Posts from September, 2006

Mornings are Creased, afternoons are Folded.

Folded:

• Girls of M&S – not FHM (classy ladies on an, admittedly rubbish, TV advert. Or we could just be getting old)
• Return of the Mack on E4 Music Uninterrupted (Mark Morrison bringing us [still] the biggest headpopper tune of the last 20 years. Puffy, take serious note. And get a Freeview box)
• Jamelia (we hate saying ‘so’ and ‘yummy mummy’, but she so is. Gorgeous)
• A Godfrey (one heck of a cocktail. Courvoisier and some other stuff. Buy at The Biltmore, or anywhere else you can find it)
• Neil Flynn as The Janitor in Scrubs (currently on E4, and quite possibly the funniest man alive for 25 minutes every week)

Creased:

• Theme song from Extras (not conducive with laughter of any kind)
• Sensationalist Richard Hammond media spin (usual death-bell ringing coverage from GMTV and the rest of their bouffant-haired friends)
• Giant Sign Language people on TV (why not just have subtitles? Surely if you can read sign language you can read words?)
• People who hang around outside apartments/office buildings smoking (…are really starting to look like vagrants. Go lung cancer, go lung cancer, go!)
• Blatant mobile phone advertising in music videos (so aimed at children it’s actually starting to look a little paedophilic)

Not so long ago, Kathryn Williams was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize with her album Little Black Numbers. But a few years have passed since then, and Kathryn Williams has made Leave To Remain - an album that surpasses Little Black Numbers for sheer aching loveliness in every possible way imaginable.

Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is an album that drips with restrained autumnal beauty, from the songwriting to the production to the crystal whisper of Kathryn Williams herself. We're loopy about Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams, can you tell?

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When you think about actors who could star in superhero movies, Robert Downey Jr probably doesn't figure too highly on the list. But films about superheroes that are wankered on booze most of the time? Why, Robert Downey Jr would be the perfect choice.

That's what Marvel figures, anyway - it's just announced that Robert Downey Jr will be taking the lead in its new Iron Man movie, a role which seems to involve being rich, drinking lots of alcohol and spending a great deal of time inside a cell. Ah, so now we see where Marvel is coming from…

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Forget the constant threat of World War III or imminent environmental collapse - you know that the planet is screwed when the band of the 33-year-old girl from What's Eating Gilbert Grape makes an album that rocks harder than a swarm of burly bikers at a wrestling match.

Four On The Floor is that album, and Juliette And The Licks is that band. Yes, Juliette as in Juliette Lewis from Cape Fear and Natural Born Killers. And, just to add to the demented brilliance of Four On The Floor by Juliette And The Licks, it looks like Juliette Lewis has taken up rocking out while dressed up like a red indian now.

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Jay-Z has been away for a while, so he needs to prove to all his old fans that he's still got the magic that made him such a draw all that time ago - and for some reason he needs the help of Gwyneth Paltrow to do this.

Last night Jay-Z performed a special concert at the Albert Hall ahead of the release of his new, retirement-shattering album Kingdom Come. And knowing he needed to give his fans something special to remember him by, he got Gwyneth Paltrow - the skinny girl from Shakespeare In Love - to sing a duet with him onstage. Forget that story yesterday about Screech from Saved By The Bell wiping his shitty fingers over a girl's face; this is just about the most horrific thing we've ever heard all week.

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Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan is already being frothed about so much by wild-eyed movie critics that we get the feeling it can't live up to all the hype, but at least Borat's trying.

Borat - or Sacha Baron Cohen, as his Mum and former co-star Natasha Kaplinsky probably call him - yesterday attempted to get into the White House to meet George Bush, the day before he started negotiations with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, to invite him to a screening of the Borat movie. Weirdly enough Borat wasn't allowed into the White House, probably because George Bush is more of a Dirty Sanchez fan.

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For a young woman, Scarlett Johansson has played all kinds of roles, from the girl with big boobs in Lost In Translation to the girl with big boobs in The Island to the girl with big boobs in those last two rubbish Woody Allen films.

But even this incredible range of roles isn't enough for Scarlett Johansson. Perhaps knowing that the quickest way to Oscar glory - apart from playing a singer who's just died - is to play a member of the British royal family, Scarlett Johansson has just signed up to play Mary Queen Of Scots in a new movie that focuses on the reasons why her cousin Elizabeth I ordered her execution. Now that Scarlett Johansson is in the movie, we can expect that reason to be jealousy about her excellent breasts.

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Anyone who's ever owned a hamster will know first hand the pleasure that comes from rolling a hamsterball down the stairs, right? Really? You actually did that? Sicko.

Harry The Hamster 3 puts you in the place of your ball-trapped hamster, although with less childlike malice than you inflicted upon yours. In Harry The Hamster 3, it's your job to roll around a large garden as fast as you can, jumping on and crushing all manner of other wildlife that are out to get you, like frogs, spiders and zombie gnomes. For a kid's game, Harry The Hamster 3 is unusually difficult - you have to time your jumps perfectly or risk getting killed by the baddies - but the graphics are clean and smooth, and the harrowingly lifelike crunch that you hear when you crush a spider in the game will have you returning to Harry The Hamster 3 just as much as we have.

Play Harry The Hamster 3 now

In the olden days, there weren’t many events that cropped up once a year. It was just your bog standard happy-go-lucky religious festivals like Christmas and Easter. Merry times indeed. 

Slowly but surely however, more and more events have crept into the calendar. Many - gulp - charity events. In the beginning it was all about Children In Need and Red Nose Day, where a few tin-post celebrities and naff presenters will come together in a TV studio and make us all feel bad about the suffering of others just so they can rob us of our beer money for a night. Or possibly even two if they can pull the right heart strings. Unbeknown to us generous folks here at hecklerspray where we love to give as well as receive, some dating website is offering the chance to give you - yes you - a chance to win a date with a hot celebrity for something called National Dating Day. Well we say 'win', what we actually mean is the chance to bid for somebody in an auction. It’s like daylight prostitution!

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You know, certain people in the hecklerspray office aren't particularly big in stature.

This can annoy us occasionally - until we remember that certain people in the world have genuine problems, like starving or dying and stuff. Then we just forget all about it and go back to stalking Lindsay Lohan instead.

But certain short people are just downright inconsolable. Like these American fellas - the Short Persons Support society, who believe that being a bit of a dwarf-arse can cause all of sort of problems in life. They're particularly annoyed about short people being 'made to look like fools' in national television commercials (Holiday Inn are a special offender in this case).

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