Lady GaGa, Simpsons pool lack of ideas

There's something so crushingly inevitable about Lady GaGa trumpeting into the Simpsons it's hard to even gather your thoughts against the sound of the bottom of two barrels being scraped simultaneously.

The teaser, which she posted on Wednesday, shows Gaga mania spreading through the Simpson's hometown of Springfield and features clips of the pop star in some of her trademark outfits, including a flame-spitting bra and her meat dress.

Baby Maggie Simpson gets dressed up in platform heels to mimic the music superstar.

Sigh. Of course she does.

And I bet Moe wears a meat dress, and gets attacked by racoons. Or it might be Barney, and it might be bears; or Edna and crows. And Homer will sing one of the songs but get the words hilariously wrong - maybe he'll make one of the songs about donuts or beer.

If anyone needs me, I'm going to be dragging the satellite dish off the wall.

Gordon in the morning: Here he comes again

Gordon is - briefly - bang on the money this morning:

YOU would be forgiven for thinking that little JOE McELDERRY had slipped into obscurity after winning The X Factor last year.

Thats, erm, because he's slipped back into obscurity.

He has, however, to trudge through the motions of putting out a record, and, keen to keep the Cowell/ITV axis happy, Smart tries to pretend that this is going to be an event:

The Geordie lad is jetting out to LA to put together his masterpiece, and the wait will soon be over.

He told me he is expected to have it all wrapped up and ready for release in October.

Yes, the wait. I bet HMV are sick of people popping in like that old chocolate advert going "any news yet?" All over the nation, piggy banks groan under the weight of pennies saved in the Joe McWhateveritwas album fund.

But Gordon has more:

In an interesting twist of fate, Joe could find himself going up against his former rival OLLY MURS in the charts.

That has to be the most inaccurate use of the word "interesting" in recorded history.

Two people? Releasing an album within a few months of each other? That would be...

X Factor runner-up Olly is also due to have something out around that time. That will make for a good old-fashioned chart battle.

Perhaps, Gordon. Although a fight for the number 37 slot is hardly going to bring the camera crews running.

In other parts of Gordon's forest, there's a lot of Murdochy-cross-promotion of Russell Brand's appearance in The Simpsons. This is treated as if it's something incredible, rather than now a job which occurs shortly after your second appearance on Leno and shortly before the first invite to a Pro-Celebrity Horseshoe Toss.

Still, he's following in a long line of cameos, isn't he, Gordon?

But his latest acting achievement puts him up there with movie greats like MARLON BRANDO ... he's bagged a role in The Simpsons.

That's odd. Brando never actually played himself in The Simpsons, he was just Dan Castellaneta doing a silly voice. Why would Gordon single out Brando rather than, say, Tom Hanks or Coldplay or... hang about, what's the headline?

New Brand'oh

Oh.

And, more importantly, it secures priceless bragging rights over close pal NOEL GALLAGHER, who has only ever been yellow with hangover pain.

I suspect that simply Americans knowing who he is gives Brand that power, Gordon.

Decade Null: 2000 - Yo La Tengo

Let's Save Tony Orlando's House. After 2000, not simply a telethon hosted by Troy McLure, but also a track on Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Here, live, in 2008:



[Part of Decade Null: 2000]

Coldplay: They'll be all yellow

Given that The Simpsons has already featured cameos from Bono and Tony Blair, the standard for getting onto the series has been clearly shifted towards "being well-known", so it was probably only a matter of time before Coldplay turned up.

Yes, more than ever confirming that "a cameo in The Simpsons" has become so prevalent that it's known as "following in the footsteps of Ed Begley Jr", Chris Martin and... uh, the others - is one of them called Tomsk? - will be drawn with overbites:

Chris Martin will play himself in the episode in which Coldplay perform a private show for Bart and Homer, after Homer wins a million dollars in the lottery.

Long-running sitcom featuring blue collar family winning big on the lottery resulting in a meeting with bizarrely popular English entertainers? What could possibly go wrong, eh?

Newton turns yellow

The answers to our spot the difference competition is one is yellow, two dimensional and would be incapable of writing a newspaper column of any consequence; the other one isn't yellow. Mr. Murdoch's tabloid comes out in support of Mr. Murdoch's film of Mr. Murdoch's television channel's programme The Simpsons.

Re: our gig at Deptford Abyss - who the hell does Matt Groening think it is?

Amusingly, in amidst the first wave of Simpsons movie promotion comes the gem that Danny Elfman nearly refused to write the theme tune for the series because - in his rock critic past - Matt Groening had taken the piss out of Oingo Boingo:

"I used to be a rock critic many years ago. I once saw Oingo Boingo and I gave them a bad review. I outraged Danny Elfman so much that he actually wrote a letter to the editor of the paper.

"But when I did The Simpsons I wanted Elfman to do the score. And I thought 'He will never remember' - and he remembered. He has forgiven me now."

To be fair, if Elfman turned down work from everyone who had snickered at Oingo Boingo, he'd be left with a very small pool of potential employment.

Prince driven off The Simpsons

It had all been set up - the sketches drawn, the script prepared, the publicity machine ready to roll. The Prince turned up to record his cameo in The Simpsons and said 'actually, I've got a better script here. And it's written by my chauffeur.'

So Prince won't be appearing in The Simpsons now:

[Matt] Groening tells the New York Daily News, "Prince wanted to do the show, so we wrote him a script. It didn't work out, because his chauffeur had written a script, too, and Prince wanted to use that one."

So, luckily, they never had to have the "how come my character is shorter than Lisa?" talk, either.

The Simpsons are going to All Tomorrow's Parties

Or, at least, Matt Groening is.