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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It seems ridiculous now to imagine Jack Bauer as some nervous bridegroom-to-be on his big day, especially when you consider some other facts about 24.

For example, would the script writers have managed to find time for their nervous groom to kill 198 people over the six-and-a-half series of the show? Probably not.
Or indeed, manage to fit six presidents of the United States somewhere into the proceedings.
They could also have found it hard to fit in the 67 torture scenes – although weddings are there to be endured.

The point is, 24 is not your average show. Don’t get us wrong, we love the show. We enjoy every second.

But, having started to compile a list of our favourite moments from the series, we have started to realise just how ludicrous it is. And we mean, totally implausible. We know, we’re a bit slow on the uptake. But 24 has a great way of making you just enjoy the ride rather than actually checking out which car you are in.

We were fooled, OK – for every enjoyable second. When you are trying to save the world, you have no time to focus on what is plausible, for God’s sake.

Anyway, please enjoy our latest burnt offering, and, as always, please send us your favourite moments, so we can laugh at them.

10. Chloe turns into Ripley
Day 4 – 1:00am-2:00am

Oddball computer nerd trades in her floppy for a huge machine gun and guns down an assailant. Finally we start to see her in a different light. Sexy? Maybe not.

9. The president who looks like Richard Nixon is a bad guy shock
Day 5 – 10pm-11pm

Who would have thought it? However, you have to say Gregory Itzin was brilliant in the role. Just beats the moment when his wife stabs him in the following series.

8. CTU is bombed
Day 2 – 10:00am-11:00am

Not much to add to this, apart from the fact they needed a new set and extras anyway.

7. Edgar dies
Day 5 – 6:00pm-7:00pm

Just when we were getting used to his fat, little chops, Edgar sacrifices himself and dies. The message? Don’t ever do selfless acts, you will die and people will forget about your character. Well, we didn’t, Edgar. Heroes can look like paedophiles.

6. Jack’s wife Teri killed by Nasty Nina
Day 1 – 11:00pm-12:00am

Let’s face it, she was annoying anyway. But it was still quite shocking.

5. Jack Bauer kills Chappelle
Day 3 – 6:00am-7:00am

Jack Bauer steps it up a notch when he kills CTU Division Director Ryan Chappelle – incidentally a boss he hates – to fulfill one of Day 3 big baddie Stephen Saunders‘ demands. Hmm. Not saw what the message is there.

4. Victor goes out fighting
Day 1 – 11:00pm-12:00am

OK, forget Dennis Hopper’s ridiculous East European accent. No, really. Stop thinking about it and focus. Despite his shortcomings as a mimic, Hopper is back to his Frank Booth best as the first day’s big baddie Victor Drazen. However, his plot to fool Jack Bauer backfires as Jack unleashes hell, wiping out his henchman before finally turning the gun on Drazen, who has surrendered, and blowing him away.

3. Bombing of airplane
Day 1 – 12:00am-1:00am

That mischievous Mandy. After nicking a journalist’s ID while shagging him in an airplane bog, she then plants a bomb and skydives out of the window. Aired at the end of the pilot show, it was the moment you realised 24 was actually pretty good.

2. Get me a hacksaw
Day 2 – 8:00am-9:00am

If ever there was a scene that defines the brutality of 24 it’s this. After shooting a handcuffed criminal in cold blood, Jack Bauer proceeds to saw off his head and present it to a terrorist group so he can get in their good books. Not sure that’s quite legal, Jack, but we forgive you. After all, it’s all for the greater good.

1. Nina is a dirty mole
Day 1 – 10:00pm-11:00pm

Nina a baddy? No way. Not Nina. But she looked so… wait. Actually she does kinda look a little evil. Two words: TV gold!

Other moments worth mentioning:
President Palmer almost killed by handshake
Robert Carlyle is mined
Bomb goes off in California
Sherry Palmer lets old man die
Jack says goodbye to Kim while flying a plane with a nuclear bomb in it
Kim gets stuck in the woods
Jack lets Audrey’s husband Paul die

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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.