The American Idol final is gone. Gone but not forgotten. Following the victory of Kris Whateverhisnamewas, the shock is still palpable.

But don’t think that fallen American Idol loser Adam Lambert won’t have the last laugh. Kris Allen may have won the battle, but Adam Lambert has won the war – Adam Lambert’s going to be the new singer of Queen!

Except he isn’t. Brian May mumbled something about it recently, which means that Adam Lambert will probably end up being the fourth male lead in the pan-Siberian touring version of We Will Rock Rock You in about 15 years’ time. Fact.

Adam Lambert’s stunning American Idol defeat last week has forced America to face up to some serious questions. Questions like ‘Was Kris Allen’s victory a sign of institutionalised homophobia in America?’, ‘Really? It was? Do any of you even know how the music industry works?’ and ‘Does it even matter anyway? It’s not as if we’re ever going to hear another peep from either of them ever again, is it?’

But just because he ended up flaming out of American Idol at the last hurdle, the tremendous – some might say froth-mouthed and utterly terrifying – support that Adam Lambert has gained along his journey can only help his chances of achieving the success he so obviously craves. Especially since one of his supporters is none other than Brian May from Queen.

That’s RIGHT! Brian May LIKES ADAM LAMBERT! And he’s in QUEEN! And Queen are 1) all about annoyingly over-theatrical songs, 2) at their best when fronted by a berserk egomaniac and 3) completely unable to recognise when they should quit. And ADAM LAMBERT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS! ADAM LAMBERT IS GOING TO BE QUEEN’S NEW SINGER! SQUEEEEE!!!

Except, wait, no. Just because a moron on the internet said that they’d quite like it if Adam Lambert became the new Queen singer, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. In fact, Brian May says he hasn’t even spoken to Adam Lambert about the possibility of it becoming true, as he told Rolling Stone:

“Amongst all that furor, there wasn’t really a quiet moment to talk. But [drummer Roger Taylor] and I are definitely hoping to have a meaningful conversation with him at some point. It’s not like we, as Queen, would rush into coalescing with another singer just like that. It isn’t that easy. But I’d certainly like to work with Adam. That is one amazing instrument he has there.”

So who knows? It might work out. After all, Adam Lambert and Queen share the same flair for grating flamboyance, and Adam’s certainly got the range to sing all of Queen’s greatest hits, like the one about seeing a little silhouetto of a man, or the one about bicycles, or the one about dying of AIDS. So it might work out.

Or, alternatively, maybe Queen realise that without even Paul Rogers to prop up their creaky old nostalgic karaoke machine, the only chance they have of selling concert tickets is to rope in whoever happens to be popular on YouTube at any given moment. And that might work out, too, until Adam Lambert gets sacked after a fortnight so that Susan Boyle can have a go. And then Keyboard Cat. And then, if there’s any justice in the world, this chap.

Which we’d be more than OK with, by the way.

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Any excuse to go to Legoland and we are there. Although as only a few of us have kids, we usually have to kidnap them to get in. Of course, we are joking. None of us have kids.

Anyway, to satisfy our sad Lego urges thankfully there are people who have decided to create music videos purely from Lego. Of course, The White Stripes did it, but here are 11 others for your viewing pleasure…

11. Guns N’Roses – Welcome to The Jungle

10. System of a Down – Chop Suey

9. The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star

8. Rammstein – FeuerFrei

7. Metallica – One

6. Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em – Crank That (Soulja Boy)

5. Michael Jackson – Thriller

4. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

3. Adam Ant – Goody Two Shoes

2. Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

1. Devo – Whip It

It’s quite difficult to decide what made up word successfully describes the noise after ‘Flash!’ is cried on the Queen song, but hecklerspray has gone with ‘pakow!’ and forever it will remain that way.

What is less difficult to describe is the news that Flash Gordon, polo playing (or american footballer, depending on how much stock you put in the 80s film) hero of the universe, is to make a return to the big screen. This comes across as particularly strange, following the fact that the recent Flash Gordon TV series was received in the way a crap-covered balloon given to a child with a terminal illness would be received.

Stretched analogies aside, we mean the TV show wasn’t very good. And it still isn’t, actually. But this hasn’t stopped Hollywood in their never-ending quest to rape nostalgia forever, which has frankly become such a stupidly common occurrence that we feel we should give it an official name.

Leave your suggestions below.

After winning the rights to create a movie based on the character, Sony have gone and hired a couple of writers for the remake – Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. Hopefully they got the gig from their names alone, but that we cannot be sure of . But when you throw in the fact that Breck Eisner is apparently directing, then, well – we have a case to make that claim, surely?

Unfortunately we are a bit neutered in the criticism we can offer Matt and Burk beyond their spectacular names, as we cannot find anything they’ve written before. Eisner, on the other hand, directed the should-be-a-war-crime that was ‘Sahara’. Which – let’s be honest here – means it’s likely going to be a big pile of poopy.

While we can’t be sure at this point, it does look like the story being pushed for will retread the ground that has been walked a dozen times before by Flash and his cohorts – Earth under attack, fly to Mongo, fight Ming, win – and this version can’t possibly have a new soundtrack devised by Queen, so what’s the point?

Will the franchise be a ‘re-boot’, akin to that of Batman? Will we see a newly-hardcore Flash Gordon fighting barefist with Ming, before setting off on some parkour-inspired chase sequence? All interlaced with CGI rife with ‘dirty cuts’?

Hecklerspray would go with: yes. That’s almost definitely what’s going to happen.

Because Hollywood has no ideas, remakes everything, forces out pointless sequels and seemingly does it all in exactly the same style – which just so happens to be whichever style is popular at the time. Philistines. Though, to be fair, a method-acted Ming would be something to savour – conquering worlds just to ‘get into character’ and generally dressing like something of a maniacal twit around town.

In fact, that sounds brilliant – make it faster, Sony.

Pakow!

Yes, the Grammys are dull, overlong and self-congratulatory, but if the Grammys didn't exist, then Aretha Franklin's demented tantrum over Beyonce calling Tina Turner 'the queen' instead of her wouldn't exist either. And that's just too priceless to live without.

Especially now that Beyonce's dad has gotten in on the act, too – Matthew Knowles has called Aretha Franklin "childish and unprofessional" for her outburst. We're expecting Aretha's "That's childish, unprofessional and super-super morbidly obese to you," retort to come any second now.

When it was announced that Beyonce was to duet with Tina Turner at this year's Grammys, at best you probably expected an under-rehearsed medley of power ballads performed by an elderly out-of-breath woman and a woman hell-bent on swamping everything with all sorts of needless "woooahoahwhooah"ery.

But ha! That's not what you got at all. In fact, what Beyonce and Tina Turner gave us on Sunday night was an under-rehearsed medley of power ballads performed by an elderly out-of-breath woman and a woman hell-bent on swamping everything with all sorts of needless "woooahoahwhooah"ery containing an introduction that made Aretha Franklin flip her shit.

In case you needed reminding, Beyonce introduced Tina Turner as 'the queen.' And this managed to rile Aretha Franklin senseless because she's supposed to be the queen, and Tina Turner can't be the queen as well otherwise there'll be two queens and people will get confused. What if Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin both went to the same party and there was a snack trolley labelled 'for the queen'? Would they have to share? We get the feeling that Aretha Franklin would rather take her own life than share any snacks. Mainly, we think this whole brouhaha is snack-based.

Anyway, Aretha Franklin was so upset by all this that she made a public statement about it. And now it's the turn of Beyonce's father Matthew Knowles to make a stand, and he seems as bewildered about all this as the rest of us:

"Something this ridiculous – it's childish, it's unprofessional. And it's a sad day when egos get bruised because somebody used the word king, queen, prince or princess."

And now Matthew Knowles has followed it up in an interview with CelebTV making his views even clearer:

"I am not taking something this ridiculous to Beyonce. Beyonce referred to Tina Turner as a 'queen.' Not queen of gospel, queen of soul, queen of blues, Queen of England. I consider my wife a queen and sometimes call her that. Does Aretha have a problem with that?"

In fact, Aretha doesn't have a problem. She eats problems for breakfast. She eats a lot of things for breakfast, though, so maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't judge that too harshly on that. 

So now just about the only person not to have spoken out about this kerfuffle is Tina Turner. There could be any number of reasons for this – perhaps she's decided to rise above it, perhaps she's continuing her pattern of not responding to anything that happens to her, or perhaps she's still out of breath from her Grammys performance – but we're not so sure.

We think that Tina Turner is quietly preparing for battle. you see, if Tina Turner is now queen, then it makes sense for Aretha Franklin to upgrade to Super-Queen. And if that happens, Tina will need to think fast and upgrade too, to Ultra Mega Super-Queen. And so it will continue, until the fateful day when Mega Super Hyper Condor GalactaQueen Aretha Franklin and Ultra Ultra Thundersaurus Omegamax Queen Tina Turner wrestle each other in the middle of New York, knocking down buildings and punching heads off statues and whatnot.

Read more:

Beyonce's Dad Weighs in on 'Queen' Flap – Associated Press 

And that's got Aretha Franklin thoroughly narked. You see, Beyonce introduced Tina Turner at the Grammys by calling her "the queen." And Aretha Franklin is under the impression that she's actually the queen.

The queen of what, we don't know. Although judging by her performance at the Grammys, our first guess would be that Aretha Franklin is the queen of competition-standard sausage-gobbling.

Although the rightful focus of the Grammys on Sunday was the way that Amy Winehouse managed to sing two songs without falling over, throwing up, smoking any hard drugs or hacking away at any of her bodyparts with a razorblade, other people found different things to concentrate on.

And, although the Grammys duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner wasn't especially pleasant, that's what Aretha Franklin has focused her mind on, anyway. Luckily Aretha Franklin isn't too concerned with the performance itself, or the way that Tina Turner's borderline-obscene silver corset pulled her 68-year-old torso in so tight that she made a noise like a choking baby rather than singing, but the way she was introduced.

You see, Beyonce's spoken-word introduction of Tina Turner mainly involved listing other female singers and saying that none of them are as good as Tina Turner, because Tina Turner is "the queen." And since Aretha Franklin thought that actually she was the queen, she's started getting shitty about it to anyone who'll listen. According to The Associated Press:

When Aretha Franklin is unhappy, she does not mince words. On Tuesday, the longtime Queen of Soul slammed Beyonce Knowles' intro to Tina Turner at Sunday's Grammy Awards, in which Knowles called Turner, not Franklin, "the queen." "I am not sure of whose toes I may have stepped on or whose ego I may have bruised between the Grammy writers and Beyonce," Franklin said in a statement issued by her publicist. "However, I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy."

If it was a cheap shot for controversy, then might we suggest that it isn't actually a particularly good one, since the only person to show even a flicker of anything approaching outrage is Aretha Franklin herself. Everyone else was probably wondering how long it took for Aretha to grow her upper arms to get to the size of a fat man's thighs.

Perhaps the organisers of the Grammys will pay attention to Aretha Franklin's tantrum, though, and in the future only refer to Tina Turner as a duchess or low-ranking marchioness or something. And maybe Aretha Franklin should think of copyrighting this queen thing – we hear several monarch states, a rock group, a scallop and a chess piece are already encroaching on her territory.

But, you know, maybe 'queen' isn't a big enough word to describe Aretha Franklin. Maybe 'planet' or 'galaxy' would be better – after all, we're pretty sure that Aretha Franklin does exert her own gravitational pull now.

Read more:

Franklin Slams Beyonce Grammy Intro – Associated Press 

According to Buckingham Palace officials, who have taken into account the exact time Queen Victoria – Liz’s great-great grandmother and now ex-record holder – was born, our own current Queen became the oldest ‘serving’ monarch at 5pm this afternoon.

Queen Victoria was born on May 24th 1819 and died on January 22 1901, and only lived for 81 years, seven months and 29 days. But today Liz has pissed all over that record and made it look like the life of a daddy longlegs in comparison to her own legacy – a mammoth 81 years, seven months, 29 days and five minutes!

Along with her 60th wedding anniversary with Prince Phillip, it’s the second time this month that the Queen has been banging on the doors of the Guinness world record fellows. However, she still has some way to go before she beats Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch. That accolade would be achieved should Liz 2 still be throning it up on September 9 2015.

If her mother was anything to go by, that record’ll be as easy to achieve as wiping a harlot of a daughter-in-law off the face of the planet with one click of her fingers (something that Queen Liz has never attempted, to her great credit).

During Queen Victoria’s life, she managed to survive the traumas of no less than three assassination attempts – the first an attempt by 18-year-old Edward Oxford, who fired two shots whilst the then Queen was riding in a carriage with Prince Albert in London. Both missed the target (though rumour has it one pierced Albert's bell-end) and, remarkably, he was acquitted of High Treason on the grounds of insanity. 

And it’s been a tough four score and one and a bit for Liz as well; she’s had to read one whole speech each year, she has – on more than one occasion – had to ask one of her servants to wipe Corgi shit of her Persian rug and the pain she must have felt when she first saw Charles’ face as it strained out her stretched royal vagina… well, we’ll never know.

So well done to you, Lizzy, on behalf of all at hecklerspray. God has certainly been listening each time we belt out our National Anthem before our work here starts each morning.

Here’s to another 81 years!

Read more:

Queen takes Victoria longevity mark – Press Association