Television

With Big Brother finishing this week, you’d think we’d be free of reality TV for a while.

Well you can take that assumption and shove it down the toilet. Various broadcasters have given the green light to more of them than ever. X Factor contains more sob stories and wobbly contestants then ever before and Strictly Come Dancing has returned - sadly with no variation. Surely everyone agrees with us when we say Strictly Come Dancing On Broken Glass And Stinging Nettles would have generated more interest?

Not content with having one reality show on their network, ITV has decided to launch a brand new show on the less popular ITV2 channel. CelebAir sees eleven celebrities staffing a real plane as it flies genuine people on holiday. Now, we realise that airplane security has been strict lately, but surely this is an act of terrorism in the making.

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Despite everything we’ve said, alluded to or thought over the last six months, we’re thrilled that Beverly Hills 90210 is coming back. Really.

Why? Because new Beverly Hills 90210 makes a clean break from the past. It’s banished all the pastel sweaters and pouffy hair of the old Beverly Hills 90210 and brought in a brand new team of youngsters who underline just how completely brand new the brand new Beverly Hills 90210 is. It’s brand new, you know.

So who’s the biggest star of this super-new, bleeding-edge Beverly Hills 90210? Um, Shannen Doherty. Off the old Beverly Hills 90210. But it’s not all cripplingly pointless news, because now she’s famous again, Shannen Doherty gets to put the record straight about a fight she didn’t have with Jennie Garth more than a decade ago. Whew!

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It must be difficult being Beyonce’s sister - she got the looks, the ambition and the talent and all you’re left with is a name that rhymes with ‘flange’.

With that in mind, if we were Solange Knowles we’d get a little bit tetchy with people who compare us to Beyonce. No, more than that, we’d actually throw an embarrassing full-on sulky tantrum on television if someone even said the name ‘Beyonce’ within earshot of us. We would. We’d look like total bellends doing it, and it’d probably harm our career quite profoundly, but a little thing like that wouldn’t stop us.

Funnily enough it wouldn’t stop Solange Knowles either. A hapless presenter on a local Las Vegas Fox entertainment show happened to mention Beyonce’s name just before a Solange Knowles interview yesterday, and Solange threw an incredible schoolmarmish hoity toity “Mer mer mer” prissy little tantrum at her for it.

Video footage? Why of course there’s video footage…

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Today is a sad day for anyone who’s ever wobbled their chin furiously and burbled “Blwoooear, Madge” - because Harold Bishop is leaving Neighbours.

It’s been announced that Ian Smith, the actor who plays Harold Bishop, is leaving Neighbours in October - and probably forever this time too, not swanning back in five years later because he spuriously only got amnesia instead of dying forever like everyone thought. Probably.

It’s upsetting to think that an ironic cultural touchstone such as Harold Bishop is really leaving Neighbours. The news has been such a shock to our systems that it even briefly reminded us that Neighbours was still actually on TV. We know - that’s how much of a shock it was.

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Adding a fourth American Idol judge is a bad idea - like adding a fourth wheel to a tricycle, or a fourth leg to the injured dog that walks around hospitals on wheels sometimes.

Not to stretch that metaphor, but it would be fine if the fourth dog leg was as famous as the other three dog legs, but it’s not - it’s a weirdly anonymous dog leg that you wouldn’t even recognise if someone hacked it off and waved it around by itself away from all the other dog legs. Understand? Good.

Anyway. Kara DioGuardi, the new fourth American Idol judge, has now been formally introduced to the public. We could have just said that instead of banging on about dog legs and saved everyone a lot of time and confusion, we suppose. Oh, will we ever learn?

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The world is split into three: one group hates Denise Richards, one group likes Denise Richards and the other group doesn’t care if Denise Richards lives or dies.

Sadly, none of these groups watch Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. The group that likes her won’t watch it because they don’t like how she’s portrayed in it, the group that hates her won’t watch it because they hate her and the group that doesn’t care won’t watch it because ultimately they’re quite sensible. And that’s why Denise Richards: It’s Complicated is getting cancelled.

Personally we blame the title. Denise Richards: It’s Complicated is both vague and untrue. Denise Richards Exceeds The Most Negative Aspects Of Her Reputation While Simultaneously Doing Her Best To Prove The Opposite would have got the viewers flooding in. But, no, nobody ever listens to us.

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The US general election is right around the corner, by which we mean that it’s weeks and weeks and weeks away.

But that hasn’t stopped everyone wigging out about it, though. It’s been reported that people are so behind Barack Obama this year that 22.3 million people watched Monday’s Democratic convention speech by his wife, Michelle Obama. 22.3 million people watching a woman basically just bang on about her feelings for ages? That’s impressive. Mental, but impressive.

You can tell from this that things are really gearing up for Barack Obama, and things are definitely falling into place for that fateful day when he inevitably loses the election and everyone goes home feeling a bit deflated.

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American Idol is such a television sensation that it can pretty much get any name going, like Prince and Gordon Brown and, um, Taylor Hicks.

So when the American Idol producers decided to shake up the holy trinity of Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul and hire a fourth judge, they aimed as high as they possibly could. So who did they pick? Michael Jackson? Madonna? The resuscitated zombie corpse of Elvis Presley? The T-Rex out of Jurassic Park? No. The American Idol producers picked Kara DioGuardi.

What? Don’t look at us. We never said we knew who she was.

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Say what you like about Dancing With The Stars, but you can’t deny that it loves its physically-impaired contestants.

In recent years, Dancing With The Stars contestants have included one-legged Heather Mills, constantly-fainting Marie Osmond and Mel B - a woman so harrowingly northern that there’ll soon be a all-star charity concert held to stop her eating tripe and breeding greyhounds.

And this year’s Dancing With The Stars is no different - contestants include 82-year-old Cloris Leachman, recent heart-scare patient Toni Braxton and Kim Kardashian, who suffers from a rare arse disorder called Booty Tumours. Or she doesn’t. Let’s not pretend that we care about any of this, shall we.

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Today hecklerspray woke up and said to itself: “Self, find a way to return blood-flow to your arm or you’ll lose it forever.” But we were feeling too lazy, so now only type at half speed.

You know the feeling - surely you do. We’re having one of those days where the only food we eat are the fish crackers we accidentally spilled under our pillow the night before. We’re only moving to avoid bed-sores, and the various shoes our step-dad keeps throwing at us for the sake of motivation. Seriously, when is he gonna realize that we’re 38, and we’ll get up when we want to?

As such, we tried to think of different ways we could post something without taking the 4 - 5 hours a typical solitary hecklerspray article usually consumes.

And then it hit us: It’s common knowledge by now that ol’ Stu Heritage is off for a month or something writing up funny bits for real a tv show. Up until five minutes ago we’d been under the impression it was Dr. Who.

Well it’s not and it never has been. It’s called Tonightly - and we have a clip for you by way of a fancy video.

So if you need a Heritage fix, have at it. We can’t say for sure that he wrote this exact piece, but we can say he was in the room when it was filmed. That counts for something, right?

It’s just typical. You finally get an advert worth watching – and then it gets banned.

US TV network bosses have deemed Eva Mendes’ advert for Calvin Klein Secret Obsession perfume - in which she writhes around naked on her bed - as too hot for TV.

Bloody squares. OK, so you can see a bit of nipple, but still.

Anyway, thankfully, hecklerspray has no such concerns, so you can watch Eva Mendes in all her glory below the cut. Enjoy!!

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Did you know that the voice of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles baddie Shredder was actually voiced by Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air?

No? Neither did we - and we’re still recovering! Unless someone is playing a joke on us. Damn them! But it got us thinking: Why do we care so much about these characters? What is it about the cartoon baddies that we love so much?

Aren’t we supposed to hate them? Boo them when they come on the screen like some kind of pantomime villain? No, and the reason why is because they are usually the most interesting characters in the cartoon.

So we have decided to come up with 16 of the best 80s cartoon villains. They reason we went for the 80s is because, well, that was when we were all kids. Plus it was a golden era. Or is that what everyone says?

Enjoy, and feel free to tell us which ones we’ve missed…

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