Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun… Flash! Pakow! Ahhh!

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!

Thanks to the ongoing writers' strike, shows like 24 have been indefinitely postponed much to everyone's disappointment – but on the other hand the Golden Globes might be cancelled too, so it all evens out.

The Golden Globes – the all-singing, all-dancing, glitzy, foreign-voted cousin to the Oscars – is set to take place on Sunday, but the writers' strike means that it will be boycotted by all the nominees if it gets televised by NBC as planned. And now the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is pushing NBC to not broadcast the awards at all so that the stars won't face picket lines on their way in. Of course, without cameras there to capture them in their pretty dresses and painstaking make-up jobs, there's a good chance that the cast of Desperate Housewives will disintegrate into clouds of dust at some point during the ceremony, but that's the chance they'll have to take.

We take everything back about awards season. Everything at all. We know we've been laying into it for a couple of months now, saying that the whole thing is nothing more that a series of excuses for actors to publicly congratulate each other for being so brilliant at repeating a handful of words off a piece of paper at a time in funny costumes, but in reality this might just be the best awards season ever.

And that's all down to the striking writers. Sure, the Writers Guild Of America strike has meant that your favourite TV shows – and Heroes – aren't getting made properly, that the sequel to The Da Vinci Code has been postponed and that Jay Leno has been told off for telling a bunch of lame jokes off the top of his head, but it also means that the Golden Globes might not be on TV this year.

You know the Golden Globes – the award ceremony that's like the Oscars except Sharon Stone gets to do a nauseating retrospective highlight show filled with preposterously unconvincing fake laughter beforehand. This year it looks like Atonement might win a lot of Golden Globes, only you probably won't see it because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organisers of the Golden Globes, wants NBC to drop the broadcast of the ceremony to stop it turning into a no-star farce.

You see, if the Golden Globes are televised, then nobody from the Screen Actors Guild will show up. And that means that there'll be nobody to present the awards and nobody to receive them. According to SAG president Alan Rosenberg:

"After considerable outreach to Golden Globe actor nominees and their
representatives over the past several weeks, there appears to be
unanimous agreement that these actors will not cross WGA picket lines
to appear on the Golden Globe Awards as acceptors or presenters."

So today NBC will make the decision whether to go ahead with the Golden Globes broadcast even though it'll consist of an empty plinth in front of rows and rows of empty chairs, whether to delay it for a few weeks while it negotiates with the WGA or whether to drop it from the schedules completely and let the ceremony take place away from television.

Fingers crossed that it won't be the last option, because we don't know if we'd be able to cope knowing that somebody was handing out awards to actors behind our backs. To think, it's a possibility that this time next week the only way we'll know the Golden Globes even happened is by the four billion newspaper pictures of Cameron Diaz twatting about on the red carpet in a dress that she's clearly 15 years too old for. And what a kick in the nuts that'd be.

Read more:

With stars dimming NBC may unplug Globes – Reuters