Gordon in the morning: Cheque-mate

It's one of those mornings when Gordon has a good story. Faced with the potential loss of thousands of pounds in refunds from the bollocksed-up Heaton Park gig, Oasis have a plan:

Now Oasis are issuing refunds on cheques signed by LIAM and NOEL GALLAGHER and bearing a “Bank of Burnage” stamp, after the Manchester area where the brothers grew up.

This is reminiscent of that urban myth about the company which took payments for dildos, and instead of sending the product, sent out cheques for marked "Dildo refund". The hope being that people would be too ashamed to pay such a cheque into their banks.

I'm not saying that an Oasis gig is like a dildo, of course. A dildo can bring great pleasure, for a start, and can offer a number of surprising experiences.

The only problem with the plan, though, is that clearly Noel and Liam haven't actually signed 20,000 cheques. So they're hoping that people cheeky enough to demand a refund are going to want to keep a facsimile signature forever.

AEG come up with a cunning plan

There's a number of stories swirling about at the moment that the death of Michael Jackson is possibly going to pull AEG down with it - the weekend papers reported that the company had been unable to insure the entire run of O2 gigs as the insurers didn't believe Jacko would manage them all; AEG could be millions in the hole by the time it refunds all the ticket holders.

Its plan B? To try and tell punters to forgo their refunds and see the tickets as 'collector's items' instead:

Company president Randy Phillips said of Jackson: "The world lost a kind soul who just happened to be the greatest entertainer the world has ever known.

"Since he loved his fans in life, it is incumbent upon us to treat them with the same reverence and respect after his death."

The company will not be printing more of the tickets and it anticipates the originals will become collectors' items."

You know... collectors' items. Probably should hold on to them, then, right? We'll keep your... sorry, curate your money, you keep the ticket. Who wouldn't swap £75 for a collector's item, right?