In 24, Jack Bauer has managed to successfully battle presidential assassinations, nuclear bombs and wild cougars over the years – but latter seasons have left audiences less than gripped.

Season 7 sets to bring back what made the show unmissable – and it’s the best season so far.

If you are unfamiliar with 24, then there isn’t too much to catch up on. We have an ex-CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) member named Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) shouting, punching, torturing and nipple-pinching his way to the truth in a long line of national disasters.

This season actually rounds Jack off into a conflicted hero, taking breaks between all that shouting and fighting to reflect on his controversial efforts. Shining a light on these ways is the FBI, with whom Jack is working. He partners up with Agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching) and the two make a good cop/ bad cop/ melodramatic self-reflective cop partnership. In fact, the series takes a refreshing look at Jack’s battle with his inner demons, making for a more character-driven show than previous seasons.

That doesn’t detract from the action, though. Jack is soon confronted by his previously dead colleague who has taken a buzz cut and a lesson in villainous snarling. Suffice to say that it’s an exciting start and one that sets us up for an unrelenting day.

The pace of the season becomes breathless. Constant twists and turns – sometimes bordering on the absurd – prevent lags, packing in a video store full of thriller-like plotlines and set-pieces into each 45-minute episode. The show does demand some suspension of disbelief, as the trail of deceit begins to run so long that it starts to loop back round on itself. Although a negative point, it can also be positive – it contributes to the exhilarating and action-packed season, and stops it becoming complacent.

Swapping the LA setting of previous outings for Washington DC also helps. This gives the banter between the president and Bauer a greater sense of urgency as the White House becomes part of the landscape being targeted. It also helps to maintain relationships between the politicians, FBI and Jack  – this show has always been as much about the bureaucrats as it has popping caps.

This is a deeper story than before, constantly evolving. After one piece of the puzzle falls into place, another ten pieces appear. But that’s why we love it. This season stands out – not just for being the most action-packed and narratively labyrinthine, but for the effort put into the characters. Bauer has always been a hero, a patriot wearing the flag, but this season takes the premise we know and explores the conflicted morality of a man facing the frontline.

Invigorating, refreshing and unmissable, Bauer is back with the best 24 hours you’ll ever spend with him.

24 Season 7 is out on DVD and Blu-ray now. DVD & Blu-ray Special Features include 14 Deleted Scenes, UK created featurette – ‘24 in 24’ (not on US version) behind the scenes footage, production details and 12 Audio Commentaries.

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If you like watching episodes of 24 on DVD as much as we do then you probably haven’t seen daylight in a while.

And also, good news! Season 7 of 24 is released on October 19, and to mark this momentous occasion we’ve got five DVD boxsets to give away. That’s a whole day of shouting, explosions and torture to look forward to. And before you get all “Well actually it’s only 18 hours without commercials” on us, we’re counting the DVD special features as well, which are so good you’ll want to watch them for six hours. Probably.

The competition question is after the jump. God, we love 24…

To win one of the five 24 season 7 DVD boxsets we’re giving away, all you need to do is watch the season’s trailer below and answer a simple question:

QUESTION: How badly do you wish you were Jack Bauer?

To stand a chance of winning, email your answer and a contact address to Hello[at]hecklerspray.com with the subject line ‘So badly I just farted‘. The competition closes at midnight on October 19 when the winner will be chosen at random. UK readers only please.

24 Season 7 is out on DVD and Blu-ray now. DVD & Blu-ray Special Features include 14 Deleted Scenes, UK created featurette – ‘24 in 24’ (not on US version) behind the scenes footage, production details and 12 Audio Commentaries.

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Kiefer Sutherland isn’t Jack Bauer. Hard to believe, we know, but they’re different in just about every way.

Jack Bauer, for instance, breaks the law in all sorts of spectacular ways to save America from terrorists then gets pardoned by the president afterwards. Kiefer Sutherland, on the other hand, commits petty crimes to save 1980s actresses then gets charged afterwards.

Kiefer Sutherland has been charged with minor assault following his alleged headbutting incident this week. Sad – we wanted to see how far he’d take this hobby. Maybe he’d end up shoplifting a Chunky Kit Kat for Molly Ringwald or something.

At least now we all know where the eighth season of 24 will be set – the studio of America’s Next Top Model. It makes so much sense – Kiefer Sutherland wouldn’t have to fake his rage for the fashion industry, plus we get the impression that the sight of Tyra Banks tied to a chair getting her kneecaps shattered while electrodes dangle from her nipples might be something of a ratings winner.

That’s provided that Kiefer Sutherland’s intense hatred of fashion designers doesn’t land him in jail for the rest of his life, of course – after allegedly headbutting Jack McCollough at a party to protect the honour of Brooke Shields this week, his future looks uncertain. Especially now that he’s been charged with assault, as Reuters reports:

Actor Kiefer Sutherland turned himself into police on Thursday and was arrested and charged with assault for headbutting another man at a swank party in New York City. The star of the hit television show “24″ was questioned by police at a station in the Manhattan neighborhood of Soho and faces a minor assault charge, according to a police spokeswoman.

Normally a charge of minor assault wouldn’t carry much of a punishment, but don’t forget this is Kiefer Sutherland we’re talking about – he’s previously been arrested so many times that headbutting McCollough probably violates the terms of about 75 different probations. This basically leaves a judge with two options. If Kiefer Sutherland is convicted then he can either be sent to prison immediately or let out onto the street where he’ll get shitfaced within a couple of minutes, start a fight with his own reflection, get rearrested and then go to prison.

But still, at least now he’s been charged, Kiefer Sutherland has set himself up for one of the greatest courtroom battles in recent history. It’s going to be amazing – Kiefer will get to do his gritty “I did what I did because I needed to” shtick, Jack McCollough will get to fake terror every time that Kiefer so much as flinches – plus all the witnesses were at a party with Brooke Shields and Kiefer Sutherland, so they’re bound to be a bunch of terrifically obnoxious nimrods.

A word of advice, though, Kiefer – tell the court that you had to headbutt Jack McCollough yourself because if Brooke Shields tried it she’d have suffocated him with her giant eyebrows and killed him. If anything, you were helping him out.

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As the star of 24, Kiefer Sutherland knows a bit about the law. For instance, it’s completely OK to suffocate your brother to death.

Also, the good guys are always bad, and the bad guys are always good. And never trust the brown ones. So when Kiefer Sutherland allegedly headbutted Jack McCollough on Tuesday, it made him a bad guy. But then again, Kiefer Sutherland was protecting the honour of Brooke Shields – so he’s a good guy.

Then again, he’ll probably spend a few more months in jail for it. So he’s bad. Or good. Oh, let’s just settle on depressing.

Look, we know the 1980s are back in fashion and all, but let’s not take the piss, eh? Strutting around in ironically-coloured Wayfarers is one thing, but having to read a news story about Kiefer Sutherland headbutting someone in a fight over Brooke Shields seems a little bit like overkill. From there it’s only a short skip to sniffing glue while critically evaluating the Masters Of The Universe film to the sound of Sydney Youngblood and, trust us, that’s not something you’d want to do.

But anyway, that’s what apparently happened. In a non-ironic way, Kiefer Sutherland allegedly headbutted a fashion designer in the face because he didn’t show the proper courtesy to Brooke Shields. And now he’s probably going back to jail for it.

You may remember that Kiefer Sutherland spent Christmas 2007 in jail after he was arrested for DUI. The sentence was so harsh because his DUI arrest violated the probation he was put on after he was arrested for DUI in 2004. After his jail sentence, Kiefer was place on a new five-year probation. And apparently, as People reports, headbutting a man in the face at a party while possibly drunk might just violate the terms of that probation, too:

“If Sutherland’s found in violation of probation for battery, and if he was intoxicated at the time, he could very well be sentenced to another 48 days or more,” says Steve Sitkoff, an L.A. criminal defense attorney not involved with the case. The 24 star, who allegedly headbutted a fashion designer at a party early Tuesday, will surrender to New York authorities to face a third-degree assault charge.

Obviously another jail sentence for Kiefer Sutherland would bugger 24 up something rotten. There probably won’t be another conveniently-timed writers’ strike to delay a new season this time. So maybe it’s time the producers thought of a plan-B workaround. Say, for instance, the president of America gets arrested for shoplifting a frozen chicken, and Jack Bauer has to headbutt an effeminate man in the face to go to jail to protect her. Or Kim Bauer comes back again and fights the forces of evil on her dad’s behalf. In a skimpy top. In the rain. In slow motion. Yes, that would work.

But whatever happens to Kiefer Sutherland, the moral of the story is clear – never help Brooke Shields. Never. You’ll go to prison if you do. Don’t be fooled by those gigantic eyebrows or the way she’s not as good as she thinks she is at anything. You must never help Brooke Shields. Not even if she falls over in front of hundreds of stampeding hippos. Especially not then.

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9 - Hands down, this is the geekiest headline we’ve ever read. We couldn’t even make it to the actual text – Dvice

8 - Want to read an article about a man who repairs sex dolls for a living? yes you do. Yes you DO – men.style

7 - Here’s how Apple could make the iPhone less rubbish – Engadget

6 - Remember Tay Zonday? Well he’s BACK! – YouTube

5 - Controversial games that are the the precise scientific opposite of controversial – Gamesradar

4 - Ooh, someone doesn’t like the new season of 24 – Premiere

3 - Man from Nirvana no good at playing Nirvana songs on Rock Band 2 – Seattleweekly

2 - And now, the most inevitable news you will ever hear – Telegraph

1 – The five funniest Sopranos episodes. Ah, we miss The Sopranos – Comedycentral

But you know what ruined Quantum Of Solace for other people? All the technical and factual mistakes that were littered throughout the film. In fact, movie mistake spotter Jon Sandys has listed all the mistakes in Quantum Of Solace and emailed them to us. So, after the jump, our favourite of the 24 Quantum Of Solace mistakes.

By which we were obviously referring to the 24 individual mistakes that can be found in Quantum Of Solace. Not the one big mistake where everyone working on Quantum Of Solace seemed to think they were making an episode of 24. Although that should be one of them. OK, there are 25 mistakes.

It doesn’t matter that Quantum Of Solace was so pointlessly action-packed that it was a giant urinating robot away from being Transformers. It doesn’t matter that the Bond baddie was just a bloke with a pond. It doesn’t even matter that halfway through it we started to bewilderingly get nostalgic about invisible cars, because Quantum Of Solace is a box office sensation.

And, never ones to muddle with a successful formula, that means that producers will continue making James Bond more and more thuggishly aggressive while the movie titles get more and more pretentious until, in 2013, we’ll be presented with a 007 movie called Polyodontidae Of Thalassography that consists of nothing but two hours of Daniel Craig kicking a burning toddler in the testicles.

So, as you may have guessed, Quantum Of Solace isn’t a perfect movie. But we hadn’t realised how imperfect it was. Luckily Jon Sandys of Moviemistakes.com has gone through Quantum Of Solace in forensic detail and has picked out all 24 mistakes found in the film. These mistakes include:

*At the end of “Casino Royale,” Bond is wearing a three-piece suit. Although “Quantum of Solace” begins just minutes later, Bond is wearing a completely different, two-piece, suit.

*When Bond is changing his clothes in the bathroom, he puts them in the sink where there is a movement sensor, which should have made the water turn on and soak all the clothes in the sink.

*In the opening car chase, Bond’s Aston Martin switches from silver to black.

*When Agent Fields meets Bond & Mathis at the airport in La Paz, Bolivia, she claims to be from the Consulate. As a capital city La Paz actually has an Embassy, whereas Consulates are generally found in secondary cities.

*In the opening car chase, the Aston Martin and Alfa Romeo go round a pack of cars stuck in traffic. When the policeman uses his radio, you can see a blue Vauxhall Corsa in the background. You can see the badge on it and it is actually a Vauxhall Corsa with Italian number-plates, which is incorrect as Vauxhall cars are branded as Opel in continental Europe.

*During the airborne chase, to escape certain demise in the canyon, Bond applied full power to both engines using the prop control levers (blue) and not the throttle set on the left of central quadrant.

In retrospect, we can see that Sandys has a point – the real reason we didn’t like Quantum Of Solace is because there aren’t even any Vauxhall Corsas in Italy. Stupid film.

Although a majestically pedantic and entertaining read, the Quantum Of Solace list isn’t exhaustive by any means. Here are a few that were omitted from the big Moviemistakes list:

*In one scene, James Bond can be seen wearing a cardigan. This is a mistake for about a million reason.

*The bit where the baddie lived in a hollowed-out volcano, killed people by dropping them into a shark tank  or was actually genuinely menacing had been completely edited out, rendering the movie largely unintelligible.

*There was a slight factual error at the start of the movie. The title of the film was displayed as Quantum Of Solace, instead of the more factually-correct title – The Bourne Ultimatum.

Read more:

Quantum Of Solace Mistake – Moviemistakes

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That’s right, we’re talking about Jack Bauer. And fortunately our prayers have been heeded – Fox has announced the exact airdate that the new season of 24 will return to our screens. Following the Africa-set TV movie prequel being broadcast on November 23, the two-day, four-hour 24 season premiere has been scheduled for January 11 and 12.

That genuinely can’t come fast enough for us – 24 has been off our screens for so long now that, and we’re slightly ashamed to admit this, last time we saw a man of Middle Eastern descent, we weren’t immediately gripped by a kneejerk urge to tie him to a chair, submerge his feet into a bucket of water and then electrocute him while screaming at him to tell us the nuclear disarmament codes. Jack Bauer would be so ashamed of us.

24 stands at something of a crossroads ahead of its seventh season. Thanks to the writer’s strike and Kiefer Sutherland’s decision to go on a drunken joyride to jail, there have been no new episodes of 24 since the middle of 2007.

Since then the world has become a slightly different place – and not for the better as far as 24 is concerned. Not only does the trailer for the new 24 prequel movie look slightly rubbish, but 24’s stock in trade – torture – has become so passe that even Christopher Hitchens is happy to have a go at it.

That means that if 24 wants to reverse its slow slide into silly self-parody and still remain the edge-of-your-seat thriller that its capable of being, it really needs to knock its four-hour season premiere out of the park. Will it? We’ll find out on January 11, as E! Online reports:

[Fox] today announced that Kiefer Sutherland and his terrorism-fighting costars will return to kick off their new run with a two-night, four-hour premiere Jan. 11 and 12. The fourth hour of the premiere will mark the series’ milestone 150th episode. The season will run without interruption through to May.

It’s no secret that season seven of 24 will revolve around Jack Bauer’s old colleague Tony Almeida coming back from the dead seeking revenge. Hopefully that’ll be a theme of the new season, because that way we can also bring back Nina, George Mason, the funny fat bloke who got gassed in CTU during season five and Frodo Baggins‘ chum Sam.

But even if 24 did suddenly become a weird zombie nostalgia show, it’d still face two insurmountable challenges. Firstly, since 24 was in its heyday, people aren’t as scared of terrorism as they were. These days it’s the economy that gives everyone nightmares.

Secondly, it looks as if Barack Obama will be less of a hardline president that George Bush was, and as such the ’shoot first, ask questions later’ interrogation style of Jack Bauer runs the risk of looking extremely outdated incredibly soon.

There’s only one way around this – in the seventh season of 24, Jack Bauer will have to abandon fighting threats to national security in order to stand in line at a bank waiting to reapply for a mortgage. But it’d be OK if he did that, because the newly-reengaged UN would be happy to handle terrorist threats in an open, friendly and bureaucratic manner by itself.

Admit it, you’d watch that.

We’ve got a few months left before the seventh season of 24 kicks off, but we’ve just been handed the very first sliver of a hint of a taste of what it’ll be like – a work print of the trailer for the Africa-set 24 season seven preview, 24: Exile.

So what’s it like? Is 24 back to its logic-defying, pedal-to-the-metal best? Or does it look like it’ll be another one of those seasons where Jack Bauer kicks his heroin addiction in 45 minutes and people get terrorised by mountain lions a lot? We’ve got the 24 preview trailer after the jump for you to make up your own mind, but here’s a hint – it’s not great.

You know that a show’s reached its absolute nadir when it shows a nuclear bomb going off in a major city at breakfast and everyone’s forgotten about it by lunchtime, don’t you? Or when the big baddie is the farmer out of Babe leaping around an oil rig like a marionette puppet from a German expressionist horror film.

Not coincidentally, the last season of 24 had both of those, plus a nurse from Scrubs being blinded on a beach by a bomb. It was rubbish. And it hasn’t helped that the new season of 24 has been so long in the waiting – held back by writers’ strikes and jail sentences – that anything less than total magnificence will be greeted with abuse from all quarters.

The new season of 24 needs to work. Not just for us, but for Kiefer Sutherland too – look at the trailer for his new movie Mirrors. It’s a creepy Asian-style horror film, but Kiefer’s wedged so tightly into the Jack Bauer groove that you get the feeling he’ll be tying the mirror-ghouls to a chair, sitting them in a bucket of water and electrocuting them with torn-out wires from a standard lamp until they tell him where the bomb is by the third act.

So, with that in mind, here’s the work print of the preview trailer for 24’s season seven preview – the two-hour 24: Exile. Although it’s just a work print, and shouldn’t be seen as a precise indication of what’s to come, we’ve still managed to glean a handful of tasty plot secrets from it. For instance:

*Season seven of 24 is set in a future where a woman can’t just be elected as president of America, but a woman who appears to be suffering from some sort of alarming face-bloat that’s possibly down to a severe food allergy. That’s progress.

*Jack Bauer wanted to go on holiday to escape his troubles, so he went to a volatile African country torn apart by civil war. From this we can deduce that Jack Bauer is an idiot and probably would have been better off going to the Isle Of Wight or something.

*Jack Bauer gets his face burnt off by a knife – a serious injury that we’re guessing will completely heal in about an hour and a half.

*Jack Bauer shoots a little boy in the face! Probably!

*Now that he’s ripped off Rambo as well as Die Hard, we can look forward to season eight of 24 where Jack Bauer rips off the last third of the Planet Hollywood action hero trio and becomes a destruction-fixated robot from the future. Or a pregnant man. But definitely one of those things.

OK, enough teasing – here’s the real 24 trailer…

So, what do you think? We’d love to know where you stand on this. Are we just setting ourselves up for disappointment by being so excited by the prospect of new 24? We are, aren’t we? We obviously are. It’s going to be rubbish. Jesus, we’re idiots.

First, hit show 24 becomes ‘26’. Then it casts Jon Voight as a terrorist. The 69-year-old Oscar-winning actor was recently signed on to be Jack Bauer’s nemesis for the upcoming seventh series.

After the shambles of the sixth series, 24 have pulled out the chequebook in an attempt to win back falling viewing figures.

But don’t you think casting Angelina Jolie’s frail father as the super villain is going a little too far – even by 24’s ridiculous standards.

Now, we know they have used Hollywood A-listers before. But at least Dennis Hopper is a nutter. He is not the kind of guy you want to piss about with, while Jon Voight is the kind of kindly gentleman you buy sweets from at the local cornershop.

Just think about it: Jon Voight, a terrorist? Doesn’t quite fit, does it? I mean, what is Hollywood playing at?

They have spent years building up a handy photo-fit of what a terrorist looks like, just so we can point them out in the street – and then they pull a stunt like this.

They are just messing with our minds. Next they’ll be saying he’s American, doesn’t have an AK47 and doesn’t wear a turban.

Don’t get us wrong, we like Jon Voight. Like many boys and girls, we bawled our eyes out to the end of The Champ, even if the kid was really annoying in it.

But is he really a credible threat to Jack Bauer? What’s he going to do? Cough on him? Bore him to death talking about the 60s?

Anyway, Jon Voight will be introduced during 24’s two-hour Season 7 prequel alongside Robert Carlyle due to be aired in November 23.

He will also feature heavily in the latter part of the series, which is expected to start at the beginning of next year. Not really a shock, seeing though he is the bad guy.

Voight said:

“I am thrilled and excited about being invited to be part of my favourite show 24. I’m hoping to bring my very best to it.”

First of all, glad he’s bringing his best to it. There was us thinking he would just turn up to go through the motions.

Secondly, two-hour sequel!? Are we the only ones annoyed by this? The whole premise of 24 is that it’s set in 24 hours – not 26!!!

I know the sixth series was a bag of shit, but that is no reason to throw the whole format away.

The world truly is a scarier place these days.

Remember when main character Jack Bauer became hopelessly addicted to heroin and ended a series crying in utter self-loathing? Boy, that was a chuckle and a half. And that bit when a supermarket full of people were told that they were all going to die from a hideous new virus, and that the best way out was to swallow the cyanide pills that were being handed around? Fun, fun, fun.

Anyone who shares these sentiments may want to shed a tear, however, because it looks like – after seven-and-a-bit years of boss-killing, suspect-beheading, nuclear-bomb-crashing and whispering in a hushed grimace – 24 co-creator Joel Surnow reckons that he's taken the acting skills of Kiefer Sutherland roughly about as far as he can.

This isn't the first disaster to befall 24 of late. Season Six was generally seen as a letdown – far from the overblown, post-pub perfection of the earlier runs, the show was now beginning to recycle itself in the most boring of ways, and not even the fiery extermination of a sizeable chunk of Los Angeles could distract from this. Furthermore, the recent writers' strike has seen production grind to a halt – and if no-one's around to scribble down 34 "Dammit Chloe"s an hour, then there ain't no televisual realtime fun to be had.

Still. Fox TV have taken the whole thing well:

"Joel created one of the landmark series of this decade in 24 and his contribution to its creative excellence over the years has been immeasurable. While he leaves the show in the incredibly capable hands of the talented Howard Gordon, his input will always be welcome."

The reason they're being so civil? Obvious – with the main creative force behind the show gone, the networks can now finally make the version of 24 that they really want to see. So expect an all-new action packed season relaunch called 24: Extreme, in which Kiefer literally grows to 70 feet tall when angry and hisses out terrorist-baiting threats with such force that evil gangs in warehouses shiver the nation over.

We hope for his sake that Surnow didn't leave any killer plot ideas with the network, though. Now he's left, they're almost certain to be Fox property, and chances are he won't get a penny if they're implemented. And – trust us – that sort of creative theft can be annoying. Almost as annoying as if another high-profile Entertainment News site saw how well your 'betting odds' features were doing, and decided to nick it for themselves.

Tsk.

Read More:

Time Is Up for 24 Creator Joel Surnow – TV Guide

It's true – every female celebrity you can think of has announced a pregnancy in the last couple of weeks and now the trend's continuing with Mary Lynn Rajskub, 24's Chloe O'Brian, revealing that she's pregnant, too.

Of course, if real life was like 24 then Mary Lynn Rajskub would have to be pregnant for 6,480 episodes. But then if real life was like 24 then Mary Lynn Rajskub's baby would be an offensively stereotypical Muslim hellbent on trying to poison the world by pumping a deadly virus out of its mother's bumhole.

You might not have noticed it at the end of 24 season six – possibly because you were too busy shouting "What about the President? Is he dead?" or "A nuclear bomb went off 18 hours ago and you're staring at some rocks?!" or "I miss Michelle Dessler!" at the TV – but right near the end Chloe O'Brian announced that she was pregnant.

And now Mary Lynn Rajskub, the actress who plays Chloe O'Brian in 24, has announced that she's pregnant, too. Spooky, right? Almost as if women are naturally designed to conceive and give birth to babies, right? Anyway, E! Online reports:

The 24 star, who plays the now-pregnant computer whiz Chloe O'Brian, is expecting a baby with her personal trainer beau, Matthew Rolph, People reports. This will be the first child for both. The new addition is due toward the end of summer. "With the strike going on, I had to keep busy!" Rajskub, who got her start as a standup comic, told the magazine. "We are thrilled and couldn't be more excited." 

Ah yes, the writers' strike. While Kiefer Sutherland passed the time by going to jail, Mary Lynn Rajskub got to get knocked up instead. God knows how Bill Buchanan has been killing time. Trying to find more suits that exactly match the colour of his hair, probably.

It's such a shame that the writers' strike is continuing, because with Mary Lynn Rajskub pregnant and Chloe O'Brian pregnant, there'd have been no need for fake stomachs or any other prosthetics during filming. True, the time it takes to shoot an episode would make it look as if Chloe's stomach was being inflated by a maniac with a footpump, but that'd be no less realistic than anything that happened during the last season of 24.

Still, though, congratulations to Mary Lynn Rajskub and her boyfriend. At least this way when Jennifer and Angelina and Gwen and Jessica and Halle and Nicole all have happy little babies running round being nice to each other in a few months, Mary Lynn Rajskub's tot can provide the stroppy, eye-rolling, socially-awkward counterbalance.

Read more:

24's Rajskub Counts Down to Motherhood - E! Online 

That's because Beanie Sigel has been sentenced to jail for repeated parole violations. And we're not talking some light-touch 90-minute jail sentence like Lindsay Lohan or Nicole Richie got, either – Beanie Sigel is going downtown bigtime, for a full backbreaking 24 hours.

Hopefully jail will do the trick for Beanie Sigel, and we're expecting him to come out older and wiser. 24 hours older and 24 hours wiser, to be precise.

Beanie Sigel has been in some bad places in his life – the man lives in Philadelphia, for God's sake, a town named after cheese – as evidenced in some of his more hard-hitting hip-hop bangers like Oh Daddy and bakery/dairy unification anthem Bread & Butter. So it's not surprising that, in his time, Beanie Sigel has found himself in trouble for this and that.

Famously Beanie Sigel was shot in the shoulder two years ago, although nobody knows why because he decided to communicate with police by singing about poo-handling alone. But that's just the tip of a slightly depressing iceberg – Beanie Sigel also spent a year in jail for attempted murder before he was aquitted and went to jail again for not paying his child support on time.

And now Beanie Sigel is going to jail again, but this time is deserved, because Beanie Sigel has done possibly the most evil thing a man can do – he went to Atlantic City.

As much as going to Atlantic City is a crime worthy of jail in itself, the truth is that the trip violated his probation for all of the above, especially since he's claimed to have met a known felon there. And that's why a judge yesterday sent him to jail. For a day. According to CNN:

U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick ordered Sigel to spend a day in prison and extended his probation by 18 months, including [a six-month] halfway house stint. During those six months, Sigel can pursue his work in Philadelphia by day but cannot travel to promote his latest album, "The Solution." The 33-year-old rapper (real name: Dwight Grant) has had a string of legal problems in recent years but insists he is a changed man. "I'm human, but I'm working on my mistakes," he told Surrick. "I do believe that other people do get a chance to go back into society and do the work that they do."

And that's precisely what Beanie Sigel is doing – he's toured schools lecturing about responsible behaviour, he's made videos all about the dangers of getting shot then writing a song about it that mainly deals with pooing – or something – and, bizarrely, he's also staged an anti-violence march with Bill Cosby.

All of that convinced the judge to just give Beanie Sigel a day in jail instead of the nine months that he could have. But still, a day in jail for going to a cold, grimy casino town sounds about fair. After all, Nicole Ritchie got 82 minutes in jail for driving into oncoming full-speed motorway vehicles on drugs, and going to Atlantic City is roughly 17 times more serious than that, so we'd say it was a fair call.

Read more:

Beanie Sigel sentenced to 1 day in jail - CNN