind games such as Halo, Halo 2 and… erm, Halo 3 have made an announcement to all the people playing the leaked version of their latest game, Halo 4… I mean Halo: Reach.

Halo: Reach for the Stars is a first person shooter set somewhere in outer space and requires the player to climb various mountains higher and ultimately follow their heart’s desire. Okay, I may have confused the plot of the game with a song by S Club 7, but to be honest the plot is so ridiculously complex I genuinely can’t be bothered going into it. In its most basic form it works like this: Man has gun, man has space suit, man go into space and shoot evil alien for arbitrary reason that serves as a plot device.

Somehow the Halo series has become the iPhone of Xbox games, except it came out before the iPhone and people who own it don’t tend to try and show off their new copy of Halo by laying it out on the table at every opportunity. Well, some people do, but they’re creepy and weird.

Anyway, being that this game is the be all and end all of gaming, the launch of Halo: Reacharound has encountered the same problem as every digital entertainment format in the last 10 years, it’s been pirated to high heaven and Bungie have had enough! The makers of the game have said that no-one playing should get too attached to any equipment or credits they’ve garnered during their illegal little online romps, as everything will be reset when the game is officially released and Bungie have written the whole episode off as, “beta testing.”

Cue rioting in the streets complaining on internet forums as players try to figure out a way to get around the reset, only to be told by Bungie that the second they connect to the Xbox LIVE servers they’ll be identified as a new user and reset to n00b status, this may or may not have been followed by the Bungie PR rep sticking two fingers up at the pirates, blowing a raspberry and telling them to, “jog on.”

TLDR; Bungie steal from pirates, LOL!

It must be awful being a wealthy celebrity who takes on the gig of UN ambassador. You have to go to all these poverty stricken places and you’re fully expected to blank out that room you have in one of your houses that is filled with jewels and 68.4 surround sound and the like. Awful. Simply awful.

And that’s the plight faced by poor ol’ Angelina Jolie. When she’s not being really rich in the face of flood victims, she highlighting other bad things.

After nodding meekly like a modern Princess Diana, Jolie has moved on from looking nice in a Jedi hood to condemning a Florida church’s threat to burn copies of the Muslim holy book to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

The Pout-A-Tron actress spoke out against the proposed burning during her worthiness building exercise to Pakistan.

Jolie says:

“I have hardly the words that somebody would do that to somebody’s religious book!”

Of course, America is home to some of the most spectacular nut-jobs in the whole world and one of these staggering wank-barrows is the Christian minister who is organizing the Quran burning who goes by the name of Pastor Terry Jones.

Until Jolie opened her big fat mouth, the issue hadn’t got much press in Pakistan, mainly because they’ve been busy dealing with those really awful floods.

However, militants in the country will now be more than aware of it after The Really Famous Person mentioned it to everyone.

Well done you.

They’ll be sharpening their bullets to kill soldiers with leaving crackpot Americans to get even more angry and blindly assuming that all Muslims are somehow a menace to the world.

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Hecklerspray’s science lab technicians have been working long and hard on one of the trickiest questions ever asked by humankind – ‘What is the point of Peaches Geldof?’ As yet, they still haven’t managed an answer.

The closest they have come is to find a whole host of things that Peaches Geldof (who isn’t engaged) would probably do.

The latest is the discovery that Geldof would probably wear a bikini made entirely from raw meat. Don’t you dare tell us that we don’t bring you the hottest and most important stories.

If you didn’t know, Lady Gaga (real name Assumpta H. Calculator) appeared on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan recently, wearing little more than a bikini made out of beef.

And so, ever the useful celebrity, Peaches ‘The Continual Disappointment To Sir Bob’ Geldof, decided to let the world know that she’d probably wear the same thing.

She tweeted:

‘RE: Lady Gaga’s meat bikini aka meatkini: I probably would wear one on the beach, but would be scared of birds pecking at it. Hmm…fashion.’

She added:

‘On second thoughts, if I wore a meatkini in the sun, it would cook on my skin. Meatkini + sun = steak, medium rare. Just pick off and enjoy.’

So what else might Peaches Geldof do?

Say ‘like’ every three seconds? Try heroin? Continue to use up valuable oxygen that could be used by someone more deserving like, say, a lepton? Try elevating herself above Celebrity Plankton status? Would she try out the new machine we’ve made which is designed to give her a swift smack around the head, every single time she blinks or breathes out?

We’ll get back to you when we know more/make something up.

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Tonight, Derren Brown is promising “life-changing television” with his newest stunt, Hero at 30,000 Feet. How thrilling. We know it involves a plane so we can only assume he’s actually going to prove that he’s the antichrist and actually sprout wings whilst in mid-air and hurtle toward Earth throwing fireballs from his ring.

That’s actually a load of cobblers.

Tonight’s 70 minute special on Channel 4 will see Brown taking an ‘average Joe’ on an psychological journey which will culminate with him facing a life-changing decision of whether to take control of a Boeing 737 packed with passengers, which he believes is about to fall out of the sky.

And we have a clip of it for you to watch!

Viewers will also witness a series of extraordinary personal challenges the subject has been through with Derren as he becomes empowered by life-skills that transform his unconfident character.

Derren Brown says:

“I hope it’s a show that people take something from. We easily let life pass us by, and ultimately this is about engaging with life and understanding that it is the choices we make right now that define us, not what we’ve done in the past.

“One unwitting volunteer gets to have a deep understanding of this, and for him to experience real and lasting change, I have to push him to the extreme.”

This follows the success of previous specials such as Russian Roulette Live, Séance, The Heist and The Events – a series of four 1 hour specials which included How To Win The Lottery and How To Take Down A Casino.

His latest feat will see Derren using his powers to make positive, lasting change to someone’s life and has involved months of planning and secret filming.

He says:

“The show was born from a desire to do something edifying. The experience of doing it has been truly extraordinary: genuinely changing someone’s life in such a good way has left us all on cloud 9 ourselves.”

Hero at 30,000 Feet is shown tonight, Wednesday 8th September at 10pm.

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We’ve been playing it coy and cool for the last few weeks because we’ve been sitting on a story so big that we assumed it must be a massive, outrageous lie. We still can’t quite believe what we’re about to announce.

The crux of the matter is that we’ve known the person behind the helmet of Top Gear’s new Stig. The BBC have threatened us with legal action should we reveal the identity of the new driver, but as Ben Whateverhemightbecalled proved, the BBC cannot suppress this information.

Of course, like Santa Claus or Jesus Christ Our Lord, it’s more fun to believe in the myth rather than find out the boring truth. As such, we’ll give no information until you get over the jump. If you want to find out who the new Stig is, please read more.

The announcing of a new Stig is timed with the departure of a infamous media node within these very walls and we can exclusively reveal that the new ‘mystery driver’ on the show will be our soon to depart editor, Stuart Heritage.

As you can see from this leaked mobile phone photo, the moment when Heritage met Richard Hammond for the first time is captured for all to see.

Stuart will be departing Hecklerspray at the end of the week, with the customary parting gift of a P45 and a £10 voucher for the now defunct Andy’s Records.

We wish him all the best in his new role and we hope that this revelation will not see him fired from Top Gear like that last guy who got fired.

Stuart said:

“I’ve loved writing for Hecklerspray all these years. Five, long, gruelling, miserable years. I really have. Remember that story about Alan Davies biting a tramp? Salad days bruv. Salad days. However, when the Beeb came knocking on the door, having seen my punditry work on Sky News, they told me I was the perfect stature to sit in a car and drive it at death-inducing speeds. How could I say no?”

He added:

“The said that my face was perfect for the role of The Stig and they couldn’t wait to stick a racing helmet on my head. They were so eager and excited that until I placed the infamous mask on, the producers of the show spent their time pointing at my head whilst dry-heaving.”

Let us just hope that the producers of the programme don’t discover that Stuart is currently only in possession of a provisional driving license which already has three points on it after he careless mowed down a cyclist by the name of Mr. B. Johnson.

Here’s a clip of our Stu’s first car test, due to be shown on the first episode of the new Top Gear series, due in the autumn of 2011.

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Don’t tell William Shatner about aliens. He knows all about aliens. He was captain of the Starship Enterprise.

He’s met loads of aliens. Admittedly most of them looked identical to minor 1960s television actresses and, by ‘met’, we obviously mean that William Shatner has tried poking his fingers up their mimsies at least once in a boneheaded and morally dubious explanation of what love is, but he’s definitely met them. And that’s why he’s so certain that there is life on other planets.

Yes, William Shatner has come out and conclusively stated his belief in aliens. And, yes, the reason we’re telling you this is because arse-all else has happened today and we’d clearly prefer to screech on about nothing than do decent thing and just shut up for a change. Happy now?

Is there life on other planets? This is a question that has divided humans for decades. Some think there is, some think there isn’t, most really haven’t given it much thought because they’re busy people and it really doesn’t make much of a difference either way and shut up because Cash In The Attic‘s on in a minute. But William Shatner knows. Oh, he knows alright.

Actually, he doesn’t know. William Shatner doesn’t have the foggiest about whether aliens can realistically exist or not. How could he? He’s not an astrobiologist. He’s just a man who pretended to be a spaceman for a TV show and then sold something he’d pissed out to a casino. It’s simply his opinion that aliens exist. You know, just like how it was his opinion that releasing a spoken-word album of hits of the day in the 1960s would be a good idea, or that nobody would ever be able to tell that he’s wearing a wig. In short, William Shatner’s opinion is so flawless that we may as well regard it as fact.

Still reading this? Hooray, your lives are as bleak and empty as ours! By way of a congratulation, here’s what William Shatner said about the possibility of life on other planets:

“There is no doubt that there is life out there; the mathematics of it lead you to that absolute conclusion. In my mind, there is no doubt that the universe teems – teems – with life in all its forms.”

So there you have it – William Shatner is convinced that aliens exist. Join us tomorrow when we’ll be telling you whether or not Jimmy Tarbuck has ever seen a ghost. Or, oh, something.

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Martin Freeman is a lucky actor. Like Michael Caine, he gets gigs in TV and film to essentially turn up and play himself. Lovely work if you can get it. And as such, Peter Jackson who makes all those awful Lord of the Rings films, offered Freeman the chance to play himself one again in the lead role of The Hobbit.

Freeman was offered the chance to play Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit film, and with it, a seven figure salary.

Did he say yes to a film that is almost certainly going to piss coins? No. He said no because he wanted to carry on as Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick Dr Watson. The tiny idiot.

The Sun reports that Freeman reluctantly turned the role down because he was already committed to 20 weeks filming alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in Jonathan-Creek-Goes-Brooding show, Sherlock.

A source said:

“It was one of the most difficult decisions of his career. MGM, who are making the film, only got a formal offer over in the last couple of weeks.

“It was too late for Martin because he had already signed up for another series of Sherlock. It was agonising but he had no other choice.”

The fool. He wouldn’t have even had to shave his hairy toes for this role.

The source added:

“All the actors had to read four pages of script to camera which is being shown to Peter Jackson. He is looking for a hidden gem now Martin has ruled himself out of the job.”

The Hobbit is expected to hit cinemas with a bunch of twee hippie bollocks in 2012.

People were up in arms about The Stig’s unmasking being considered newsworthy. So, of course, this article is dedicated to those people in an attempt to wind them up to the point where they grind their teeth into dust.

Of course, you’ll be more than aware of the fact that Some Bloke told the world that he was The Stig. If you really want to know his name before you forget it for the rest of your life, he’s called Ben. Ben Collins. He can drive cars really fast.

Or at least he used to because Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he’s been handed his P45 after his little court battle with the BBC.

Thanks to all this, the world will spin the wrong way on its axis as Clarkson announced that the show’s format will change after The Stig outed himself. Imagine that. A TV show doing things slightly differently than it once did. Trying to process that notion is making us collectively feel like we’re coming down off bad drugs.

Clarkson said:

“He is history as far as we are concerned, he is sacked.”

“It was a shock. I was hurt, actually, because I liked him and he came around to my house and had drinks and all the time he was writing a book, so I feel a bit hurt.”

So what’s next? Well, apart from Ben Whatshisface wondering whether his book was worth it and whether he should’ve given up such a well-paid and prestigious job, Clarkson said that Top Gear won’t be short of options.

“We’ve many, many thousands of people queuing up to be whatever it is that we create.”

“I have spent the last three weeks doing nothing but trying to figure out what we will do instead. We will get somebody. Top Gear is damaged but not out.”

So there you have it. Earth shattering stuff. Jeremy Clarkson feels hurt and Ben Thingy will now sit at home, alone, dressed in a boiler suit with a pan on his head, making the sound of shrieking tyres and shouting the word ‘Gambon’ over and over until he finally ends his life with a hose attached to the exhaust of his Toyota Prius.

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8 - Oh Pamela Anderson. Ick – AmyGrindhouse

7 – OLD BOOZE – Asylum

6 - THE GREATEST VIDEO OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS, NUMBER TWO…

5 - Seven awesome things about a Celine Dion magazine cover - BestWeekEver

4 - Giant, slow-motion popping bubbles – Geekologie

3 - Ronnie Corbett’s Supper Club sounds AWESOME – WatchWithMothers

2 - Warning: you will never be able to unwatch this – Warmingglow

1 - THE GREATEST VIDEO OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS, NUMBER THREE…

Strictly Come Dancing or X Factor? It’s a question that’s divided the nation. You have to prefer one.

You have to. Even though deep down you realise that they’re both a bit insultingly crap. Anyway, if you prefer Strictly Come Dancing, today is your lucky day – the list of celebrity participants for this year’s series have just been announced. And if you like painfully long lists of people you don’t really recognise, then you’re about to be catapulted into heaven.

So here are the 2010 Strictly Come Dancing participants. Remember, some of these celebrities will be good at dancing, and some will be rubbish at dancing, and at least one will end up getting off with their professional dancer. But who? Well, Patsy Kensit, obviously. But we’ve already said too much. After the jump…

Matt Baker – Former Blue Peter presenter. Behaves identically to Tom Hanks in Big, which is as creepy as it is endearing.

Paul Daniels – 72-year-old midget conjurer. FUN FACT: Paul Daniels once had to go to hospital because his pee-hole started to heal up.

Goldie -A man who used to be cool but would now put on a tutu and knit fairies on Channel Five if a reality TV show offered him enough money.

Jimmi Mistry – Star of East Is East. The fact he’s being touted as ‘star of East Is East‘ should be proof that he’s not really the star of anything any more.

Scott Maslen – The one from EastEnders who had the most amount of trouble saying identifiable words during the live episode. Good job that moving all of your limbs with grace and split-second precision on live TV is easier than saying the words “It’s a motive” in the right order on live TV then, huh?

Peter Shilton - Former England goalkeeper. Hopefully Peter will replicate David Seaman‘s Dancing On Ice performance, and bludgeon his way through about six quivering,concussed partners. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Gavin Henson – Bright orange rugby idiot. Used to be married to Charlotte Church. Will adapt to ballroom dancing with such obvious glee that it’ll be sort of uncomfortable to watch.

Patsy Kensit – Ex-wife of every single celebrity ever. Future girlfriend of whoever gets to be her partner. Mark our words.

Kara Tointon – A woman who left EastEnders in order to turn up in newspapers once every six weeks wearing a bra. That’s about it.

Felicity Kendall – This year’s token older lady who everyone will fancy, and then let this fact go to her head, and then overdo it a bit, and then be eliminated from the show in early November.

Pamela Stephenson – Billy Connolly‘s wife. Psychologist. That’s about it.

Tina O’Brien – Either current or former Coronation Street star. We don’t bloody know. We don’t watch Coronation Street and we can’t be bothered to look it up.

Michelle Williams – The woman from Destiny’s Child. No, not that one. Or that one. The other one. Yes, there was another one. There was. There bloody was! Don’t look at us like that, there was definitely a third member of Destiny’s Child. There was. Oh, you people.

Anne Widdecombe - That fact that we’re currently vomiting, pooing, weeing, pulling our hair and punching ourselves in the face as hard as we can all at the same time prevents us from penning a description of what Anne Widdecombe will be like on Strictly Come Dancing. Sorry.

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Pete Doherty is the musician’s marmite. You will literally adore everything that comes out of his grimy mouth, or regard him as a useless tosser who contributes as much to society as London types who can’t cope with a bit of snow.

Recently, Pete Doherty has been picked as the one that girls want to smoke their first crackpipe with, whilst boys try to zone in and copy his horrible dress sense and vacant gaze. And yet others find his behaviour slightly repulsive. Amazingly we’re not alluding to another soul-destroying drug arrest here. Hold on tight ladies – there are photos of Pete Doherty with his wang out on the internet!

Fancy the image of a confused looking male wearing nothing but a smile and a crop of scruffy hair? Actually, we’re describing just images from the hecklerspray 2011 calendar here.

The actual naked Pete Doherty image in question almost wants us to never shower naked ever again due to the fear that our bodies will one day end up like the bloke who inked such literate smashes as Fuck Forever.

Why was Pete Doherty naked? Was he at a nudist beach? Or is he secretly one of those people who take items of clothing off for money while moronic idiots cheer and woop, in the vain hope of receiving special cuddles behind the skips? Or was he playing the gentleman’s game of snooker bollock naked? Well crazy Pete Doherty did the latter and, providing extreme commentary on the event, The Sun reports:

“The former junkie stripped off for a game of snooker at a house party.”

Don’t leave us hanging! We need to know if he won the game or lost his nerve in the final frame. Who was he playing and did the other person decide to join everyone’s favourite popstar junkie in playing with mountains of flesh on show?

Fear not, the pictures bothering the internet have been edited so your eyes don’t melt. Who’d want to see a penis that might have been injected with heroin, anyway?

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Like everyone else on this crummy Earth, we’re fans of Natalie Portman. She’s made some good films and, when she’s been in not-so-good films, she still looks just like Natalie Portman which is better looking than, say, you. And you. And everyone stood behind you ’til the horizon.

Anyway, it seems that her latest role, in Black Swan, is almost certainly going to win her an Oscar. Yep. It’s all sewn up. Everyone who has seen the new flick at the Venice Film Festival came out of the show, muttering about how wonderful her performance is.

And quite possibly, trying to hide their erections from the lesbian scenes with Mila Kunis which feature.

Words like ‘astounding’ and ‘best performance ever’ have been bandied about which is very nice for Portman. The best we could do, when we wrote about the film was that the Oscars might “introduce a brand new category – for Loveliest Princess In A Lovely Pretty Dress – just so she can win something.”

Then again, we’re idiots.

Natalie Portman isn’t perfect though as she’s shown a weakness for hopeless RSC thesp, Kenneth Branagh. Apparently, she only agreed to take part in his big budget adaptation of the comic, ‘Thor’ after hearing that Branagh was directing.

She explains:

“It was sort of actually not something I was dying to do. Not ‘Thor’ in particular but a big movie. When I heard Ken was doing it, I said, ‘Wow that is a daring and interesting idea.’

“Then I met Ken and he was someone I was extremely interested to get to spend three months with. It was probably the first, or one of the first times that my expectations were actually exceeded.”

‘Thor’ is due for release in May 2011 and, even if it’s rubbish, you can still fawn over Natalie Portman’s face… unless of course, she’s a hideous CGI character and is only providing the voice.

We suppose that we could easily find out but there’s an opened yoghurt in the fridge which goes off today and that’s taking all of our concentration.

Anyway, watch Natalie Portman kissing a girl in this trailer for Black Swan.

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Rihanna, quite possibly, is the world’s coolest pop-star. She’s made a whole bunch of great pop records and, more importantly, been involved in a scandal that saw Hecklerspray writers given the chance to stare at her naked parts.

Over the years, Rihanna has gone from reasonably boring R&B thingy, to the crooner of slick electropop, to the champion of weird ballads and along the way, extolled the virtues of owning an umbrella-ella-ella-ay-ay-ay.

So what is she up to next? Well, we’re all about to find out with her new album, which Rihanna has told us will be called ‘Loud’ and will be released in November.

Like all musical projects, there will be a single leading the charge.

The first single from the new album is called ‘Only Girl (In the World)’ and we’ll all get to hear it at the same time as it is set to premiere online tomorrow (September 8th).

During a webchat on her official site, Rihannanow.com, the singer said of the album:

“I didn’t want to go backward and remake ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’. I wanted the next step in the evolution of Rihanna.”

She then added:

“I’m gonna miss the ‘Rated R’ era too, but NOTHING compares to the album I just made.”

To be perfectly honest, if there’s anything as good as ‘Rude Boy’ on it, the Earth’s ears will be just fine. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who doesn’t like Rihanna because you prefer other music or, indeed, you’re one of those miserable chumps who objects to her music on principle because it’s popular.

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God bless famous people. If it wasn’t for them appearing in disaster areas, we wouldn’t even hear about them. Did you know there was a massive flood in Pakistan? What? It happened ages ago? This must be a new one because Angelina Jolie is going over there to look upset in the face of victims. Upset and wealthy.

Of course, the events in Pakistan are so unrelentingly awful that, should Hecklerspray think about it seriously for even one-second, we’d probably create a flood of our own with our tears. See? We can’t even take being depressed seriously.

Anyway, the Hollywood superstar has gone to the north-west of the country to refugees whose camp was completely destroyed in three hours of flooding. Feel free to make your own jokes about her making off with babies while she’s out there. We can’t be bothered to word it properly.

Jolie, dressed down in what the Telegraph described as “a striking black and red embroidered cloak” said:

“From what I understand, the situation is on a scale we have not really seen. It’s on a huge scale. It’s not just the floods – it’s three decades that the Pakistani people have hosted Afghan refugees. Their needs need to be addressed.”

“There are people displaced by the floods, all their homes washed away. Many of them lost their children during the floods.”

In fairness to Jolie, she’s put her money where her mouth is by kicking up a stink and donating $100,000 of her own money to the plight, which is nearly double what Pakistan’s president has given to the cause.

Of course, Jolie was there because she’s a goodwill ambassador for the UN.

Geri Halliwell used to do that job… and it’s still staggering to think about it as a prospect. We can imagine her in the face of people at rock bottom, flicking a peace sign and shouting ‘GIRL POWER!’ before planting a great big smacker on the face of a dignitary before breaking into Look At Me.

Anyway. This is all far too depressing for us to compute. All you need to know is that Angelina Jolie is a better human than all of the Hecklerspray writers combined.

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Celebrities seem to get special treatment when it comes to the law don’t they? Mick Jagger was one of the first high profile busts, which prompted an outpouring in the media called ‘Who Breaks A Butterfly Upon A Wheel’.

When Lindsay Lohan went to prison, we responded with a similarly sensitive article called Lindsay Lohan Makes Going To Jail Look Like A Ruddy Lark.

And now, Paris Hilton and her boyfriend Cy Waits have had their collars felt by the long arm of the law. Alas, it was barely a grab at the scruff, rather a gentle tickle that lasted barely 3 hours.

The pair were in and out of jail in such a short time after being arrested for chewing gum/drug possession on August 27th.

The incredibly fair justice system of America (where they actually still kill people) have claimed that there is no special treatment going on here. The Las Vegas Police claim they’ve had no choice but to speed up the process… so not exactly special treatment, rather, A Bit Different Treatment.

Jim Dixon, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Deputy Chief, said:

“Yeah, she was treated differently so I don’t have a disruption of my process here at the county jail. When you bring in somebody like that, everybody comes over and tries to look at them. I’d have officers attempting to keep inmates away from her. I’d have disruptions.”

Imagine that! A policeman being asked to deal with some disruptions. We shouldn’t mock really as we know full well that Vegas is a notoriously law-abiding place and the police probably aren’t used to doing anything other than scratching their rears and eating pastries covered in Pepto-Bismol.

Anyway, this isn’t over yet. Paris Hilton is set to appear before Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Joe Bonaventure (what an exciting name!) on October 27 and, if all goes according to the normal trend of convicting, she’ll go to prison for four years.

Yeah. Right.

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Ladies and gentleman, the moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived.

David and Victoria Beckham have put their seven bedroom Hertfordshire estate on the market and are finally packing up shop and moving to America full time. HAHAHAHAHA AMERICA! They’re your problem now.

Unbelievably the two-headed, barely one brained, self-promoting, outfit-matching monster have been terrorising our poor nation for 13 years. 13 bloody years. To put things into perspective, when these two all-encompassing nobheads met in the Manchester United players’ lounge in 1997, Tony Blair was popular, the UK won the Eurovision Song Contest and Lindsay Lohan was actually a respected actress. No really. What a crazy old world, eh?

But after the births of their oddly named offspring, an alleged affair with a woman who’ll happily help a pig rub one out and an infamous kick from the world’s most annoying football manager, the Beckhams have decided to leave our fair soil and make their move to America permanent, even though the country has already made it clear that they don’t give a toss about them. Oh well.

A spokeswoman for the Beckhams said: “I can confirm David and Victoria have had their UK home valued.”

We’re sure this has nothing to do with the fact that their accountants have told them to stop shitting their fortune down the toilet and all to do with the fact that once you make friends with the likes of Tom Cruise, you’re life is set. Let’s just hope that America doesn’t get some crazy idea to punish us by offloading one of their talent less harridans. Seriously Paris Hilton, put your passport and coke-filled handbag down, we just got rid of Peaches Geldof and the country is all the better for it.

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Twilight and Harry Potter are basically the same – both are supernatural books for children and stupid adults.

But there are differences. In Harry Potter, it’s basically taken as granted that all the characters are timid virgins – except for Dumbledore, of course, who spends most of his free time engaged in all sorts of bizarre kinky sex acts in a disused Hogwarts dungeon – while everyone in Twilight is so obsessed with sex that they can’t even brush their hair or smile or learn how to breathe quietly.

And this has riled Harry Potter‘s Emma Watson. She’s accused Twilight‘s Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart of ‘selling sex’. Which isn’t true, obviously – anyone with half a brain can see that sex with either Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart would be like sex with a disinterested shop mannequin that’s been left out in the rain for months – but anyway, this is a fight and fights are cool.

Emma Watson is a clever girl. She’s clever enough to go to university and become the world’s highest-paid actress and to get a haircut that doesn’t look completely hopeless. But when it comes to picking fights, Emma Watson has no clue at all.

Why? Because she’s just picked a fight with Twilight. And this is something she shouldn’t have done. Emma Watson shouldn’t have picked a fight with Twilight because Twilight is much cooler than Harry Potter. The soundtracks are cooler, the look is cooler and the haircuts – although legitimately awful – are cooler. Harry Potter has a theme park, for crying out loud – that’s preposterously uncool. Imagine a Twilight theme park – it’d be full of blank-faced, dispossessed emos standing around listlessly and breathing through their noses as hard as they can. It’d be rubbish.

What’s more, Emma Watson has even got the entire basis of her fight wrong, as MTV reports:

When speaking about the final installment of Harry Potter, The Deathly Hallows in a conference call with journalists, Watson reportedly said: “This kiss between Hermione and Ron is highly anticipated, it’s been building up for eight films now.” She added to the New York Daily News: “And Harry Potter is not Twilight, you know. We’re not selling sex.”

Which is just plain wrong. For all of its numerous flaws, Twilight doesn’t really sell sex at all. It’s the story of a woman who doesn’t have sex, then doesn’t have sex, then doesn’t have sex, then does have sex and immediately gets pregnant with a vile little monster that smashes her bones from the inside and has to actually be bitten out of her uterus by the person who knocked her up. And if that’s selling sex then the salesman should probably be fired for negligible incompetence for doing such a shitty job.

And here ends the last time we’ll ever defend Twilight. Because we hate it and think anybody who likes it is an idiot. Fact.

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Everyone at Hecklerspray towers is very angry. Not about anything in particular, rather, everything in particular. This is because, collectively, we’re all massive failures in one way or another and as such, we hold everyone but ourselves responsible.

As such, we’re all prone to smashing up our houses in fits of pique. However, our destructive sessions have been eerily silent and we needed music to soundtrack us lobbing stuff out of the window and hammering sinks clean off the wall. So we asked you, dear reader, to submit your own angry songs via the comments, Facebook and Twitter. You didn’t disappoint (apart from one person who suggested Leonard Cohen).

Featured are Nirvana, Dead Kennedys and Rihanna.

Yesindeed.

Click here to listen to the HecklerPlay Anger playlist

To The Bones -Rex

McClusky – Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues

The Damned – Neat Neat Neat

The Stooges – Shake Appeal

Jack Off Jill – Media C-Section

PJ Harvey – 50ft Queenie

Queens of the Stone Age – Quick and To The Pointless

The Buzzcocks – No Reply

The Dead Kennedys – Nazi Punks Fuck Off

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Black Tongue

Rage Against The Machine – Sleep Now In The Fire

The Meteors – I Hate People

Nirvana – Milk It

Art Brut – Fight

Beastie Boys – Sabotage

Rihanna – Breaking Dishes

Kelis – Caught Out There

Goldie – St Angel

MIA – Meds & Feds

Peaches – Fuck Or Kill

Audioslave – Cochise

Disturbed – Down With The Sickness

Stampin’ Ground – Officer Down

Lifelover – Major Fuck Off

Motorhead – Ace of Spades

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Our lives have been empty – EMPTY – without a new Eyezmaze game to play. So when we heard about Grow Valley, we’re not too proud to admit that we actually soiled ourselves in excitement.

If you’ve even only played one Eyezmaze game you’ll already know how Grow Valley works – you pick a bunch of items in a certain order to see how they interact with each other. But even by previous standards, Grow Valley is impressively intricate. This time you can develop phones and computers and each individual component can talk to each other and, oh, it’s so so much fun. We don’t want to spoil the ending, but this is definitely a game worth persevering with.

Play Grow Valley now

Simon Cowell has an amazing ability to polarise opinion. Some think of him as a great TV dame who is there to provide high-camp in a sea of TV seriousness. Others meanwhile, seem to hate him so much that they tune-in for his shows, just so they can turn their back on them and tut repeatedly.

Either way, Cowell’s shows are big business and pretty much everyone has an opinion on them. But for how long?

You see, the future of The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent is now in doubt after Cowell stated that he’s still not made his mind up about the franchises. And if Cowell goes, then surely, the show goes with him?

At the time of press, Cowell has only agreed to do the American X Factor in 2011 and hasn’t yet decided if he’s even going to bother with the British programmes.

He told some newspaper:

“At the moment you are only going to see me do one show – and it is not in England. We have to make a decision if we can make the shows better. Do people want them back?”

“There has got to be a mood here for these shows, and I have always been very conscious of that. You can’t force anything. And it has got to be fun, the minute it stops becoming fun, bye bye.”

“Genuinely I am going to take this week by week because it is about mood. That is how I feel. I may wait till the end of this show to decide, exactly. Look, at the end of the day you are led by your audience, if they are enthusiastic and they want more, you do it.”

Ratings for the show have been high in this new series, breaking the 10 million mark consistently. However, it hasn’t been without controversy after loads of people complained about autotune and the treatment of a contestant who it transpired had mental health issues.

Still. That girl who punched her mate in the face was good fun wasn’t she?

Cowell hasn’t decided about the future of BGT, saying:

“I have not decided if I am doing Britain’s Got Talent. There are a lot of scheduling issues. We are getting to the point where we have to make a decision.”

The show is in limbo, after Piers Morgan quit the show after signing a £5.5million deal with US TV network CNN. It’s baffling isn’t it? Piers Morgan, cracking America with his big suet-pudding face.

Is this the end for X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent in the UK?

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Have you seen Gossip Girl? It’s terrible isn’t it? It’s like an overly-long tooth-paste commercial based on Cruel Intentions. In the thick of the show is dashing sneerer, Ed Westwick who is living up to his character’s traits by waggling his bits about in front of humans in the hope they’ll succumb to his dubious charms.

This time, his sights are set squarely on Cheryl Cole.

So what does he see in Cheryl? Is it because she’s still recovering from malaria? Is it her vast wealth? Is it her weight-lifter trousers that she wore in the Fight For This Love video?

Ed certainly seems bowled over by The X Factor judge and has had an outpouring of mushy praise for the Girls Aloud singer.

He said:

“Cheryl is ideal. There’s something about her soft Geordie accent that just does it for me. I’d love to take her for some good old-fashioned fish and chips. My dad is from the north east, and girls with those accents…. well, they’re just amazing.”

What a lovely image. Two famous people dangling their feet into the water at the docks in Newcastle, gently pushing the needles and condoms away that float close by, both talking to each other like Sid The Sexist. Pet.

Of course, Ed, who plays bad boy Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl, is newly single after splitting-up with co-star Jessica Szohr. We wonder if he had to put all his stuff in bin bags and load the car up like we all do?

Now he’s on the market and gunning for Wor Cheryl, he’s going to have to join a lengthy queue as she’s being courted by the likes of Chace Crawford and will.i.am.

Let’s not forget that she’s been hanging around with Derek Hough who has been helping to mend her crippled heart… crippled by that shag-sack, Ashley Cole. It’s worth pointing out that Hecklerspray does not believe that both these men used Cheryl as a Professional Beard for one second. Nope. No truth in it at all.

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