Heather Mills, with apologies to Matt Groening and humour

The story in today's Sunday Mirror about Heather Mill's plans to create a cartoon family called "The McFartneys" details a bad idea taken to such rotten extremes, it sounds like it's either been made up by Paul McCartney's supporters in a ham-fisted attempt to discredit Heather (although that seems unlikely, as she needs little enough help there) or must be the result of such a long process of Chinese Whispers as to make the eventual story bear no relation to the original idea. Perhaps Heather was heard saying "I should get someone to do one of those caricatures of Paul, with a big wallet or something", and by the time it made the paper it was like this:

The bizarre animation show will portray Sir Paul as a crude Homer Simpson-like slob who spends all day smoking pot and breaking wind.

His children Stella, James and Mary are also ridiculed - while Heather paints herself as a supermum juggling her business and family life.

In one episode she also plans to feature Sir Paul's late wife Linda - who died from breast cancer in 1998 - as a ghost. Heather believes she will be able to get away with outrageous storylines as long as the McCartneys' names are changed slightly.

But, clearly, it wouldn't, and you don't even need a libel lawyer to tell you that that would leave you open to any number of legal actions; not to mention how such a strange activity would look when you came to court to fight for custody of your child.

However unlikely the project might sound, the Sunday Mirror's Michael Duffy has dug about and found Heather has established a company called - hold your sides - Raspberry Fields, and the company that administrates her personal website has, indeed, registered webnames in including McFartneys.co.uk and mcfartneys.com. Duffy also claims that the project is being trotted round animation companies, and some work is being done on development:

"The McFartneys will all get names similar to the McCartneys. So Heather will be given another flower name. This way the viewer will be able to work out who is meant to be who."

In case the subtlety of "McFartney" flies over your head, presumably.