There have been few more satisfying TV moments of late than when ‘comedian’ Russell Brand appeared on Have I Got News For You and attempted to impress the audience.

His winning tactic? Erm … simply rambling about author Anthony Burgess in relation to his own bestseller My Booky-Wook and expecting the assembled onlookers to clap like special-needs sealions at his stunning intellect.

Cue a grim look of realisation as Brand found this wasn’t his usual crowd – i.e. an audience made up entirely of slightly-dim sixth-formers who’d label a turnip a ‘legend’ if it had its own E4 series. He then had to do more…

We don’t really need to explain this one to you. Suffice to say: get ready for the esteem with which you may hold the human race to drop a notch.

Sometimes adverts just totally miss the point.

Take this little doozy for example: a woefully misguided anti-drugs PSA in which a talking dog decides to harrass a teenage girl about her drug use.

So – what has she been doing? Snorting three lines of coke over breakfast every morning? Jacking up a speedball during SAT revision? Rubbing blotter paper soaked in acid against her cherubic face? No. She’s … well … been smoking the odd joint. Seriously. Smoking weed. That’s it.

All of which is very ironic, because if the events in this commercial happened to us, we’d either:

a) Scream ‘Jesus Christ, a…

Talk about your long gestation periods – The Opiates, the third and final album from Swedish collective Anywhen, was originally recorded in 2001, and subject to an extremely limited release in February of that year.

So why are we mentioning it now? Well, The Opiates has aged sufficently enough to reach ‘lost classic’ status, and – following a rediscovery by ex-Japan mastermind David Sylvian – is all set for an updated and expanded re-release, courtesy of some reworking by vocalist Thomas Feiner.

Please. Stay where you are. We know the connotations that the term ‘lost classic’ has – you probably can’t help thinking of some scratchy Bob Dylan bootleg heralded as ‘the ultimate live experience’ or thirty-seven minutes of Syd Barrett farting that some wag has labelled ‘a transcendent psychedelic journey lost for several decades.’

Remember the courtyard square from the Back To The Future films? Sure you do. It was the courtyard. You know – the one shaped like a square. From the Back To The Future films.

Well, it looks like remembering it is all you’ll be able to do, as the courtyard square from the Back To The Future films is just one of the many movie milestones that has been eaten up by a blazing fire raging its way through Universal Studios,Los Angeles.

Is there any more gloriously simple concept than the ‘fail’?

It may well come to be the true defining buzzword of the Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or wherever the pissing Christ we are these days) generation. The notion is so pure and undistilled as to be genius: take a picture – either your own or sourced from elsewhere – of a human or animal plumbing the absolute depths of idiocy or loserdom, whack a big old ‘FAIL’ across the photo and share with the world. Done.

Just goes to prove: who says Oscar Wilde is the epitome of wit? Hecklerspray has read The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, and frankly there isn’t a single moment in there that made us snort out loud as much as anything on Shipment Of Fail – the interweb’s premier collection of timewasting laughability.

Got a few hours to waste? Here you go:

Shipment Of Fail

We’ve all been there.

You know the feeling: it’s a big night out and you want to dress to impress. But all your best clothes are in the laundry, and you can’t go out naked again – you always seem to draw all that nasty ‘police attention’, and besides, it’d be the third time this week. How you wish – oh, how you yearn and pray – that you could look like an overweight gangster who may or may not be dead and whose life neatly doubles up as a slow-burning metaphor for various aspects of American national identity.

Well … now you can!

Not a single millisecond goes by when there isn’t some astonishing new rumour about Amy Winehouse – that she’s taken so many drugs she now sees only in kaleidoscope or that she’s actually a half-human, half-horse hybrid genetically engineered on the planet Mediocrotron and sent to Earth to soundtrack dinner parties everywhere.

The latest gossip flying around? That Amy is being shipped off to Barzilai Medical Centre, Israel – a fresh attempt to wean her off those lovely narcotics by plunging her into a $12,800 course of ‘’short, intensive and effective treatment”. Presumably involving a room full of people with actual real-life problems yelling “oh, just pull yourself together, you self-obsessed silly bint.”