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.

But, no, actually perhaps things will be different this year. Perhaps Paula Abdul will be able to get through a season of American Idol sanely, sensibly and without drawing attention to her worst characteristics like she usually does.

What? Paula Abdul's gone and had a 10-minute emotional breakdown in an airport? And she started talking like a poltergeist? Lordy.

Maybe we should start acting mental all the time, you know. Look at Paula Abdul – hardly a day passes without her managing to claw through the walls of logic and do something genuinely stupefying, like punch herself in the nose with a chihuahua or scream about diarrhoea into a telephone, and all the American Idol contestants are like "Woooo! Ohmigaaaaaah! Paula Abdul, you totally mean so much to me!"

And, despite spending our entire lives trying to avoid public displays of wibbling emotion, what do we get? The occasional comment from people calling us biased pricks, that's what. Where's the justice?

Anyway, a new season of American Idol is set to start, and that means Paula Abdul will have to crank up her derange-o-scope if she wants to make the public worry about her mental wellbeing nearly as much as in previous years. Remember that last year Courtney Love almost replaced Paula as an American Idol judge? Courtney pissing Love! So it's fair to say that Paula Abdul has her work cut out for her if she wants to keep up that juddering level of instability this year.

So hats off to Paula Abdul, then, for announcing the start of American Idol 2008 by apparently having a bewildering emotional breakdown in an airport where she started wailing like a poltergeist in front of everyone. A source told Radaronline:

"She had an insane nervous breakdown that lasted 10 minutes. One minute she was hyperventilating and on the verge of passing out; the next she was yelling into her cell phone in this deep, rage-filled Poltergeist voice. She kept screaming three names over and over—Michael, Sidney, and Leslie. Everyone was staring at her, but she didn't care."

Perhaps, if this report is true, there's more to this than Paula Abdul just being Paula Abdul. Perhaps it's a thinly-veiled warning to Amy Winehouse to make sure she knows who the crazy airport behaviour patch belongs to.

And, just think, this is Paula Abdul right at the beginning of American Idol. Who knows what zany, slightly disturbing antics she'll have gotten up to by the time American Idol skids to an exhausted close in the middle of the year? We know it's improper of us to ask but, Paula, you'd make us the happiest people on earth if you could tailor one of your episodes around holding a turd like a biro and writing on the walls of your house.

Read more:

Paula Abdul's Airport Flip-Out – Radar Online