Thunder Lightning Strike by The Go! Team is on the shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize. And we'd love it if they won. Partly because we've got a fiver on them, and partly because their music is so extraordinarily fantastic - a day-glo mish-mash of Sonic Youth guitars, Northern Soul rhythms, handclaps, recorders, manic female rapping and cinematic bedroom lo-fi scratchiness.

If we were having a summer instead of the world's wettest water shortage, the debut album by The Go! Team, Thunder Lightning Strike would easily soundtrack it. It's joyous.

We caught up with the gentleman leader of The Go! Team, Ian Parton, to discuss Mark E Smith, the Mercury Music Prize and San Fran-motherfucking-cisco.

Do you think that Bob Hoskins would rather be remembered as the star of The Long Good Friday or the star of Super Mario Brothers? Will the obituaries for Kylie Minogue begin with "Star of the lauded Street Fighter movie..."? Of course not.

Not that it's stopping Hollywood from bashing out videogame movies willy-nilly. And - now that Microsoft has agreed a deal with two studios - the latest remake blockbuster will be Halo, which is due to hit the multiplexes in the summer of 2007.

The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase was a wise wrestler. He always used to insist that "Everybody has a price". He was also a badly-dressed fat guy with a black servant, but that's less relevant.

Back to the original point, Ted's "Everybody has a price" motto has seemingly been picked up by satellite TV company EchoStar. They're offering free satellite TV for ten years to every household in the first town in America to change it's name to DISH.

You know Where's Wally? Where you have to find a guy in a woolly hat in a huge crowd of other people? You know how that was so hard you wanted to cry for a month while you were doing it?

Now, imagine that Wally wasn't a guy in a woolly hat. Imagine that he's a four leaf clover. Imagine also that he isn't

If you want hecklerspray's opinion - and while you're here, pal, that's all ye shall be getting - Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant's new series Extras hasn't been half-bad.

What with all the celebrity endorsement, the project could have oh-so-easily turned into the sort of Elton John-starring Little Britain bumkissery that makes any self-respecting viewer hang their head in shame. With a trail of vomit dribbling down their chin.

But no! While it - cliche impending - hasn't been as good as The Office, Extras has indeed swung perilously close to genius. Particularly the Les Dennis episode, which - in any sane world - would transform the Family Fortunes host from laughable has-been to craggy-faced tragicomic 'serious actor' territory.

No surprise then, what with all this success, that chubby Mr. Gervais is planning his move to Hollywood.

***LATEST MTV MUSIC VIDEO AWARDS BETTING ODDS! CLICK HERE***

Only three more days to go until the 2005 MTV Music Video Awards take place in Miami. So there are also three more days left of MTV Music Video Awards betting. Trust us, finding out if Gwen Stefani can dance better than Ciara or not gets a whole lot more interesting if you've placed a bet on it beforehand.

Today we're looking at the nominees for the Best Group Video award. This is the award where, traditionally, all kinds of pasty-faced gits can stand up and carp on about 'real' music - even though their songs have been processed and tweaked and marketed just as aggressively as someone like 50 Cent, as we're about to see.

Here are the latest betting odds for the MTV MVA Best Group Video Award, brought to you with Betfair.com...

You know how it gets in the summer. If the rock-stars of the world aren't up to their waist in filth at some grotty European festival, then they're sunning themselves on some ultra-secure private tropical island.

And this poses a problem for the music magazines - if nobody is doing anything entertaining, how do we fill our pages? Fortunately, Spin magazine has a

If there's one thing we love here at hecklerspray, it's flying a plane down a river pumping oil tankers so full of bullets that they explode, causing a major-league environmental hotspot that will last for generations.

River Raid is today's Game That Time Forgot, and that's precisely what the game involved. And, of all things, this vision of insane violence created by a woman.