And if you went to the reunion concert, at some point you more than likely woke up in the trunk of a car next to a spare tire and several bloodied police batons. Had you your senses about you, you’d have noticed there were 193 other unconscious people crammed in there with you – all of them wearing rainbowy shirts.

That’s because local police really cracked down at the show – enough so to confiscate over $1,000,000 in illegal drugs, among other things.

If for some reason you decided to attend the recent Hampton, VA Phish concert dressed like a giant doobie – heaven help you. Not only would your lame, all-day joke be hotter and sweatier than you ever imagined, but you’d have a devil of a time fitting into the typical port-a-johns as well.

Not so funny now, is it? Not with urine on your legs it isn’t! Your experience would get even worse. Imagine it – there you are gaily playing hacky sack with all of your unshaven, dreadlocked, itchy friends – and you’re having the game of your life. The sack’s been passed to you three times and you haven’t even had to apologise to anybody yet – when suddenly you get tackled and dragged off by your big fuzzy yellow boots.

You don’t know where you’re going yet – and you’re scared. The next thing you know you’re getting shaken upside down by three men in blue cop uniforms. Everything falls out of your pockets – including all your weed, your pot, your dope, your grass, your reefer, your herb, your Mary Jane, your Aunt Mary, your gangster, your boom, your ganja, your skunk, your kif, your buds, your nuggets, your blaze, your whacky tobaccy, your hay, your rope, your stinkweed – and worst of all – your pocket picture of the blessed Mother Theresa who watches over you while you sleep.

And you know what happens next – the cops take it all from you. No, really they do. As the Washington Post so delicately explains things:

“Police said Monday they confiscated about $1.2 million in illegal drugs and more than $68,000 in cash from concertgoers. Authorities also arrested 194 Phish fans during the three-night celebration of the band’s return to the stage after a nearly five-year absence. Most of the arrests were for drug possession, use and distribution, police said.”

The cops sure saw them coming, eh? And do you know where that confiscated money will go? Probably to police cruisers or something. And do you know where the drugs will go? Probably also to police cruisers once its been properly sold and what not.

Ah, who are we kidding? That would be completely unethical. Although the local police force couldn’t in good conscience sell drugs to raise patrol car money, they probably could shape some of the moistened cocaine into something fast with wheels.

Now just imagine seeing that flashing in the rear view.

We know – terrifying.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

It’s a dead dog with a sawn-open chest screaming at a man who’s having a nosebleed in the voice of David Mitchell from Peep Show. Seriously, point us towards the nearest monastery. We’ll be fine there.

That’s right, it’s time for another installment of our four-billion-part series ‘Amy Winehouse Goes To Hospital For Something That’s Probably Got Something To Do With Drugs.’ In this edition, Amy Winehouse goes to hospital for something that’s probably got something to do with drugs.

Apparently Amy Winehouse was admitted to a clinic on Sunday after reacting badly to medication, and she’s been kept there to undergo tests. Sadly, those tests include the ‘Here’s a picture of a fan, do you sincerely thank them for their support or punch them in the face?’ test and the ‘Is it better to look like a human being or a cave drawing of a rampaging lizardman?’ test, so it looks like Amy will remain in hospital for the foreseeable.

You know how jokers always say that planes should be made out of the same material as their black box recorders? They’re wrong. If planes want to be completely indestructible, they should be made of bits of Amy Winehouse.

True, it’d make air travel noisier, more erratic and far more terrifying – plus all the planes would be so smelly and dirty-looking that everyone would have to coat their seats with newspaper first so as not to catch any sort of horrible disease, but the planes would be indestructible.

And that’s because Amy Winehouse is indestructible. Yes, she might look like an extra from a Popeye Variety Hour spoof of 28 Days Later, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you tried to keep up with Amy Winehouse’s lifestyle – the drug overdoses, the fistfights with strangers, the being married to a steaming wazzock – you’d be dead within a week.

Not Amy Winehouse, though. She’s still going strong. Well, not strong, obviously – Amy Winehouse is in hospital because some medication went crazy inside her body – but she’s still going. She’s barely going. Amy Winehouse is barely going. Reuters reports:

Singer Amy Winehouse is in hospital after reacting badly to medication, a spokesman said on Tuesday. The 25-year-old Grammy winner was admitted to a clinic after falling ill on Sunday and has been kept there for tests.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is – four months ago Amy Winehouse ended up in hospital for the exact same thing. And in four months’ time it’ll happen again. And again after that. Look, we’re no medical experts or anything, but if your medication keeps making you so ill that you have to keep going to hospital, maybe you should stop taking it. Or, you know switch to Tixylix. Amy Winehouse’s doctors are idiots.

But still, at least Amy Winehouse is in hospital being treated properly for her illness now, and the biggest danger while she’s in there will be withdrawal. No, not her withdrawal from drugs, silly – we’re talking about our withdrawal from seeing paparazzi photos of Amy Winehouse standing on her doorstep in newspapers every single day.

Honestly, if we don’t see a brand new picture of Amy Winehouse dressed up like Mumm-Ra’s concussed and scabby stepmother every single day, we don’t know what we’ll do. We might have to downgrade to looking at pictures of serious burns victims or something equally meek in comparison. Bleurgh.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Not completely – the day that photos of Suge Knight rolling around in his knickers are leaked to the internet is the day we cut out our eyes and, to our knowledge, Miley Cyrus has never driven around in a car allegedly punching a woman in the head – but in terms of ubiquity, the comparison just about holds up. Just about.

In fact, it’s this whole ‘allegedly punching women in the head while driving a car’ thing that’s brought Suge Knight to our attention again this time. Because now Suge Knight has been charged for the last time he supposedly beat up a women in a car. And since this time the charges also include a spot of beating up a woman in a car park with a knife in his hand, Suge Knight faces eight and a half years in jail. Oh well.

You know what makes our blood boil? People who walk around with small amounts of two different types of drugs in their pockets. Any bastard who does that should be immediately sent to jail for the best part of a decade. And as for people who think they can violently beat up women in broad daylight in a car park with a knife in their hand, well, that’s probably about 16 times less important than the drugs thing.

That’s not just our opinion, by the way – that’s the opinion of the American justice system as well. For instance, a few months ago increasingly desperate-looking rap mogul Suge Knight got arrested after he was apparently spotted driving through Las Vegas while punching a woman repeatedly in the head. When the woman escaped from the car, Suge Knight then continued beating her up while holding a knife.

And now Suge Knight has been charged. Mostly because it’s claimed he had small quantities of ecstasy and hydrocodone on him while he was allegedly thumping the life out of this woman. That part was cool because, you know, she probably deserved it. BBC News reports:

[Suge Knight] has been charged with two counts of drug possession and one of misdemeanour battery, according to papers filed in Las Vegas Justice Court. When arrested in August, police said Knight, 43, was found “violently beating” Melissa Isaac in a Las Vegas parking lot while holding a knife. If convicted, Knight could face up to four years in jail for each of the drugs charges, as well as six months for the assault charge.

So, in total, that’s an eight and a half year jail sentence he’s looking at. In retrospect, Suge Knight must be wishing that he’d punched four women in the head at knifepoint until they were hospitalised with no drugs in his pockets, because that way he’d have reduced his potential sentence by more than 75%. Hindsight’s a bitch, isn’t it.

However, lawyers for Suge Knight have claimed that Knight is not guilty of any of the charges, and they plan to fight them when the case goes to court next month. Personally we’re hoping that Suge Knight gets off without charge, because it’s going to be awfully hard for him to sue Kanye West from behind bars. Because in many ways, a prison sentence is nothing compared to the suffering that Suge Knight went through when he lost that earring at Kanye West’s party.

OK, not in many ways. In one way.

OK, not even in one way.

But now, possibly, Heather Locklear might just be starting to regret allegedly getting hammered on prescription medication and then parking her car in the middle of a state highway in floods of tears in September and then having a mugshot taken that makes her look a bit like a emotionally-sensitive panda being forced to watch the 2 Girls 1 Cup video.

And that’s because Heather Locklear has just been officially charged with misdemeanor driving under the influence of legally prescribed drugs. Who knew that Heather Locklear possibly had an addiction to prescription drugs? We’d have thought that her existing addictions – to making cacky TV shows and marrying idiots from crappy bands that only morons like – would have been enough for anyone.

We’ve always had a sneaking resentment of Ava, the daughter of Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora – not only does she have the genes to grow the worst haircut in history if she wanted to, but she’s going to have a hell of a Christmas.

This year her dad was arrested for DUI while she was in the car with him, and his mother’s just been charged with DUI after she was arrested for parking her car in the middle of a highway on suspicion of being off her chuff on prescription drugs. And that means Ava’s getting shitloads of presents.

True, depending on who she gets to spend Christmas day with, Ava might either have to put up with a recovering alcoholic barely in control of his own functions or a shivering depressed woman who might  constantly be on the verge of suicide but, hey, at least she’ll get an Xbox out of it. And isn’t that the most important thing?

Well, that’s unless Heather Locklear blows all her money on legal fees. Because, following her DUI arrest in September, Heather Locklear has now finally been charged with misdemeanor driving under the influence of legally prescribed drugs. The Los Angeles Times reports:

“There was no alcohol and no illegal narcotics in her system, only prescription medications, said Santa Barbara County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lee Carter. Locklear is scheduled to be arraigned Jan. 26. Attorney Blair Berk, who is representing the actress, declined to comment.

Heather Locklear may have been charged, but that isn’t to say that she’ll be heavily punished for it if she’s convicted. Since this is her first real offence, it’s likely that Heather will get away with just a fine and possibly a court-ordered rehab stint.

And that’s undoubtedly the best outcome. Not only is Heather Locklear the mother of a young child, but also if she’s sent to prison, then who’ll do all the crappy cameos in all the rubbish American sitcoms in her place?

Britney Spears, that’s who. Would you really be able to live with yourselves after an outcome like that, jury members? We didn’t think so.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

But that’s not going to happen. None of the Barenaked Ladies – not the one who looks like Kevin Bacon, not the one who looks like a weather-damaged Backstreet Boy, not even the schlubby fat one who seems to have dipped his chin in dogmuck – are going to jail. And especially not Steven Page, even though it looked like he might for a while.

After being arrested for cocaine possession back in July, Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies has been staring down a jail sentence. Yesterday, though, he avoided that fate – but only if he promises to go to rehab and stay clean for six months. Stupid courts, everyone knows that when you’re letting a Barenaked Lady avoid jail, you’re supposed to slip in a clause banning them from ever making any more bad music ever again. Idiots.

We’ve all got it so wrong. Look at any classic drug movie of the last 30 years – what have they been missing? That’s right, a soundtrack by Barenaked Ladies.

Imagine how much more powerful the final scene of Scarface would be if it was accompanied by the sound of Here Come The Geese, the final track from Barenaked Ladies’ new kid’s album Snacktime! And you can’t deny that the bit in Requiem For A Dream where that heroin addict’s arm gets all withered and diseased would have been about a thousand times better had there been a fat Canadian man in the background wittering on tweely about Chinese chickens. Don’t argue with this, it’s fact.

It’s fact because Barenaked Ladies are possibly the most rebellious drug-splattered rock and roll act of the last century. Or because Steven Page, the Barenaked Ladies singer who most resembled a tearful Hello Kitty-fixated Games Workshop Saturday boy, got arrested for cocaine possession in July. One or the other.

Despite initially trying to fight the charges, Steven Page has since decided to cut a deal with the courts whereby rather than going to jail for five and a half years, he just has to plead guilty to a lesser charge, stop taking drugs for six months and go to rehab instead, as E! Online reports:

“I’m grateful…for this opportunity to further prove myself as a productive and law-abiding member of society,” Page, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession, said in a prepared statement. “I look forward to the next six months as a period of healing and growth.”

Alright, steady on Steven. You’ve avoided a jail sentence, not won a reality show. Besides, if we were you we’d probably not concentrate on the growth part of the growth and healing so much, if you know what we mean. We mean you’re already quite fat.

Still, at least we know that these next six months will be an interesting time for the future of Barenaked Ladies. Because, Jesus, if One Week was their peak of their mind-expanded drug music, we can only guess that their clean-up album will be almost unimaginably shit.

But that’s no longer the case. Ryan O’Neal and his son Redmond have both been charged with methamphetamine possession and other drug offences stemming from time police offices searched their house and allegedly found both of them, um, in possession of methamphetamine.

However, if they’re found guilty of these charges, both Ryan O’Neal and his son will probably escape a prison sentence. That’s because if they go to jail, they’ll be less likely to stumble round their house shooting guns at each other and tying each other to banisters and hitting each other in the head with fireplace pokers. And only a monster would put an end to that sort of first-class entertainment.

We’ve never hidden our desire to be adopted by the O’Neal family. Those O’Neal kids got lucky breaks we never did, and we want in. We want to be roped into an orgy with Melanie Griffith and a hairdresser like Tatum O’Neal says she was. We want to be able to tie our brother to a banister and accidentally hit women in the head with a fireplace poker until our father fires a gun at us like Griffin O’Neal.

But most of all, we want to be like Redmond O’Neal. Redmond O’Neal has lived a charmed life – reaching professional successes like getting minor voiceover work in The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars and personal successes like being so close to his father that both of them were arrested for possession of methamphetamine at the same time last month. Oh, how we wish we could be an O’Neal.

But it looks like an adoption is out of the question, so we’re just going to have to live vicariously through them all instead. And now seems to be a pretty good time to do that, because Ryan and Redmond O’Neal have now been charged with felony methamphetamine possession, and they’ll go to court over it next month. Reuters reports:

Both men were charged with felony possession of methamphetamine, and the son was additionally charged with lesser counts of possessing drug paraphernalia and illegal possession of pepper spray. Felony drug possession carries a possible maximum sentence of three years in prison, but neither man is likely do any time behind bars if convicted.

It sounds like Ryan O’Neal will get off lightly if he’s convicted of these charges – since he’s a first-time offender he’ll most likely be sent on a drug rehabilitation program where he’ll either learn that a) taking drugs is bad or b) trying to hide some of your son’s drugs that you’ve never tried in your bedroom to stop him getting into any more trouble with the police is bad.

Having said that, though, maybe a drug conviction is just the thing to give Ryan O’Neal an edgy new audience. After all, look at Robert Downey Jr – after he went berserk on drugs he became one of the biggest stars in the world.

So who knows – this could lead Ryan O’Neal out of the creative cul-de-sac he’s found himself by accepting guest spots on hopeless shows like Miss Match. Play his cards right and he might even lock down that walk-on cameo on CSI: Miami he’s been desperate for. No, what are we saying, Ryan O’Neal needs to gradually work up to something as high profile as that. Babysteps, Ryan. Babysteps.

That’s the reason why everyone’s favourite episodes of The Brady Bunch is the one where Marcia Brady plumbs the squalid depths of addiction thanks to her years growing up in an abusive family, trading sex for drugs and being forced to deal with unwanted pregnancies. And that episode where Marcia Brady gets hammered on Quaaludes in Sammy Davis Jr’s house? Oh Marcia Marcia Marcia.

Wait, they’re not episodes of The Brady Bunch at all – they’re excerpts from Maureen McCormick’s new book, Here’s The Story: Surviving Marcia Brady And Finding My True Voice. You might think that Maureen McCormick has reached a new pitiful low by detailing her battles with depression and drug addiction in a book for cash, but you’re wrong – she’s nowhere near the pitiful low benchmark set by her participation in A Very Brady Christmas.

If we ever have children, the first thing we’re going to do is shove them into ill-fitting careers as childstars. Really, it’s the best thing for them. Admittedly they’ll grow up with a sort of low self-esteem Pavlovian conditioning that’ll equate attention with love, making them spiral off into the dark realms of joyless sex and drug addiction by their early teens. But they’ll thank us later when their careers dry up and they can get an easy second income by detailing what a shitty childhood they had in a series of books.

Honestly, everyone’s at it. Screech from Saved By The Bell has a book coming out, it can only be a matter of time before Gary Coleman releases a book called What’chu Talkin’ ‘Bout: Cries For Help From An Angry Midget and now Marcia Brady actress Maureen McCormick has had a go too.

Previously the two most exciting things to ever happen to anyone from The Brady Bunch were a) when Bobby lost control of his car in The Brady 500 and ended up paralysed from the waist down and b) when Florence Henderson lost her dog and got a bit sad about it.

But that’s nothing, because Maureen McCormick today publishes Here’s The Story: Surviving Marcia Brady And Finding My True Voice, her attempt to make all Brady Bunch fans so depressed and guilty by association that they end up losing all will to live. In the book, Maureen McCormick reveals fun little anecdotes about the time she developed a long-term addiction to cocaine and Quaaludes, the time she spent most of her adult life getting treated for depression, the times she debased herself by swapping sex for drugs and her hilarious unwanted pregnancy. E! Online has details:

“As a teenager, I had no idea that few people are everything they present to the outside world,” McCormick, now 52, writes in the book, excerpts of which were released today. “Yet there I was, hiding the reality of my life behind the unreal perfection of Marcia Brady. No one suspected the fear that gnawed at me even as I lent my voice to the chorus of Bradys singing ‘It’s a Sunshine Day.’”

Well that’s Christmas sorted, then. Everyone we know is getting a copy of Maureen McCormick’s book. That way, by Boxing Day teatime, everyone will be so inert and desolate that they won’t notice that we’ve eaten all the sausage rolls and have stolen their Xboxes. Result.

Let’s hope that Maureen McCormick’s book acts as a valuable warning to the new generation of tween stars rising up in America at the moment. The lesson it teaches is plain to see – make sure you do as many drugs and have as much meaningless sex as possible right now, otherwise you’ll never get that publishing deal in 30 years’ time.

Following Richie Sambora’s DUI arret in March, Ava’s mother Heather Locklear has gone and followed suit. According to reports, Heather Locklear was arrested for DUI on Saturday night after police found her parked on a motorway, blocking an entire lane.

However, it’s also been reported that alcohol wasn’t a factor in Heather Locklear’s arrest. That begs the question – what was Heather driving under the influence of? The best guess at the moment is that it was prescription medicine – but having seen Heather Locklear’s arrest mugshot we’re pretty sure that she was driving under the influence of either onions or the dark lord Satan.

But anyway, back to Heather Locklear’s daughter. She’s going to be in for a bumper Christmas, isn’t she? There’s nothing like parental guilt for amassing giant presents, and both her parents have plenty to be guilty about.

True, both Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora have been arrested for DUI within six months of each other, but they’ve both got their own individual reasons to feel stupid. Her father Richie Sambora should feel stupid because his daughter was in the car with him during his DUI arrest, and her mother Heather Locklear is probably feeling stupid because she appears to be in the middle of a giant mental and physical breakdown that she urgently needs to seek help for.

The signs have been there for a while, to be honest – not because of the way that Heather Locklear unconvincingly denied that story about her suicide attempt or her admission into rehab on the grounds of depression soon after, but because of the way that she let David Spade have it off with her. Urgh, David Spade.

And now all those warning signs seem to have come to fairly upsetting fruition – Heather Locklear has been arrested for DUI. But not any old DUI – potentially lethal DUI that appears to stem from the consumption of prescription medicine. The LA Times reports:

According to TMZ, alcohol was not a factor and the police believe she was on prescription medications. A resident reported Heather was “driving erratically” while pulling out of a parking lot. The California Highway Patrol say they found Locklear’s car parked on a state highway and it was blocking a lane.

After being tested for alcohol and drugs, Heather Locklear was released without bail. But, really, the arrest isn’t the important thing here – the important thing is the gradual deterioration of Heather Locklear’s condition. For God’s sake – things have got so bad for Heather that she’s now basically just copying Nicole Richie. That’s literally as bad as anything in this world can get.

Fingers crossed that Heather Locklear takes this arrest as her cue to seriously seek help to iron out her problems, for her daughter’s sake as much as her own. After all, would you really want a child of yours to be raised under the sole care of Richie Sambora from Bon Jovi? Of course you wouldn’t – the haircuts they’d receive alone would be enough to traumatise them permanently.

And, since Richard & Judy isn’t on the telly any more, that means that George Michael only has one way to respond to his arrest this weekend on suspicion of sitting on a toilet in Hampstead Heath trying to eat a chunk of crack the size of an owl, or whatever it was that he was arrested for.

In short, now that he’s been cautioned for his possession of crack, George Michael has issued an apology to all his fans promising that he’s going to try and overcome his drug problems once and for all. And a good thing too, because all the George Michael fans needed to calm down – otherwise they’d have done a really slapdash job of cutting everyone’s hair today.

When you think of George Michael, you don’t instantly think of crack cocaine. That’s because, as history has shown us in the form of Pete Doherty, the music that a crack addiction produces is a sort of off-kilter retro indie that sounds like a tranquilised cat being tortured until it makes a noise that sounds like the worst song The Kinks ever wrote.

And since George Michael deals solely in insipid, mimsying soul ballads that only hairdressers and nurses are allowed to like, nobody really made the connection.

But it seems as if the connection is there. On Friday George Michael was arrested on suspicion of the possession of a Class A drug though to be crack after a toilet attendant in Hampstead Heath saw him acting all peculiar and reported him to the police.

It’s not the first time that George Michael has found himself in trouble because of drugs – in the past he’s been found slumped at the wheel of his car with cannabis in his possession, smoking as much cannabis as possible on national television and taking loads of whatever drug it is that makes you feel up unemployed van drivers in a bush in front of the world’s press.

But crack? That’s a much more serious problem. As we all know, prolonged exposure to crack makes you grow a funny haircut and start screeching the word “BLAKE!” at intermittent points throughout your songs, and that would never do.

However, it seems as if this arrest has made George Michael come to his senses a little, because in his obligatory post-arrest apology to fans, George Michael has hinted that he might be about to attempt something of a clean-up:

“I want to apologise to my fans for screwing up again, and to promise them I’ll sort myself out. And to say sorry to everybody else, just for boring them.”

Sorry, but this sounds like the most insincere piece of tosh we’ve ever heard. Not because George Michael constantly apologises to his fans after these drug arrests and yet he never seems to do anything about it, but because George Michael obviously doesn’t care about how much he bores people. If he did, all copies of Jesus To A Child would currently be sealed inside a lead box, encased in concrete and buried 400ft underground where it couldn’t do anybody any more damage.

Still, at least an arrest on suspicion of crack possession is probably as bad as things will ever get for George Michael. And, on the bright side, he’s now got something to pin his confusing friendship with Geri Halliwell a few years ago on. After all, a fevered crack-dependent mind is just about the only logical reason why anyone would willingly want to go through a mental torture like that.

By that right, the O’Neal family don’t stand a chance. On Wednesday Ryan O’Neal and his son Redmond were both arrested for the possession of methamphetamine during a routine probation sweep of their house, and it’s taken Tatum O’Neal to bring some perspective to the matter.

Yes, Tatum O’Neal – the woman who’s kissed Michael Jackson with tongues, claims to have had an orgy with Melanie Griffith, lost custody of her kids because she was wasted on heroin all the time and was recently arrested for trying to buy crack in New York – has put the Ryan O’Neal drug arrest into perspective. In summary, that perspective is as follows: Yeesh.

On the basis that wisdom comes from experience, Tatum O’Neal must be one of the most insightful people on Earth. She won an Oscar when she was 11, had a drug-addict mother and an angry father who she apparently once caught with his bits stuck up Melanie Griffith. She claims to have been sexually abused as a child, had a volatile marriage to John McEnroe and was Michael Jackson’s first love. Tatum O’Neal isn’t just a woman – she’s the walking physical representation of The Jeremy Kyle Show.

So who’d be better placed to reflect upon this week’s drug arrest of Ryan O’Neal and his son than Ryan’s own daughter Tatum?

Now we know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that someone who wasn’t recently arrested for buying a big bag of crack would probably be better placed to discuss Ryan O’Neal’s arrest. But you’re wrong. It means that Tatum O’Neal doesn’t just share some genes with Ryan O’Neal, or a deep lingering bitterness about never managing to fulfill her professional potential, or questionable parenting skills, but also what might just be a fondness for illegal substances.

Honestly, Tatum O’Neal and Ryan O’Neal are so similar that talking to Tatum is just like talking to Ryan but without the constant feeling that you’re going to get a gun fired in your direction.

So, with that in mind, what’s Tatum O’Neal’s take on her dad and brother getting arrested on drug charges? People reports:

“I’m really worried about Redmond. I want them both to get better and get the help they need. [Addiction] runs in families. It’s a disease. I’m praying for both of them. I’m praying for my whole family. I hope Red will get treatment. That’s what he needs. There is hope for Redmond. He deserves to have the life a [young man] – going to school, hanging out with friends, getting a job. I wish the best for him.”

Actually, Tatum O’Neal is spot-on here. The last thing anyone needs is to see Redmond O’Neal destroy himself with drugs. Otherwise what are they going to do if Hollywood suddenly decides to make a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars? Recast the role of Squirt, the eighth male lead? Please.

Anyway, we always try to look on the positive, and that’s no different now. Maybe Tatum O’Neal taking the time to speak out about Ryan and Redmond O’Neal will mend the fractured relationships between father, son and daughter and they can all start afresh.

It’ll be hard, but if they all work really hard and try to talk they can get there. And if they can’t, we hear methamphetamine is really good for increased talkativeness and stuff. Maybe they should give that a go.

Because, without question, a TV show about the family life of Ryan O’Neal would hands-down be the best piece of television ever made. Especially if it explained why Ryan O’Neal and his son Redmond were yesterday both arrested on the felony charge of methamphetamine possession.

Wow. So Oscar-nominated actor Ryan O’Neal (father of Tatum O’Neal, the actress who was recently arrested for buying crack) and his son Redmond (who last year tied his half-brother to a staircase like a dog and hit his girlfriend in the head with a fireplace poker until Ryan O’Neal actually had to fire a gun at him to make him stop) might be on drugs. Who knew?

You know what? We’d give anything to be an O’Neal. Seriously, anything. When we were kids, our Dad would just take us out for fishing trips or bike rides or something equally dull. But not Ryan O’Neal. Ryan O’Neal’s a real dad, and here’s why:

*Ryan O’Neal taught his kids that the only way to deal with the grief of losing a pet is to go and buy crack and then pretend you didn’t know it was crack when you’re arrested for it.

*Ryan O’Neal knows that sometimes the only way you can stop your son from waving a fireplace poker around so haphazardly that he injures his own girlfriend’s head because you overreacted to the sight of him tethering your other son to a bannister like a dog to stop him buying drugs is to fire a gun at him.

*Ryan O’Neal knows that the family that gets shitfaced on methamphetamine together stays together. Allegedly.

How much of that did you do with us, Dad? None of it. Thanks Dad. Thanks a lot.

Anyway, Ryan O’Neal and his son Redmond O’Neal have both been arrested on the felony charge of narcotics possession. The New York Daily News reports:

Deputies found what is believed to be methamphetamine on them during a probation sweep of their Malibu home. Father and son were later released on $10,000 bail each. “Authorities found Redmond in possession of narcotics and later discovered the father, Ryan O’Neal, was also in possession of narcotics,” spokesman Steve Whitmore told the Daily News

Of course, the lion’s share of the blame for the arrest has to go to Redmond O’Neal. If he hadn’t got arrested earlier this year for going on a pre-dawn joyride through the streets of Malibu with all sorts of heroin and crystal meth in his possession then the probation squad would have never come a-knocking, leaving Ryan and Redmond to get as allegedly munted on methamphetamine as they like in the privacy of their own home.

Still, it doesn’t matter whose fault the arrest was, or even if Ryan O’Neal and Redmond O’Neal are guilty or innocent. What matters is that the justice system doesn’t punish either of them for this. Seriously. Imagine if this arrest shocked the O’Neals into cleaning up their act and behaving like responsible members of the public for once. This website would go under in seconds. Seconds. We beg of you, don’t let that happen.

But even someone as distinguished as Helen Mirren still has her problems – like all that cocaine she used to take, for example. That’s all in the past, though, because Helen Mirren has revealed exactly how she managed to quit her drug habit – it’s all thanks to notorious dead Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

There’s a reality show in this somewhere, we know it.

Drugs are everywhere these days – you can see it in our culture. Would the Teletubbies exist if it weren’t for the invention of mind-altering hallucinogens? Doubtful. Without drugs, what would Pete Doherty would be doing now? He’d probably a Saturday boy at Games Workshop or something. And who can forget that 1993 episode of Praise Be where Thora Hird gangbanged 24 members of a local church’s congregation because she was high on a mixture of cough medicine and glue? It’s tragic.

And that even goes for Dame Helen Mirren. You may know Helen Mirren as the lady who dressed up like the queen and won every award going last year, but beneath her staid exterior is the heartbeat of a desperate woman.

How desperate? Desperate enough to quite like cocaine and then sort of stop liking it about 25 years ago. Yes, that’s how desperate.

You see, Helen Mirren has been interviewed in this month’s GQ magazine and she decided to go for the whole ‘My Drug Hell’ angle – or at least she would have done if it wasn’t for those pesky Nazis screwing it up for her in the early 1980s.

Oh yes, the Nazis. We forgot to mention them, didn’t we? It’s probably best to let Helen Mirren explain this one herself:

“I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties. But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early 80s. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron. And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this fucking horrible man in South America.”

Helen Mirren is absolutely right about this. If you take drugs, you’re helping to fund the Nazi party. We’re sure the Nazis are grateful. In fact we’re pretty sure that they’re going to send Amy Winehouse a crystal decanter as a mark of their appreciation before long.

Anyway, if this is true and Klaus Barbie managed to wean Helen Mirren off cocaine, then he must be kicking himself from beyond the grave at the moment. Had he known about this earlier, he might have been able to get it together to become a motivational speaker. Imagine the publishing opportunities – Klaus Barbie Helps You Kick Drugs, Drop A Dress Size The Nazi Way, SS Stands For Super Selfconfidence….

Don’t laugh – you’d still feel less dirty buying those than you would with anything by Paul McKenna, wouldn’t you?

And now that the people of the world once again recognise Robert Downey Jr in the street – and now that he’s likely off the smack and charlie – people are more likely to listen to him. So it comes as a nice big pile of fun when the man gets all ranty, decides he disagrees with just about everyone in the world and that he hates The Dark Knight, because it makes him feel ‘dumb’.

For once we don’t have to add much to that – it’s simply what he said in an interview with Movie Hole.

Speaking about the plans for Iron Man 2, the Marvel-contracted actor decided that he shouldn’t just talk up some vague plot points, speculate on what may happen in the sequel and start the ball rolling on some early hype for the upcoming blockbuster.

No – he would also stick the knife in in a pretty spectacular fashion, especially when you consider this is mainstream Hollywood cinema, people are likely to see what he’s said and it will get widely reported.

Just for that, we have to give Robert Downey Jr a special hecklerspray ‘Well Done You Have Some Balls’ award that we’ve just invented.

Congratulations, Bobby – how does it feel to be the first ever recipient?

Granted, he may not have threatened his mum, died or had a serious car accident, but directly slagging off a competitor’s film is good enough for us. Talking to Movie Hole, Downey Jr let loose this barrage:

“My whole thing is that that I saw ‘The Dark Knight’. I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart…and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.’ I…still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so high brow and so f–king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? F–k DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

Clearly not a man worried about burning any bridges… oh, wait, he went on about that too, the little git:

“You know, you’re never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone. I think I’ve got a couple more. ‘I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it’ is my favourite phrase I’ve ever coined.”

Well, we’re not going to argue with that.

Maybe years of drug abuse, carrying weapons around and getting arrested every three-point-four minutes is the recipe to make the perfect movie star – one who can actually act pretty well and one who has both an actual set of balls and a lack of inner monologue, leaving them free to say what they actually mean.

Set the plan in motion, Hollywood berks – prescription smack and a shotgun for Lindsay Lohan, followed by four arrests in a week. Maybe that’ll make her fun again.

Read The Rest Of It Here:

Movie Hole

For once we decided not to leave ourselves open for getting something wrong and remembered that you can’t physically get hold of this new tune from the UK’s worst drug-taking band, Keane.

Unless you’re one of those posh industry types, this song is unavailable to buy on CD, vinyl or even from one of those fancy digital downloading services. Though we assume it’s on file sharing sites alongside the mis-titled new Elvis and Frank Sinatra album.

Usually we don’t bother telling you how awesome or shoddy a single is, but seeing as it’s free release that didn’t get that much publicity compared to other free downloads, offered by the likes of Radiohead and Sigur Ros, we thought we’d make you aware. Spiralling is taken from Keane’s yet to be released (but probably available illegally on the internet) third album Perfect Symmetry.

Gone are the earlier vocals of fatter-looking lead man Tom Chaplin, who previously sounded like a choir boy whose angelic vocals had crashed head on with him breaking into puberty. 2008 sees a different and experimental sounding vocal style – maybe it was the cocaine, we don’t know, but he seems to be taking on a bit more of an aggressive edge to his singing style. Gone is the quite timid whimper that was sometimes a bit awkward to listen to, but still delighted thousands of Radio 2 listeners.

When trying to work out the reason for this change, it may not be down to him snorting cocaine off the arsecrack of a model. Tom may have been given peppermint tea before the vocal take instead of mint tea. It would piss us off, that’s for sure.

Following strange lyrics from Feeder and their single We Are The People, Keane have managed to arrange the lyrics into questions for fans to answer. Hooray for interactive fun! Instead of the song breaking down and building back up again as per usual we are instead hit with a barrage of questions. Don’t worry, they won’t fry your brain – Chaplin asks if we want to:

“Be a winner, Be an icon, Be Famous, Be the President, Start a war, Have a family, Be in love.”

Because we’re nice, we’ll give you the answers:

“We already are – ask Alan Mcgee, only if it involves free things off PR people, only if we didn’t have to campaign for a year, no – because we struggle to even start a computer up sometimes, we are one happy family and yes – but not with the people from Keane.”

The lyrics are a bit too kooky for a band as commercial as Keane, and they would work better coming from some pissed off communist rapper who is integrating you through his lyrics and why you are a sucker to globalisation.

Not from a posh podgy boy and his mates whose idea of fun on a Friday night is ringing doorbells and running away whilst laughing like people who’ve just seen a pair of tits for the first time.

So what about the music? Well the two bods who no-one seem to know about are still performing. Richard Hughes still bangs the drums and Tim Rice-Oxley is still on the keyboard.

After two albums of just using the boring piano and not even altering the pitch Rice-Oxley has discovered the effects button and decided to jazz things up a bit. Sadly this new direction of incorporating diluted electronic sounds and vocal tweaks doesn’t work.

At best the song sounds like a shoddy remix using the successful song formula that Keane constantly used with songs such Somewhere Only We Know and Everybody’s Changing. With so much free music software for bedroom producers to use, it really just sounds like someone has attempted to remix the older tracks and failed badly.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the daring leap of going hip and copying the dying trend of indie bands with synthesizers simply falls flat on its arse. As this is a free release, we can only hope that the real version suddenly appears and those crazy Keane boys have pulled an early April fool on us, or it’s never going to be anything more that poor.

Still, it’s only a free download. If you don’t like it, e-mail the song around as one of those crap joke chain messages. Title it as “best thing you’ll ever hear” before deleting the song off of your computer and freeing up the space it took up for porn or a better sounding track.

There are a lot available. Trust us.