Gordon in the morning: Sticky backed plastic

What the hell is this horror, from The Sun?

No, it's not someone who looks like Noel Gallagher being sought through a dodgy e-fit; instead, it's the team at The Sun trying to imagine what Noel Gallagher would look like wearing a Blue Peter badge.

They're going to be charging to look at stuff like this soon, you know.

Gordon in the morning: Aguilera fitter

Beci Wood takes to the Bizarre column to suggest there's something not-quite-right about a magazine cover:

CHRISTINA Aguilera turns back the clock with a VERY Dirrty magazine photoshoot.
[...]
Christina's body also appears to have been remodelled — indicating the photoshop wizards have been hard at work.
[...]
It's just a shame magazines feel the need to get the airbrush out.

Hang about... this is someone in The Sun complaining about reality being manipulated to make something fit the needs of a publication? Really?

Still, two cheers for The Sun taking a stand against setting up ridiculous expectations of body image. Clearly, Beci isn't the sort of person who is part of the journalistic trend of tutting over women's bodies reacting to food and the passage of time...

The 31-year-old star's yo-yo'ing body shape has been the subject of many discussions.

In the snaps a chain metal belt is wrapped around the star's 'waist' while her arms look much thinner than recent images we've seen as she poses hand on hips.

Oh. So this faux outrage about photoshop is just an excuse to point out that sometimes women's body shapes change when they have babies. At least the Mail doesn't pretend to be concerned.

I'm indebted to Michael M, by the way, for pointing out a story from Gordon Smart - with his actual byline - from last Sunday's News Of The World ("Sun on Sunday"): Woman eats breakfast in restaurant.

Gordon in the morning: A certain age

From all the excitement, you might imagine that One Direction are actually going to play what Gordon charmingly calls "an Old Folk's home". Except they've just vaguely said that it might be nice to do.

It hasn't stopped Gordon firing up the MS Paint, though:

It's not entirely clear why the band would turn into old men if they played such a venue.

It gives Gordon the chance to run through a few senior citizen cliches:

ONE Direction will have to lay on some louder speakers for a future gig.
[...]
The only thing he'll have to watch out for are flying mints.

I'm surprised Gordon didn't find a photo of an elderly man sitting looking all confused and lost. Here's one he could have:

Gordon in the morning: Plastic punks

The news that One Direction's management have shoved their hapless noisesacks off in a "rock" direction is amusing enough in its own right:

ONE Direction are gaining a reputation as hellraisers so its no surprise they're working with a US punk-pop svengali.

Some of the lads' new material has a rock influence inspired by American producer and writer Matt Squire.

It gets better though. Squire has worked with Good Charlotte, and they're "punk" (in the way that McDonalds is a "restaurant"), and so Gordon has decided that... well, this will be the result:

Yes, that's Gordon's "mock up" of what a punk band might look like.

Gordon in the morning: Nobody pastes baby on a Corden

Good news for James Corden, a father for a first time.

How does Gordon celebrate this happy event? With a photoshop horror:

Take a moment to enjoy just how shoddy that work is, by the way - the jagged shoulder, whatever the hell is going on round the neck. This is Britain's biggest selling newspaper, by the way, not a sixth form project.

The photo is captioned "Top of the tot ... tracksuit like one Smithy wears" which, erm, explains everything.

Are you interested in what Justin Bieber thinks of Dancing On Ice?

Could you pretend you are?

In a piece with the headline teaser 'Biber: I'll skate on ice show', the poppet actually says:

Justin, 17, has just one condition, saying: "Next time I see David Beckham I will say that if he agrees to do it then so will I."

In much the same way that I will run naked down Kensington High Street - on condition the Queen does it first, then.

Gordon in the morning: Two of us getting nowhere

Paul McCartney made a fateful mistake yesterday of saying something vaguely nice about Jedward, and thus has been rewarded with Gordon's team not just doing a bog-standard 'oooh, imagine if we stuck Jedward hair on a photo of Macca' bit of photoshoddy, but also Beatles songs amusingly tweaked to make satirical comment on the twins.

By 'amusingly', of course, I mean 'why? why? why would you do such a thing?' This would be the best:

1. Ballad of John and Edward

To be fair, Gordon hasn't put his name to this - step forward, Sean Hamilton, and take a bow.

Gordon in the morning: What's new, pussycat?

For some reason, nobody at The Sun has deemed Gordon's story about Megan Fox playing Catwoman worthy of putting behind a "buy the paper" pay fence.

And I have a strong feline she is the purrfect choice for the part - and thanks to a spot of computer wizardry here's how she might look.

Even with cat puns (of the sort being made even while the Egyptians were first domesticating kittens) and somebody photoshopping a pair of rubber ears on Megan Fox?

Slipping into the famous PVC catsuit always looked like a tricky business to me.

This would be more a impressive observation, were it not slap bang under a picture of Halle Berry as Catwoman not wearing a PVC catsuit. Or a catsuit at all. Or PVC.

Elsewhere, Smart runs yet another non-story about JLS:

JLS have been given an official warning by their management company to curb their big spending.

This is accompanied by photo of one of them ordering some food at a McDonalds drive-through. Which, naturally, is the sort of place where the paparazzi usually hang out, and not somewhere a band's management would have to send their own photographer to. In the new pay-per-Smart future, when you read this sort of advertorial, I'm guessing you'll get cashback.

Woot-ton: It takes a village

Despite the terribly thin nature of Dan Wootton's Celeb XS, it's now apparently got two other chaps helping Dan fill it out. Simon Freeman and Simon 'presumably not the Simon Ward' Ward are helping Dan come up with stuff like this, on Victoria Beckham's acting aspirations:

She's clearly a Shakespeare fan if the name of her six-year-old son Romeo is anything to go by.

Ye-e-es. I'm not sure that 'the name of a child' is going to be much of an indication that she's going to be hoping for a crack at The Tempest.

Still, Dan and Simon and Simon have excelled themselves at getting their "art guys" to mock up how Beckham might look at acting:

Rupert Murdoch desperately wants to put quality like this behind a paywall, you know.

Gordon in the morning: Love you til Luton

Virginia Wheeler is still Gordon's closest-thing-to-a-writer in Malawi, and is still shovelling out Madonna-camp-pleasing coverage:

The boss of Mercy’s orphanage, the Kondanani Children’s Home, said the youngster “could not understand where her new family had gone”.

Annie Chikhwaza said: “It’s devastating for Mercy. She had bonded with her new family and was calling for Madonna, saying, ‘Where is my Mummy?’

“She couldn’t understand where Lola, David and Rocco had gone — she thought they were playing hide and seek. It broke my heart to see her crying out for David as they’d become inseparable."

Virginia doesn't see this as being a good example of why you shouldn't make promises to children until you're bloody certain you can make good on them. She doesn't suggest that the whole thing suggests that the orphanage has been placing Madonna's needs ahead of those of Mercy. She doesn't think to question Chikhwaza's odd claims - why would Mercy think the other kids were "playing hide and seek"? It's not like they were living at the orphanage, is it? Wouldn't Mercy just assume they'd gone back to their nicer place to live? Isn't this sort of statement more about trying to manipulate press coverage and court decisions rather than telling the truth?

Although Mercy does have a good point: where is Madonna?

Madonna, 50, flew to Britain with kids Lourdes, 12, Rocco, eight, and adopted three-year-old David Banda, greeted at Luton Airport by Madge’s ex-hubby GUY RITCHIE.

But the devastated singer cut a forlorn figure as she stepped alone from the private plane.

Given that one of the reasons she was turned down as an adoptor was a lack of time spent in the country, and if she was really that devastated, why was she in Luton? If we take Wheeler's reportage at face value, what we seem to have is a desperately upset child, and a woman who claims to care about that child puts thousands of miles between them.

Normally, Gordon's work on Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell being up for the same award would not detain us, but connosieurs of bad photoshop will enjoy the terrible, terrible boxing-mock-up-artwork.

Gordon in the morning: But... but... you're meant to be pretty

Yesterday, Gordon Smart ran one of the leaked year-old pictures from the aborted Hard Candy sessions, and oozed all over it:

I wonder if Lady G will look as good when she hits 50.

Today, he runs one of the leaked pictures from the aborted Hard Candy sessions, and is disgusted:

WHEN I set eyes on this picture of MADONNA yesterday I felt for the first time that I had seen enough of her posing in her undercrackers.

It is the latest photo released to promote Madge’s album Hard Candy, but it’s how I’d promote Saga holidays for the over-50s.

The difference, of course, is that today's picture isn't retouched. Oh, and none of these pictures have been "released to promote" anything, have they, Gordon? They've been leaked. Which is why the picture you're running is un-retouched.

The boys’ observations were a bit more simple... that she looks like the terrifying Zelda from TV’s Terrahawks.

Let's hope, erm, Lady Gaga looks as good when... sorry, what did you say yesterday, Gordon?

Elsewhere, Gordon runs some pointless long-lens shots of Pink in a bikini, concluding somewhat oddly:

Her display is another reason why I’m glad I never had a sister.

Why? Because you'd be worried some creepy pervert would take sneaky pictures of her arse and then sell them to his creepy mates?

Oh, look, Mariah Carey's clothes have fallen off

What's more interesting than the naked picture of Mariah Carey on the cover of the latest Interview (naked if you don't count airbrushing as clothes, of course) is that she seems to have done a complete about-face on the breakdown that never happened. Now, it seems, it happened - but it was a learning experience:

“I consider the breakdown a breakthrough - I needed to hit rock bottom, however it happened.

“I needed to understand the cost of pushing so hard, fighting so hard against the system.

“You just can’t beat the system when they’re against you and are that strong…. But was I out of control at that moment? Yes. I believe that it happened for a reason.”

It's too early in the morning for us to ring round a representative cross-section of community activists, but it's surprising to discover that Mariah fought the system - like a Chuck D in a push-up bra. We could have sworn she just had a falling-out with the bloke who told her to build a career on something other than jiggling her breasts and instead went out jiggle her breasts. Submitting to that seems to be less "fighting the system", more like lubing yourself to help glide the system on its way.

Almost literally.

But perhaps we're being unfair. We await discovery of Carey's part in the Faslane Peace Camp.

Stone fuming as Harpers change her head

We've got some sympathy with Joss Stone, who's apparently more than a little vexed that Harpers Bazaar have photoshopped her cover shoot - they've changed her hair colour from ill-advised pink strands to brown, and airbrushed her nose-ring out. It's not clear why: either the magazine thinks she's stylish enough to warrant a cover, or she isn't. If you're going to use a Mac man to turn your subject into your idea of perfection, you might as well stick anyone on the front.

It's totally dishonest - and even more shamingly, when the Mail asked about the alterations, the magazine still refused to fess up:

"All we can say is that we've had nothing but positive feedback from people," a spokesman for Harper's Bazaar tells me. "I can't confirm whether her nose ring and hair were digitally altered."

It might only be a photo of a declining minor celebrity, but any publication which dicks about with reality and doesn't alert its readers to the fact is on very dodgy ground indeed. It's especially insulting that one of the other stories in the current issue is about Anna Politkovskaya. How better to pay tribute to someone murdered for their journalistic pursuit of truth by sticking her in a magazine that can't even be honset about someone's hair colour?