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.

Zane Lowe is an unbearably smug son of a turd and if you disagree with that statement then you’ll probably disagree with most of this article. Ever since the days when he was sitting on a badly green-screened couch, chumming up to the Foo Fighters, Lowe has maintained the air of a man whose every musical opinion is based not on a love of music, but on a love of his own opinions on music.

The Smug-Meister-General of BBC Radio 1′s musical output has a long-running tradition of forcing his opinions down the throats of his listeners by choosing a series of “Masterpiece” albums to play, in their entirety, during his show. Thankfully this only happens once a year.

However, things are different this time.

If Zane Lowe thinks that he can force his idea of what makes a musical classic down our throats then we’re going to do the same thing to our readers, hopefully making you realise that this kind of behaviour isn’t okay. We might strap you all down and force the sounds of The Sugababes’ classic “Hole In The Head” into you, or we might just leave a link and some impassioned words from our writers.

We’ll see how we feel.

For those of you who still care about what the people who employ Chris Moyles think, the Radio 1 press person wrote these words to accompany the email:

Each show will include interviews with the artists and others involved in the making of the album, giving a fascinating insight into the stories behind the songs. Zane also takes a look at how each album since its release has influenced other artists with contributors including Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Blink 182 and Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner.

Chris Martin?! BLINK 182?! ALEX TURNER?! Why, Radio 1, with these leviathans of popular music, you are truly spoiling us but what does the Git-In-Chief have to say about his little collection?

“It gets harder every year to pick them, but this year’s four albums each hold a special place in the record collections of many, whilst at the at the same time influencing on many of today’s most successful and brilliant artists.”

It gets harder because you’re trying so hard to look like you know music Zane. The identity of the albums that Lowe has chosen (by committee) isn’t a secret but we genuinely couldn’t care less what they are so you’ll have to look elsewhere for them. Sorry chumps.

Anyway, taking a leaf out of Lowe’s Big Book of Self-Importance, we’ve come up with a list of our ‘masterpiece’ albums. No committee, no real thought. Everybody in the hecklerspray bedsit got the chance to pick one. It’s only fair.

Dare – The Human League

Mof Gimmers: Synthpop was always a ludicrous (gloriously so) genre, which showcased a retrofuturism hatched up in bedsits and motorway cafes by young men with dreadful haircuts and worse clothes. Then, Phil Oakey & Co. realised that they were sitting on something that was plain futuristic and went about making one of the finest, weirdest pop albums ever made. While ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is standard wedding fodder, it’s still a bona fide masterpiece. Backed by the catchier-than-mumps ‘Love Action’, the fierce ‘Sound Of The Crowd’ and the thunderous ‘Do Or Die’, ‘Dare’ is just about the most perfect pop-art LP ever made.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Check Your Head – Beastie Boys

Si Sharp: ‘Paul’s Boutique’ may have seen them at their lyrical peak, but 1992′s Check Your Head is the grooviest hip-hop album of all time.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Lungs – Florence & The Machine

Joanna Bolouri: Original, beautiful, quirky and downright genius. An album that could bring back longing and joy to an otherwise dead heart.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Beat Me – Electric Eel Shock

Kris Silver: An album that perfectly sums up this band of Japanese outsiders, fusing pop, punk, metal and comedy to make a collection of riotous, yet still catchy, and often funny songs about everything from politics to fishing.

Listen to it on Spotify.

We Are The Pipettes – The Pipettes

Robin Darke: Failing to invigorate the market with a reinvention of the traditional 60s girl group, this album breathes a modern interpretation into a staple of Motown history; catchy, feminism-infused and highly underrated. Get them before they turn eurodance and shi…oh.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Mr Beast – Mogwai

Michael Park: Mogwai have been producing exceptional album after exceptional album right back to 1997′s ‘Young Team’ but this attempt from 2006 is one of their most accessible. Rolling crescendoes and haunting lulls, what’s not to like?

Listen to it on Spotify.

Actually – The Pet Shop Boys

Sophie Hall: It’s the one with ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ on it – a song which would upgrade ‘Disappointing second Hear’say Album’ to ‘Best contribution to sound in the universe’ in a mere moment.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Hootenanny – The Replacements

Lauren Mullineaux: It might not be their finest album, but it captures a band on the brink of unappreciated greatness and showed the self-deprecating maturity of Westerberg’s lyrics.  Besides the man is a genius.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Second Toughest In The Infants – Underworld

Matthew Laidlow: Comprising multiple styles from lounge to drum & bass, progressive electro to full-on acid, Second Toughest In The Infants is an album that sounds as fresh today as when it first came out, especially when coupled with the rambling, confusing lyrics of Karl Hyde.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Get them all on one, big Spotify playlist so that you can impress people at parties.

So there you have it, readers. Nine classic albums from the furthest reaches of musical taste (and decency), all delivered to you without the need for a three hour retrospective starring Chris Martin and Alex Turner.

You might not like all of the albums on our list but do feel free to tell us your ‘masterpiece’ albums in the comments. Or slag off Zane Lowe. It’s really up to you.

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Yes it’s that time of year where Twitter is all aflutter with talk of moustaches and novels. The nights have finished drawing in and the drunken abandon of Hallowe’en has passed into the forgotten annals of Facebook albums to be ignored until next year.

Winter’s here and it’s a time for soup, fires, books and growing a moustache and forgetting to do it for charity (yeah, you’re supposed to get yourself sponsored, you unbearable poseur). Winter’s also a time of reflection when we look back and realise that we’ve done nothing to inspire or improve the world. You know, that feeling that everyone gets where they want to make the world a better place by forcing their insufferable platitudes upon an uninterested populace?

Well, most people.

It’s an old cliché that everyone has “one novel in them” and the NaNoWriMo scheme does its best to prove the point by having a set month for people to blurt out whatever nonsense is lolling around in their brains, having a proverbial mud-wrestle with smutty jokes and opinions on X Factor contestants. NaNoWriMo is a bit like school.

People need structure to create their best work and signing up for NaNoWriMo gives it to you, whether you like it or not. You have thirty days to write a novel. Easy as that, right? Everyone’s been planning their great page-turner since the last National Novel Writing Month ended.

Actually, no-one has.

What does signing up for the scheme get you? Well, you can meet up with like-minded people who are also trying to write the next great novel within the confines of thirty days. What qualifies these kindred spirits to do this? Why, they have laptops and Starbucks loyalty cards! You can get uppity about that if you want but their “coat of arms” leaves that heavy implication.

The National Novel Writing Month website claims that you, yes YOU, can write a novel in a month. C’mon! It’s easy! Anyone can do it! It doesn’t even have to be good! Just give us some money! What? Of course it’s for char- oh… servers are charity, right?

Look, let’s face facts. If you want to write a novel, you don’t have to sign up to do it in a month, try to cram as much into it as possible and wail about it on twitter so that people think you’re being brave. Sure anyone can write a novel and if you are writing a novel then kudos to you. Even if it never sees the light of day, at least you’ve had a bash at it. You can be proud of that.

Still though, why would anyone feel the need to register to write a book?

It could be because to write a novel, there’s no support structure. We don’t mean “people there to help”, there are plenty of industry vultures looking to do people down in the pursuit of a quick buck, we mean the social networking crutch structure. The only reason to sign up and dedicate a month of your life to writing a novel is so that everyone can give you a nice big pat on the back and say, “My word, look at how clever you’re being. I can’t wait to read it.”

Perhaps when it rolls around to the 14th November you can send them the two-page long, tear-stained manuscript that will stand forever as testament to your failure. If you even remember that you signed up by that point.

With the loss of Jools Holland’s iconic “Later…” until its new series begins in the Spring, BBC bosses are desperately scrabbling around looking for a new show to fill their most important quota of all.

A lot of our readers might not know that the BBC has a number of quotas that they have to fulfil on a weekly basis.

From the news output quota that all terrestrial television channels must adhere to to quotas regarding race, religion and sexuality (possibly) but there is one of the BBC’s quotas that is less well known and that hecklerspray can exclusively reveal to you today.

The Smugness Quota (1991)

In 1991 the BBC was found wanting in crucial areas of televisual broadcasting. They were doing well in spite of budget constraints to show well-appointed dramas and quizzes but their musical output largely took the form of the utterly acceptable Top of the Pops. They needed something with verve and panache to come out and say “We’re here, we’re middle class and we thoroughly love a good, performance of live music presented by someone with a musical pedigree!”

Thus, in 1992, Later… with Jools Holland was born. He might not have been the automatic choice but his show automatically smashed the BBC’s new Smugness Quota in one week. It was then that they realised they needed to keep the show as long as possible. Government quotas on showing smug middle-class people quietly bopping their heads while a black metal outfit declares their hatred for… well… everything.

The pretension is obvious for all to see but it’s not until Jools finds his big moment, his one massive opportunity to interject that we suddenly see Later… for what it is – a quota filler.

The BBC manages not show any smug bastards during the week, storing it up for a Friday night when it shows them all in one. It’s a wonder that anyone without the latest 3D LED TV can watch the show without the wave of cripplingly self-satisfied judgement smashing their televisions into a million pieces.

Jools can hear a break-down in the black metal and thinks “yes!” he steps forward, snapping his chubby fingers in delight as he positions his arse over the stool. There’s nothing stopping him now. You’re about to hear it. A musical marriage of black metal and boogie-woogie. Two genres that no-one in the audience likes but yet they sit there applauding, whooping and hollering as the talented tips of Holland’s fingers glide across the keys.

Of course, now the BBC only has one opportunity to fill it until Spring and that’s Jools’ annual mutu-wank on New Year’s Eve. They need something else and we have a suggestion.

Combine the formats of Later… and Total Wipeout. Instead of having Richard Hammond desperately looking to laugh at members of the public being thrown from dangerous inflatable obstacles, why not have bands try to play at different instruments positioned throughout the course, having to run from one to the other while a group of champagne swilling minor celebrities sit around wine bar tables at the side of the course, inconsiderately talking amongst themselves.

As a topper for this idea they’ll be joined from a studio (via satellite link-up) by Jools himself who will be needlessly accompanying the bands on a spinet while also playing comedy ditties when they inevitably fall in the water, electrocuting themselves with the residual charge from their amps. Naturally, Jools won’t find this funny and the preening cocks who sit beside the water will only look up from their self-involved conversation to applaud the end of the music and the beginning of the next one.

A depressing vision it might be, but it would smash the quota on a weekly basis.

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Stephen Fry is the Dad we wished we all had here at Hecklerspray, mainly because he’s less drinky-drinky-touchy-feely than our real Dads, but also because he’s so loveable and he loves technology.

Fry has always showcased his love for technology and yesterday conducted the first ever newspaper interview via twitter, in which he used the popular but ultimately pointless and constantly broken social network to talk to the only man in the UK with a name more ridiculous than (the sparkly new editor of Hecklerspray) Mof Gimmers. The impossibly smug Johann Hari.

Johann the man seemed to be hoping to get a few followers out of this as without following him it just looked like Stephen Fry had had a bit of a breakdown and decided the best way to advertise this to the world was starting to interview himself live on the internet, in a way that was too clever for us to really make fun of. Think Mel Gibson’s phone rants mixed with the Times crossword.

Hari also seemed to spend a bit too long asking Stephen Fry about his appearance and aspects of his love life. A ‘proper’ journalist would tell you that this is because, as a sufferer of manic-depression, Fry’s image of himself appears to be horribly distorted, to the point where he seems to look in the mirror and sees a man with Michael Jackson’s face and Rick Waller’s body staring back at him.

However, after much discussion within the not-so-serious confines of the Hecklerspray office, it was obvious that the reason for all the personal questions was because Hari fancies being the yoghurt pot to Fry’s spoon (apologies if that’s put you off your lunch, especially once you know what Hari looks like).

The self described, “European Social Democrat,” who managed to call the Dalai Lama a bitch, then proceeded to name drop Dolly Parton and Busted during the pre-amble, couldn’t be more of a smug faced goon if he tried.

Sorry if I’ve now ruined yoghurt for you, blame Johann.

George Clooney may well be a huge ball of smugness, thinking he knows better than all of us – but he doesn’t think that highly of himself, it would appear.

Well, he probably does still think highly of himself. In fact, there’s no ‘probably’ about it.

Anyway, Georgey apparently doesn’t think enough of himself to advise presidential candidate and Paris Hilton/Britney Spears-alike Barack Obama, despite reports emerging that claimed otherwise.

No, it would seem that George Clooney just thinks he’s better than us ‘normies’, as he may well like to call us, and only feels it prudent to educate (‘patronise’) and entertain (‘annoy with smug fat face’) the plebians – not those of a better stock, like candidates for the US presidency.

Well doesn’t that just make you feel a whole lot better? Not only is he not trying to influence possible future leaders, but he will still try and talk down to us as much as humanly possible.

But we’ve seen you in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, George – we all know what levels you’ll stoop to, and we simply can’t respect you for it. Take that!

It was reported by the Los Angeles Times on Friday that Clooney “frequently text messages the Illinois senator with whom he’s been friends for many years.”

Granted, if it were true then the texts would probably just amount to daily questions along the lines of: ‘have you bought a hybrid car yet? I have, I’ve bought ten, actually.’, ‘have you installed solar panels on your house yet? I have, I’ve got more than you.’ or ‘do you pay attention to your carbon footprint? I do – I pay loads more attention than you do’.

But George was quick to deny involvement with the senator, issuing a statement through his publicist which read:

“I have never texted or emailed Senator Obama. And I’ll offer a million dollars to anyone who could prove otherwise. In fact, I’ve only talked to the Senator once in the last year and a half….on the phone,”

The topic of conversation during the phonecall wasn’t revealed, but we can speculate it covered one or more of our potential text message topics listed above. It is easier to talk than it is to text, after all, but putting up with the smugtitude of Clooney while having to listen to his voice at the same time is something that most sane people wouldn’t be able to cope with.

This makes hecklerspray think that maybe the call didn’t cover those topics.

The statement did have more words in it, and amazingly they didn’t bother trying to lecture us at any point. It went on:

“I’ve spent more time with Senator McCain (he did my TV show) than I have with Senator Obama.

“I would hope that my friend John McCain would join me in condemning this kind of politics. Although I support Senator Obama I would never be dumb enough to offer policy advice to either candidate. They seem to be doing fine without me.”

There – proof if proof be need be that George Clooney thinks he is better than you, but not some men who pretend to care about their country. The big ruddy smug git.

Reports that Clooney, after issuing the statement, went for a walk and talked to 34 different grown adults as if they were toddlers were unconfirmed at the time of posting this. But we can assume he probably did anyway. While wearing a big UN badge.