Piers Morgan, the ever lovable former Daily Mirror editor and man for whom the word smarmy was invented, certainly has gotten his large, soiled knickers in a twist of late.

We’re not even half way through the week and he’s already attempted to take some cheap shots at 2 people who are infinitely more famous and loved than him.

It’s the equivalent of the school weed slagging off the popular kids because they won’t invite him to their fancy pool parties when their parents go to Tuscany for the weekend.

On Monday, Morgan went on Chelsea Lately, one of the billions of late night talk shows more popular than his own in the States, to have a pop at Madonna, claiming that the baby catcher’s Super Bowl performance was akin to that of, “a gruesome drunken Aunt.”

TAKE THAT MADONNA! You just got served. Piers Morgan, a man who will struggle to get the same amount of viewers all year that you got during your brief Super Bowl half-time show, just told you how it went down!

Why don’t you start acting your age and visit a W.I. meeting once in a while, huh!?

After dispatching of her Madgesty, Piers pointed his pistol of perfunctory towards former footballer, Match of the Day presenter and UN ambassador for crisps, Gary Lineker.

Morgan decided to brag to the former Spurs star about a review he got in the San Fransisco Chronicle, praising his talents as a football pundit on Fox TV. Lineker went on to question how long Morgan had spent searching for that, lone, positive review, to which Morgan replied, one can only assume with a look of post-mastubatory smugness plastered across his sweaty brow:

“I currently air in 200 countries/territories – how you getting on? #SmallPondMinnow”

Despite forgetting to mention that even though he’s aired in 200 territories, he still only draws a crowd of about 6, Morgan mopped the mix of bile and man lather from his keyboard and went to make a cup of tea, safe in the knowledge that he’d given Gary Lineker, ‘a Madonna.’

But our Gary isn’t Madonna, he doesn’t take things lying down, or from Malawi, he rebutted Morgan’s smugspunk with this:

“I think the 2 world cups I played in probably edged that.”

BAM! He had Morgan on the ropes, but wasn’t finished yet, fearing Morgan could possibly steal his presenting gig, Salt and Lineker wound up and struck the final, devastating blow to Morgan’s inflated ego:

“Spoke to the powers that be at the BBC and they are very interested in you… staying in America”

He may work for Walkers, but Lineker is definitely the Real McCoy.

Sorry.

Sometimes, one can only hope that Glenn Beck is the Republican version of Jon Stewart and that it was all one big joke we didn’t latch onto in good time… but there’s that gnawing feeling that he really does believe the beserk stuff he says.

And it is his views that have seen him and his family being targeted by “hateful” crowds at a screening of The 39 Steps in New York City on Monday night.

While there, Beck & Co were caught in a “hostile situation”, and if you look at his history, it isn’t difficult to see why that will happen from time-to-time. You troll people, there’s a strong chance they’ll harangue you in return. So let us glare at him at his most weird.

Apparently, Beck was at this outdoor screening and someone kicked wine onto his wife Tanya’s back, soaking her clothes and their Stars ‘n’ Stripes blanket. Then, after that, when Tanya and their daughter Hannah went to the bathroom to clean up, someone yelled “We hate conservatives here!”

The Becks did their best to ignore the catcalls and people taking pictures of them, but it obviously didn’t work, with Beck saying on his radio show:

“These people were some of the most hateful people I’ve ever seen. All I wanted to do was watch a movie in the park. I have a right to watch and enjoy a movie in the park.”

Hate? Wanna talk about hate? See, Beck was mockingly applauded as he left the show. While it may be very uncomfortable to be chided in public, you have to wonder where this behaviour comes from. Seeing as the screening was in New York, you have to assume that saying things like ‘I hate 9/11 victim families’ will turn a community against you.

And of course, Beck’s melodramatic response probably doesn’t help matters.

“If I had suggested ‘Does anybody have a rope? Because there’s a tree here. You could just lynch me.’ I think there would’ve been a couple in the crowd that would’ve.”

It isn’t exactly a good idea to bring up lynching is it, especially given that Beck has been accused of ‘race hate’ in some quarters.

Fact is, if you’re on a huge platform like the Fox Network, given the opportunity to speak without fear of immediate reply, if you have views that are, to put it kindly, controversial, then people will build up loathing and weariness which could easily manifest itself as… well… taking the piss out of you while you sit on a rug in a park.

Of course, Glenn Beck has the right to his views and no-one should ever take that right away from him… but y’know, the right to speak goes both ways, so if someone wants to boo and heckle you, they’ve got that right too, especially if you’re the kind of bloke who can lose his bap on-air and furious slate a caller, only for you to call them a “pinhead”.

Public attacks aren’t very nice are they? Mercifully, we revel in it and would love the chance to mindlessly call Glenn Beck names, mainly because he looks like Bobby from King of the Hill.

It goes without saying that, while Beck recalled all this on his show, he got all choked up. It’s not like Glenn Beck to cry is it? Not one bit…

Beck, who launches a live streaming video network in Sept., closed his segment about the incident with a plea for love, “Find a way to love because in the end only love remains. The only thing that is true is love. Everything else is a lie. Do not hate, love. That’s the promise of America. That is the shining city on the hill that cannot and will not be hid.”

Beck’s GBTV will feature Beck’s new daily two-hour show and other original and licensed programming.

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Family Guy may well be one of the most dismal programmes ever aired on a television anywhere on Earth, but that didn’t stop Seth MacFarlane scraping the barrel even further with the miserable American Dad and further still with the joy-vacuum of The Cleveland Show.

Quite an impressive feat you might think. How on Earth is it possible to make something more grating and unfunny as Family Guy?

Well, unbelievably, he’s going to top all of that when he takes over, revamps and utterly sullies one of the greatest animated series in television – The Flintstones. And you thought that the live action flick with John Goodman was bad!

Yes indeed, MacFarlane will apparently be giving a 21st century spin to the already perfect ’60s comedy series, invariably turning Fred Flintstone, Wilma, Barney and Betty Rubble, into quirky, off-beat characters, into boorish, cut-away obsessed, hateful creations.

That said, MacFarlane is a fan:

“The very first cartoon character I drew at age two was Fred Flintstone”

“So it’s appropriate that events have come full circle, allowing me to produce the newest incarnation of this great franchise. Plus, I think America is finally ready for an animated sitcom about a fat, stupid guy with a wife who’s too good for him”

Production (or, as it is being referred to in some circles, The Death Of Humour) will be starting in the fall of 2011 and will most likely end up polluting our screens in 2013.

That gives us two years to decide whether to end the lives of those involved or simply partake in a mass-suicide.*

*Please note, this is quite clearly a melodramatic response to a situation, used for comedic effect. So, if you’re a lawyer or a basketcase who briefly took it seriously, please go and stand in a darkened room, count to ten, think about your life and then, should you see fit, kill yourself.**

**Please note, this is further use of melodrama, used for comedic effect. Seriously, stop trying to kill yourself or other people to then pin the blame on us. Idiot.

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Glenn Beck – the GG Allin of television* – isn’t likely to see his contract renewed by Fox. Imagine that for a second. Someone in the world who is deemed too nutso even for Rupert Murdoch. Staggering stuff.

So what can Glenn Beck do now? Have a cry about it? Roll around on the floor, masturbating into an American flag?

He might! And he might film it too! That’s because Glenn Beck is to take his brand of bug-eyed, frenzied gibberish onto his own network! If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em! And we can only imagine the horrors that will unfold on GBTV.

He is considering a cable channel takeover or expanding his online video service, going solo much like Oprah Winfrey. Of course, instead of being the caring bosom of America, Beck will film himself, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from a secret nuclear bunker, talking to himself and slowly deteriorating before climaxing with a shotgun in his mouth and a small stars ‘n’ stripes dangling from his anus.

You know damn well that’ll happen if there’s no-one to tell him where the line is.

Disagree? Here’s a man who said that the devastating events in Japan were likely to be a “message from God”. He’s all heart isn’t he?

Alas, it would appear that America is tiring of ol’ Glenn. He’s lost over one million viewers from his show in 12 months. We suspect this is wholly connected to his outing himself as a Muse fan. That, or people have stopped tuning in ironically.

Either way, it looks like Fox bosses are considering giving him the chop. Presumably, this is so they can pave the way for Sarah Palin’s sadly inevitable television career. Fox can’t be hiring a man who has nearly 400 advertisers boycotting him can they?

And so, once more, the eyes of the world will look to America with a special kind of astonishment reserved for their right-wingers.

Gawd bless ‘em.

*Think about it. Self defecating and won’t be happy ’til he’s in the centre of a riot he’s caused himself. Probably has a tiny penis as well.

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Men, the day we have been dreading for weeks has finally come and gone, Sky Sports News is no longer available on Freeview in the UK. That’s right, no more up to date analysis, no more SoccerSaturday and, of course, no more Georgie Thompson.

I know it hurts but we have to face facts, no longer shall she be there when we wake up in the morning, to tell us the latest scores and transfer rumours, no longer will she distract us from the fact that there’s a bloke from Blue Peter attempting, badly, to present news that isn’t about some sort of bring and buy sale.

It is indeed a sad day for us all. Rupert Murdoch is now using our beloved Georgie to get us to sign up to his extortionate Sky TV subscription service. All we have left is the vain hope that someone vaguely attractive turns up on Loose Women to ease our heartbreak.

But surely what was most memorable about Sky Sports News was the in depth coverage of every major sport around the world I hear you cry. Well, let’s be honest, it isn’t. Ever since the launch of Sky’s betting service Skybet (not to be confused with megalomaniacal artificial intelligence system Skynet) Sky Sports News has been accused of manipulating stories for personal gain. Plus Sky Sports News is part of Newscorp, a company that seems to think that Aryan, loud-mouthed loony tune Glenn Beck is an appropriate host for a show on one of the biggest news networks in the World.

But we could forgive all that, because they gave us Georgie. With her long blonde hair, sultry voice, piercing eyes and, most importantly, love of football. Even her own colleagues can’t keep their eyes off her, as Sky’s flagship Breakfast show Soccer AM pointed out.

Let’s just hope she makes a big money move to Match of The Day before the end of the transfer Window, or this season could see us being relegated to watching supposed funny man James Kimberley (yes, his middle name is actually Kimberley) Corden’s God awful panel show, A League Of Their Own, to get our Georgie Fix.

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Glenn Beck may be going blind. Isn’t that sad? Maybe he actually cried all the fluid out of his eye-sockets, leaving him with two rattling pork scratchings in his skull? Maybe he just plays with himself too frequently?

Beck, who you have no doubt seen going slowly postal on Fox News (or indeed, being lampooned on other programmes) could gradually lose his eyesight and he’s already admitted that he’s “too darn lazy to learn Braille.” That’s okay Glenn! Don’t worry yourself unduly! You make stuff up in your round little head all the time… you don’t need your eyes for that (although, you’ll now have to feel some faces before you can decide whether they’re evil terrorists, rather than just spy a turban and call it off the cuff).

In an announcement, Beck said:

“Yes, I have a problem with my eyes. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the doctor because I can’t focus my eyes … So I went to the best doctor I could find … he did all kinds of tests, and he said I have macular dystrophy.”

Don’t confuse that with muscular dystrophy. That’s a completely different thing altogether. Basically, the thing Beck has got affects a tiny portion of the retina which will mean that he’ll have difficulty reading print and identifying faces, blurred vision and it’ll be hard to focus. Alas, it does have the potential to cause blindness.

Glenn Beck haters will be thrilled to know that there’s no known cure for macular dystrophy and, no doubt, with Obama’s health care reforms, he’ll get treated by a dirty commie who will put fluoride in his water and brain-wash him into being a spy.

And what does Beck think of it all?

“I plan on dealing with it with a smile and dignity, and quite honestly, at least I’ll be able to get away with a blind joke from time to time.”

Now, let’s watch a video of Glenn Beck going mental and say really, really dumb things.

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Remember 2003?

Sure it was a long time ago – but let us jog your memory. The sky outside was often gray and dreary, flowers refused to bloom and the Internet bed linen industry absolutely boomed because bedridden people were too depressed to drop turd all the way over in the toilet.

Well no more – because Futurama has been un-cancelled. And we’re not talking about four more straight to DVD movies either – we’re talking about 26 new episodes on Comedy Central.

You still don’t believe us?

We don’t blame you. We’re sorry we ever told you we’re half-brothers with Coolio.

Trust restored.

In 2003 a black-faced torch holding mob of Fox executives took every single Futurama character out behind a barn. Once there, they stuffed them chock-full of steel barb and then crushed them beneath a sand roller (a heavy piece of machinery we probably just made up. It’s supposed to sound heavy). It wasn’t pretty.

We imagine the liquids from their animated bodies slowly pooled and scabbed as the execs walked back to their shiny, super long limos. At the time, nobody had any idea the killing wouldn’t be permanent. After all – this was way before Family Guy gloriously emerged from the tomb.

After the cancellation Futurama was swooped up by Cartoon Network, who proudly aired it as an Adult Swim anchor. When the show was contractually up for bid again - Comedy Central knew a good thing when they saw it. They outbid CN.

Then of course the four movies came out – one of which we claimed to be film of the year in ’08. The whole quadrilogy sold big. And now this from Reuters:

“Taking a page from the “Family Guy” resurrection guidebook, the canceled Fox animated comedy is returning with an order from Comedy Central for 26 new episodes to run over two seasons. “Futurama” creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen already are working on stories for the new batch of episodes of the sci-fi cartoon, slated to premiere on Comedy Central in mid-2010.”

Comedy Central says that if the new episodes draw a big enough crowd, they’ll try their darndest to bring other shows back from the bin too. Like Seinfeld, Cheers and confusingly, I Love Lucy. To make the latter happen we bet they use science.

And now to celebrate their triumphant return, we present a wonderful Futurama segment where in they wax sentimental about global warming.

In Spanish.

De nada.

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Generally speaking there are only a few places we really don’t want to ever see overweight people: Going anywhere wearing our pants, suspended above us descending in a parachute, or full-frenzied inside a sneeze guard with their sneakered feet perched in the sliced tomatoes.

Anywhere else, though, and we’ll take them. That’s because we love the heavy, and always want to know everything about them. For instance, do they fall in love? Probably not. But if they do we’ll all get to see on Fox’s new show – billed as The Bachelor for fat guys, which we actually find quite rude.

Do you think Elvis‘ full glory wasn’t realised until his sequins started popping off in concert like a heated bag of Orville Redenbacher? Do you think Biggest Loser would be a better show if only they’d ditch those stupid trainers? Would you like reality TV more if they didn’t make it so hard for immature middle-schoolers to hilariously draw clear comparisons between the contestants and marine mammalians?

If so, you may be callous, grating and all around unbearable company. But you’re also the Fox Network’s target audience, so cheer up, you. In order to properly fill your TV platter (no pun intended), they’ve just green-lit what may be the greatest show ever. For lovers of overweight romance. They’re calling it More to Love, and here’s the basic premise according to The Hollywood Reporter:

“The series, titled “More to Love,” is billed as the first “dating show for the rest of us,” throwing open its doors to overweight contestants. “For six years it’s been skinny-minis and good-looking bachelors, and that’s not what the dating world looks like,” Fox president of alternative Mike Darnell said. “Why don’t real women — the women who watch these shows, for the most part — have a chance to find love too?”"

It actually sounds like a descent show, and we, for one, shall tune in. So long as any hot-tub scenes have water clear up to the necks, because really, we’re ear guys anyway.

Really though, it’s sounds like blatant exploitation of people with eating disorders, and that infuriates us.

What’s that you say? It doesn’t sound that bad and you just don’t understand our anger? Well maybe that’s because we haven’t described the show to you in enough detail. The house the girls live in will be a gigantic kitchen, they’ll all be forced to sleep nights in horizontal open-faced refrigerators while dressed like squeeze bottles full of hot-dog condiments, and their show nicknames will will all be directly inspired by Hostess mascots.

Curse you Fox! If that’s true at all we’ll never forgive you!

Word is the Fatchelor really hits it off with Chocodile halfway through the pilot episode.

We’ve got a real feeling about those two.

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It would have been awful if Fox managed to block the release of this year’s Watchmen movie, wouldn’t it?

Because what would we have to be disappointed about then? The weather? Our jobs? The way we can’t grow a proper beard? No, Fox didn’t want to just block Watchmen – it wanted to block our right to be chronically disappointed by Watchmen, and that wasn’t on.

Luckily, though, the crisis has been averted. Fox and Warner Bros have resolved their legal squabble, and Watchmen is coming out as planned. That means our plan to slag it off before we’ve seen it remains intact! Yay!

Watchmen is undoubtedly one of the must-see movies of the year, provided that you’re a) a virgin, b) a pleb and c) so afraid of going outside that your skin has become the same colour as your bedroom walls.

And, to be fair, you’ve got every reason to be excited about Watchmen‘s release – not jut because it’s a Zac Snyder movie so it’s bound to be brimming with so much latent homoeroticism that it’ll make WWE wrestling seem like an episode of The View, but because it almost wasn’t going to be released in the first place.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve had to put up with endless squabbling between Fox and Warner Bros over Watchmen – first Warner Bros made Watchmen, and then Fox said that it actually owned Watchmen and that Warner Bros shouldn’t have made it, and then Warner Bros was all like ‘screw you’ and Fox was all like ‘no, screw YOU!’ and then Warner Bros said something about Fox’s mum giving blowjobs to sailors and Fox took Warner Bros to court to block Watchman‘s release.

It all got very messy, especially when a judge ruled that Fox had an interest in Watchmen on Christmas Eve. Since then, Fox and Warner Bros have been in a series of protracted negotiations about who owns which part of Watchmen and, more importantly, how many frightened southeast Asian prostitutes they’ll be able to buy with their cut from the movie. Possibly.

But since this is Hollywood we’re talking about, it’s time for the happy ending. People, Fox and Warner Brothers have smoothed things over and Watchmen‘s March release date stands firm. Reuters reports:

Terms of the agreement will not be disclosed, but it is said to involve a sizable cash payment to Fox and a percentage of the film’s box office, which Warners plans to release March 6. Fox will not be a co-distributor on the film, nor will it own a piece of the “Watchmen” property going forward. The studios are set to release a joint statement announcing the agreement Friday.

Well, this is good news all round, isn’t it. Warner Bros gets to release a movie that comicbook fans have salivated over for two entire decades, Fox gets a large injection of cash and, best of all, what with Watchmen AND Terminator Salvation coming out in coming months, there’ll be two movies this year that take a painful, slobbery dump in the eye of things we used to like. Hooray for everything!

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If you happen to enjoy ridiculous television shows that can pointlessly tread water for three entire seasons, we have some bad news.

Prison Break is no more. Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly has decided that Prison Break‘s fourth season will be its last. This will no doubt come as a shock to the solitary homeless man who didn’t think that Prison Break got cancelled in 2006 anyway.

So Prison Break may be dying, but let’s focus on all the positive things it gave us – like Wentworth Miller and that hour a week where nothing good was on TV so we could read books instead.

The problem with most big American dramas these days is that they don’t know how to stretch out for multiple seasons. Lost got around this by becoming so impossibly dense that you can’t follow episodes without the aid of a flipchart and an encyclopedia. 24 just repeats itself exactly every year with only minor changes, like the introduction of a female president who’s got a face that looks like a cake. And Heroes is determined to deliberately lose all of its viewers by progressively getting worse and worse with every passing minute.

And then there’s Prison Break – a show about a man breaking out of prison with the aid of his magical tattoo. Which was all well and good, except that at the end of the first season he broke out of prison, leaving nowhere for the show to go.

That’s why the following three seasons of Prison Break – where tattoo man goes on the lam, gets caught, goes to another prison, breaks out of that prison too and goes on the lam again, all because the president is evil or something – were such hopeless failures. You want examples of how bad the latter seasons of Prison Break were? OK, here’s three:

1) In America, the audience halved between the first season and the fourth season.

2) The Prison Break cast got so bored by the ridiculous plotlines that they actually took to killing boys in drunken accidents to pass the time.

3) In the UK, not even Channel Five thought that seasons three and four of Prison Break were good enough to broadcast. And this is Channel Five – the channel that, in a few hours, is genuinely going to broadcast a documentary about a clever pig.

And these reasons are why Kevin Reilly from Fox has decided to put Prison Break out of its misery. The LA Times reports:

The action series starring Wentworth Miller will return on April 17 for its final run of four to six episodes. The show premiered in 2005 as a hit but has progressively run out of steam. “Creatively, the show’s just played out,” Reilly said. “Creatively, everyone feels enough stories were told. We want to finish strong.”

“Well, alright, maybe not strong,” we then imagine Kevin Reilly went on to say “But mediocre. No, no, mediocre’s not the word either. Alone and ignored. That’s the one! We want to finish alone and ignored!”

But now pilot season is coming up, so let’s just hope that Fox learns from the demise of Prison Break and stops commissioning shows that can’t possibly stretch beyond their quickly-completed premise. Apparently Fox is especially keen on the new high-concept drama Man Jumps Off Log, about a man who wants to jump off a log. He does actually jump off the log within the first six seconds of the first episode, but we’re sure they’ll find away to stretch it out for years after that.

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One of the movies that everyone is most looking forward to being profoundly disappointed by this year is Watchmen.

That’s if Watchmen is released this year, of course. Thanks to a petty squabble between Warner Bros (which made Watchmen) and Fox (which says it owns the rights to Watchmen), nothing looks certain any more. And now one of the movie’s producers, Lloyd Levin, has waded in on the issue by writing a letter calling everyone at Fox big old smellyheads. We’re paraphrasing.

So Watchmen still might not be released this year. That’s OK, we’re sure we’ll be just as disappointed by Terminator Salvation.

It’s hard to know why people are so excited at the prospect of seeing the Watchmen movie this spring. On reflection, we think we’ve boiled it down to three reasons:

1 - They’re gigantic Alan Moore fans.

2 - They can’t believe that the movie has actually been made at all.

3 – They’re stinking, lonely, friendless geeks and their only companion is their crusty ejacu-sock.

But forget the first and last reasons for the time being – much of the excitement about Watchmen comes from the fact that people have been trying to make it for 20 year. Terry Gilliam had a go at making Watchmen and failed. Darren Aronofsky had a go and failed. Paul Greengrass had a go and failed. Jude Law was going to be in it at one point. Simon Pegg was going to be in it at one point. Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be in it at one point. Dig hard enough and you’ll probably discover that you’d been briefly considered for the role of Dollar Bill at some point in the mid-1990s.

Because of the immense amount of time that Watchmen took to get to the screen, it’s spent much of the last two decades being shuttlecocked between movie studios at an astonishing rate. Fox had it for a while, Universal had it for a while, Paramount had it for a while, Revolution had it for a while and finally Warner Bros ended up making it. And that’s where all the confusion lies.

Fox is currently suing Warner Bros with the intention of either cashing in on Watchmen‘s release or stopping it completely, claiming that it still owns the rights to the movie. On Christmas Eve a judge ruled in Fox’s favour, and now Watchmen producer Lloyd Levin has been reduced to writing a letter online telling Fox to back off and let him release his film. The LA Times reports:

Lloyd Levin said Fox repeatedly passed on making director Zack Snyder’s epic superhero movie and was now trying to take advantage of Warner Bros.’ willingness to develop and produce it. “Shouldn’t Warner Bros. be entitled to the spoils — if any — of the risk they took in supporting and making ‘Watchmen’? Should Fox have any claim on something they could have had but chose to neither support nor show any interest in?”

With any luck, the coming weeks will see another round of court hearings to decide for good who owns what when it comes to Watchmen. We’d imagine that the worst-case scenario would involve Watchmen‘s release being shelved indefinitely. But even that’s not the end of the world.

Look at it this way – if Watchmen doesn’t come out, the geeks will cry. If Watchmen does come out, it’ll probably be fairly awful and the geeks will still cry. Either way there’ll be some crying geeks. It’s a win-win.

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For all this talk of change, one thing must remain the same – the humourless blonde men who torture foreigners and never pee.

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.

Everybody seems to be getting in on the comic book-to-movie adaptation thing, with easily one of the most anticipated being that of Watchmen.

While normally this would be greeted with trepidation and a slight amount of fear, the sheer quality of the source material, combined with the fact that the film is supposed to actually be, y’know – good – has people sweating around the groin, awaiting next year’s release.

That is, unless Fox have their way and ban the film from ever coming out.

Oh, we’re not kidding here – that’s what they’re trying to do in the latest of legal battles that shows just how the company is actually forged from Satan’s testicles themselves. There’s evil, then there’s Fox evil.

This is the company that cancelled Family Guy in its prime – though they did bring it back, they actually ended up becoming more evil by letting the damn thing continue, seeing as it’s turned into utter tripe in recent years. Then there was the cancellation of Firefly, but we won’t go into that – it’s still too painful. They cancel, they block, they ruin and they devour, and they never seem to stop.

Next on their list is Zack Snyder, director of 300, and his adaptation of Watchmen, the classic 80s comic series that ranks amongst the finest books ever written. Apparently. With some nice spoof adverts.

The film is bankrolled and due for release through Warner Bros early next year, but some convoluted and complicated legal wrangling has revealed that Fox are claiming that they own the rights to a film release of the property.

While this came about in February of this year, well before Watchmen fever had truly got a hold of the internets, it has been decided recently by a judge that Warner Bros could not have the case thrown out of court as they had asked.

What this means is that Fox are free to pursue their copyright infringement case against Warner Bros, and are looking to get back either damages for the trouble – sure to be a few quid at the very least – or, in a worst case scenario, ban the movie from being released indefinitely.

And it looks like Fox‘s band of lawyers, built as we all know from pure evil, are looking to force a worst case scenario – pushing to kill the project altogether rather than take some of its potentially huge box office. A statement released by Fox read:

“Warner Bros.’ production and anticipated release of ‘The Watchmen’ motion picture violates 20th Century Fox’s long-standing motion picture rights in ‘The Watchmen’ property.”

Which is pretty standard stuff until you realise they seemingly don’t even care enough to get the name of the comic right in the first place. So if they don’t even care about that, do they care about you, the fans – the public? Do they bollocks. It’s idiots in suits playing at running the world again, and it’s getting to be a bit annoying now.

But hey, at least Fox can clear the way for their own films to come out next year, and there’ll be no risk of them being compared side-by-side with Watchmen. That could be viewed as a good point. If you were mental.

The case is far from settled, though Fox are pushing for it to be fast-tracked through the courts. Probably so they can get back to stealing candy from orphanages, or burning down babies or something.

Today’s vitriolic rant brought to you by hunger pains and a lack of coffee. We will resume normal service shortly.

There's a constant battle in America between the FCC – which believes that you go to hell as soon as you see a nude body, even your own – and the titty-loving TV networks.

And the latest scrap to break out is between the FCC and Fox. You see, half a decade ago, Fox showed some digitally-obscured boobs on a barely-remembered reality TV show and the FCC has just decided to fine it $91,000 for doing so.  However, Fox is refusing to pay the fine, calling it "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional."

By doing so, Fox has kick-started a hard-fought ideological debate about morals, indecency, ethics, free speech and censorship that could change the shape of American broadcasting forever. Plus it's about boobies. Wheeeee!

We're no experts, but we think that Americans have the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms and the right to sit around masturbating to digitally-obscured breasts until they either a) get cramp or b) realise what they've become and stop in an angry fit of self-loathing. And that's a God-given right that the FCC has been trying to take away from them.

If the FCC had its way then the average American wouldn't be able to masturbate to a sudden glimpse of a 1990s pop star's partially-covered breast or brief shots of naked buttocks or Diane Keaton swearing on live TV. The first two are OK, but the last one is a step too far – show us a man who doesn't find saggy-faced 62-year-olds screeching the word 'fuck' at Diane Sawyer completely erotic and we'll show you a liar – which is why Fox is staging a fightback.

Back in 2003, Fox broadcast an episode of reality show Married By America that showed some digitally-obscured strippers and a woman licking whipped cream off a man's nipple. Enraged that Fox was basically sending everyone who watched it to hell for eternity – a place which, ironically, shows nothing by Married By America reruns all day – the FCC hit Fox with a $1.2 million fine.

After four years of appeals the fine was reduced to just $91,000, but now Fox has decided that it won't pay that either. The Washington Post reports:

Despite the sharp reduction, Fox said it would not pay the fine on principle, calling it "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional" in a statement released yesterday… Fox has asked the five FCC commissioners to reconsider the fine without its having to pay, a move that sets Fox in a two-front indecency war: It is battling the FCC at the agency level on the "Married" fine and in the Supreme Court on other indecency fines levied at about the same time.

Part of the reason why Fox is refusing to pay the fine is apparently because of the nature of the complaints that the FCC received over Married By America. Although it received 90 complaints, they were from only 23 people. And all but two of the complaints were virtually identical, meaning that the fine had basically come from three people who were angry at a pixelised tit.

If this is true, then there's a strong argument for Fox to fight the FCC fine. The FCC's war on indecency is wrongheaded at best and dangerous at worst – it can let entire seasons of 24 pass without blinking once at all the relentless scenes of violent torture pass, but as soon as a digitally-obscured stripper covered in whipped cream flits into view for a couple of seconds, fines get thrown about like nobody's business. The FCC really has no right to enforce such heavyhanded censorship in a modern society.

Unless the FCC is just protecting us from Heather Mills. After all, if we're talking cream-covered strippers then Heather Mills is pretty much the queen of that (NSFW), and the FCC needs to make sure that she's never allowed to commit such terrible atrocities again. Keep up the great work, chaps!

Read more:

Fox Refuses To Pay FCC Indecency Fine – WP 

When Dog The Bounty Hunter was taped calling his son's black girlfriend a 'nigger', the global shock was palpable – not just because of the hateful language but because most people assumed that Dog The Bounty Hunter was black himself.

It's true. OK, admittedly Dog The Bounty Hunter is a 15-foot-tall, bleach-blonde mulleted redneck who makes his living shooting minor criminals in the face with bear mace and very obviously has white skin, so it might be a stretch to see Dog as black, but that's how Dog The Bounty Hunter described himself in his first post-scandal TV interview. But it's OK, because Dog The Bounty Hunter has learnt that he isn't actually black – which is good because if he was then he'd hate himself and have to spray mace at his own eyes, then manhandle himself a bit while shouting 'bra' into his own face over and over again. And that'd just be weird. 

Like Rambo or Jesus Christ, Dog The Bounty Hunter was a hero to many. If the public ever thought that someone in their street was harbouring a wanted criminal then they could call Dog The Bounty Hunter and let him – along with his wife – shout abuse at them, chase them down an alley, spray a form of tear gas at them and take them back to prison, so long as there was some kind of financial reward in it for him.

But now Dog The Bounty Hunter is learning what it feels like to be chased, with the mace of public judgement and the butch squat wife of political correctness. Ever since a tape of Dog The Bounty Hunter calling his son's girlfriend a 'nigger' hit the internet, Dog's prospects have gone from bad to worse. First A&E halted production of Dog The Bounty Hunter and then, after advertisers distanced themselves from Dog, the station dropped him altogether.

People are currently talking about Dog The Bounty Hunter in the same way they'd talk about Don Imus or Michael Richards or that woman from Radio 2 who can only see black people at night if they open their mouths. But Dog The Bounty Hunter knows in his heart that his is a completely different situation. Dog The Bounty Hunter, you see, would never call someone a 'nigger' in anger because Dog The Bounty Hunter thinks that he's black.

In his first interview since the 'nigger' tape made the internet, Dog The Bounty Hunter appeared on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show to tell the world why he thought he was black and how he now realises that he was probably mistaken in retrospect:

"There's a special connection that I thought I had between me and black America. And I used to say, 'I'm black, too.' In other words, my whole life I've been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that… so when I stood there and said, 'I kind of know what you feel like, because I've been there, too,' that I felt that I could embrace and like, as brothers… say the word. I now learned I'm not black at all, and I never did it out of hate. This sounds so stupid. I always did it out of love. Other white guys would be like, 'Boy, who does Dog think he is? Dog can say that.' And black guys would be with me and walk with me and respect me. So, I went too far with that."

Even though this line is markedly different to when Dog The Bounty Hunter told his son that "If Lyssa was dating a nigger we'd all say 'fuck you' and you know that," it seems as though Dog The Bounty Hunter is genuinely remorseful for the recorded telephone conversation, and not just because he might not be allowed to strut about on TV like a human Biker Mouse From Mars any more either. Maybe education and time will be the rehabilitation that Dog The Bounty Hunter needs to heal himself and those around him.

Just so long as he's not allowed on TV any more. Seriously, that show was cack.