Gordon in the morning: Won't someone sign Simon off?

As we come to terms with the apparent paradox that, the duller the X Factor blood-sausages are, the more people watch them straining to grab at a tune, what news this morning of Simon Cowell?

Leigh Holmwood has news, and it's not pretty:

SIMON Cowell has admitted he can feel so overloaded with work that he suffers dark moods and feels "trapped" by his fame.

The X Factor boss, 50, claimed his job was sometimes like a "tidal wave" due to all his responsibilities - and it can "get too much".

I imagine this includes quite a lot of sitting round with his head in his hands, sobbing "what have I done? What have I done?" while the ghost of Gareth Gates rattles at him.

Oh, but it gets so much worse:

He said: "I get to a point where I get overloaded, where you can have a week or a month where you're responsible for so many things. You have to deal with so many people.

"This can go on from leaving the office until five or six in the morning.

"You just have enough and it's just too much information and at that point I will go on my own somewhere and work it out in my head.

"Sometimes you feel it's like a tidal wave of stuff that continues to come."

Good news, Simon - we've checked, and - on all current projections - if you didn't turn up at work for a period of all the years you have left on the Earth, nobody at all will die. There would also be positive results: the supply of low-cost childrens' entertainers would increase, and the entire world would be happier. There are even suggestions that people might start to wonder what the point of Piers Morgan is.

So, please, feel free to take some time to yourself. Perhaps a hunting holiday with Dick Cheney?

The source of this story is interesting, by the way:

In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight to be shown tonight, presenter Kirsty Wark asked if he ever suffered "dark moods". Simon replied: "Yeah, don't you?"

So, the Sun has, in effect, lifted an entire interview from the BBC.

I don't know why, but I have the strange urge to post this from earlier in the year:

In an interview with Australia's Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, [Rupert Murdoch] was asked why he expects Internet users to accept his plan to charge readers to access his newspapers' stories online when they can read the news for free on other Web sites such as the BBC's.

"But we're better," he said in the interview broadcast Saturday. "And anyway, if you look at them, most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we'll be suing them for copyright. They'll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world when they can't steal from newspapers."

But he said he didn't think the matter would end up in a courtroom.

"They know the law," he said. "They will adapt."

You know, I bet Newsnight runs pretty much the same interview Bizarre have today. Feel Rupe's flexible-morality wrath, BBC.

Elsewhere, Elton John is hot again:

ELTON JOHN is back at the centre of a record company bidding war - 40 years on from when he first became a star.

Given that Gordon backs this up with a nameless, vague quote, you'll be surprised that even the back-up fails to stack-up the headline:

A source said: "Elton says he's writing his most exciting new stuff for years - possibly decades.

"Working with P'Nau has got the creative juices flowing again.

"They have got a load of big companies sniffing around."

"Sniffing around" is a little different from "engaging in a bidding war" - this sounds more like Elton's team trying to talk up the price of a deal from where I'm sitting.