Gordon in the morning: Where is Beatles band?

Meanwhile, Gordon is all excited about the Beatles reissues:

BEATLEMANIA is back - blasting the Fab Four back into the Top Ten with a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues in just one day.

Woo-hoo! We're with The Be... hang about...

How many sales?

a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues

50,000? But weren't there 14 albums released? 50,000 records spread over 14 titles comes out at an average of... well, sales that would make Speech Debelle's pre-Mercury figures look like Elvis Presley.

All of that coverage, and they manage to only flog fifty thousand albums?

Helpfully, Gordon runs the midweek chart, complete with sales figures:

1 (-) Kings & Queens
Jamie T - 17,568

2 (2) We'll Meet Again
The Very Best Of Vera Lynn - 14,092

3 (1) Humbug
Arctic Monkeys - 10,495

4 (-) Ignore The Ignorant
The Cribs - 10,137

5 (3) One Love
David Guetta - 9,458

6 (4) Only By The Night
Kings Of Leon - 8,356

7 (-) Abbey Road
The Beatles - 7,164

8 (-) Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - 7,002

9 (5) The End
Black Eyed Peas - 6,354

10 (8) Lungs
Florence & The Machine - 6,090

11 (6) Sunny Side Up
Paolo Nutini - 6,054

12 (-) Revolver
The Beatles - 6,048

13 (-) The Beatles (Stereo Box Set)
The Beatles - 5,867

14 (10) Songs For You Truths For Me
James Morrison - 5,798

15 (-) Rubber Soul
The Beatles - 5,239

Now, to be fair, The Beatles albums did only come into the shops on Tuesday, which means that everyone else had a whole extra twenty-four hours to tot up sales, but even so - given that this was meant to somehow prove that The Beatles were the greatest band ever by storming the charts - it has wound up with them looking a poor second to Vera Lynn.

Yes, they're old albums, and the sales figures aren't bad for back catalogue - but the sheer heft of press coverage suggested we were meant to be viewing this in those terms. As it is, their sales are around the level of a Kings Of Leon record nudging its first anniversary. That's about a quarter of a sale per column inch.

Elsewhere: The love of JLS exhibited by Gordon Smart's pages is bizarre, but understandable - quids pro quo and keeping Simon Cowell happy.

The obsession with slowly chipping away at N-Dubz, though, is bemusing. Following on from announcing that Dappy's juvenilia consisted of raps about stabbing and policemen, and stabbing policemen comes a story today, filed by Jess Rogers, which drags up a "secret" conviction:

RAP star DAPPY has a secret conviction for spitting in a girl's face during a drunken brawl.

It wasn't actually secret - the suggestion there was something hushed-up about it just seems to be a simple way of explaining how Gordon Smart's well-resourced reporting engine didn't happen to report the conviction when it happened.

Dappy - real name Costas Contostavlos - had kept the incident quiet.

Now, what he did was a nasty thing, and it's right to condemn it, but what does Rogers mean by "keeping it quiet"? It was in a public court, and he's been doing community service. Admittedly, he didn't issue a press release - but then that's understandable, isn't it?

And - to be fair to Gordon's team - back when this happened nobody would have been much interested. Equally, though, nobody's very interested in Dappy now, either, and yet Gordon seems determined to bring him down. All somewhat curious.