It’s something we’ve all been taught from a young age, from our days of appearing in school productions of whatever rubbish the teachers thought our parents may want to see: don’t ruin your body parts when you’re playing the lead character.

It’s something that maybe, possibly just should have been taught to everyone’s favourite beef machine, Shia LaBeouf, before he was involved in a smashed-up cartastrophe a week ago.

Unfortunately it seems that noone did teach Beefy this one life lesson, and the manchild has ended up with something of a mashed up hand. Halfway through filming Transformers 2. You broke the golden rule, Shia. Silly boy.

Fear not though, as director extraordinairre and all-round BOOM! BLAMMO! KABLAM! personality Michael Bay may well have a solution to the age-old problem of children crashing their cars halfway through filming huge-budget blockbusters: give him a CGI hand four times bigger than his head that transforms into a public toilet – of death.

What do you mean that’s not what he said? Ohhhh – he said he’d probably just write it into the script somehow. Makes more sense, we suppose.

Yes – while some actors have the good grace to go the whole hog and actually die towards the end of filming, so all that is needed is a stunt double and a few special effects (thanks, Brandon Lee in The Crow!), Shia LaBeouf had to go and hurt himself quite badly, but be alright enough to carry on with filming.

See, that’s just the selfish behaviour of a child, meaning that once again the adults have to come in and clean up the mess by writing in a scene when Optimus Prime stands on your hand or something.

Selfish, selfish, silly boy.

Not content with saying a naughty word and making everyone in the world overreact at him, he had to go and have himself a fairly serious accident, be accused of drink driving (which Michael Bay seemingly legally cleared him of) and then have it turn out that in all likelihood the accident wasn’t even his fault in the first place, thus making any criticism we may have levelled at Beefy concerning the accident null and void.

Selfish, selfish, silly boy.

In a typically balls-out, playing-by-his-own-rules fashion, director Michael Bay decided to ignore the four hours of surgery, the apparent partial paralysis and the fact that Shia’s hand probably doesn’t look much like a hand right now. Bay told Access Hollywood:

“His two fingers are pretty smashed, but we’re figuring out a way to shoot around it, kind of write it into the story.”

Where other directors fear to tread – where they are sure they will fail, Michael Bay will emerge triumphant. Simply by saying Grimlock mistook Shia’s hand for the metal he so loves to “munch,” or that Beefy tried to take a cassette out of a tapedeck which turned out to be the evil Soundwave, who proceeded to slam the deck shut, trapping the tiny man’s hand. Or Kup makes a cameo, forcing Bifstek to mangle his own paw in a bizarre rite of passage, seeing as he’s old and mental.

Maybe?

Seriously – hecklerspray should charge for this stuff.