Stone out of love with you

Things aren't looking that rosy for Joss Stone right now, with the Sun taking a lowly midweek album ranking of 12 and extrapolating from that the very end of her career:

Her Brits appearance made her a national laughing stock and now it looks like her meteoric fall from grace will be complete this weekend when she fails to make the Top Ten of the album charts.

Most embarrassing for Joss is that another annoying curly redhead looks set for the Top Ten.

That’s right, SIMPLY RED’s new album Stay is stuffing Joss’s effort too.

When you lose to MICK HUCKNALL in a popularity contest you know it’s time to pack your bags.

Is 12 really that bad, though? Stone has been selling this record as a repositioning (although it's arguably more of a shuffling a bit to one side) which means, presumably, expectations of having to drop and grow a new audience; it's Mothering Sunday this weekend which means the album chart is distorted by the stronger sales of uninspired gifting choices like Ray Quinn and Ben Mills; and Mick Hucknall is a knob, but he's a knob with quite a successful track record of selling large quantities of uninspired records so being bested by him isn't like being outsold by The Krankies or something.

Much as we'd love to believe that Stone is heading back to summer jobs in the Ambrosia creamery, The Sun's piece looks more like wishful thinking to us.

But then, The Sun seems to no longer have half a clue about popular culture at all: Today, it's asking readers about Tracy Barlow's murder case:

CORRIE’S Tracy Barlow is to stand trial for her lover’s murder — and we’re inviting YOU to decide if she is guilty.

Erm... twelve million people watched her character spend weeks creating a false impression of her relationship, saw her tell Charlie that she was going to kill, watched her plot and manoeuvre him into place before thumping him in a most premeditated way with a horrible ornament, before putting a knife in his hand and then spending two months grooming a teenage boy to lie for her in court. The whole bloody point is that she is guilty and the viewers know she's guilty. Really, if the Sun can't understand a simple soap opera storyline, they probably shouldn't be covering entertainment stories at all. Or the news.