Smelly old cheeseball poses as gay-flavoured gobstopper

You've got to hand it to Madonna: she doesn't even have to show up to stop the press. When a rumour was hatched by bitter smokers banished to the cold outside Heaven last Wednesday night that the great ~~dane~~ dame of pop was in the building, the place turned into the clubbing equivalent of a battery farm on acid. The chickens inside went crazy, practically pecking each other's ears off in the rush to spread the word, some of the tall ones popping their heads up from the crowd like meerkats on crack, straining to catch a glimpse of their icon whilst trying to appear aloof. The fact that there was almost a riot is further proof that the smoking ban was a hazardous, heinous error.

Turned out it was all just a fuss about nothing, of course, and the closest anyone got to a Madonna sighting that night was a one-eyed busboy who temporarily mistook a trucker tranny with extraordinary biceps for the tediously tautological old pop trollop / The Oracle™ (delete as per preference - we're all entitled to our opinions).

She does, indeed, look unreasonably fabulous in her new video for the shit song, Four Minutes to Save the World. To the point where she makes Justin Timberlake appear positively ropey and in need of a good wash. But she is also so comprehensively airbrushed it verges on the embarrassing - one can't help but think that someone who requires such an extensive digital overhaul must, in the flesh, be a right dog.

Madonna is notoriously knowledgeable about how she should be photographed and filmed. One of our Glitterditch sniffer bitches tells us that, on a recent shoot, the photographer and crew were basically redundant as a consequence of the dictatorial pop icon exercising her encyclopaedic knowledge of lighting, lenses, angles and all.

Some might say this is simply professional excellence and she definitely delivers on presentation. But it's a shame about the content. The sneak preview we heard of new album, Hard Candy, proves once more that she can't write lyrics for toffee, though the production on the album is unarguably fierce. This is a woman who writes books for our children and she's about as literate as a stick of Blackpool rock. If you allow your children to read Madonna's books, why not just push the fuck-it button and feed them some of these, too?

To top it all off, Madonna just ain't cool no more. She's got a serious case of the grandad-on-the-dancefloors; so unhip it's arthritic. Which isn't helped by the misguided notion that teaming up with Justin is a recipe to reverse this because we all know he's basically a nerd.

We're fully seized of the possibility that this rant could spark a flame war because the gay handbook clearly states that we just shouldn't talk about Madonna that way. She's a pioneer, for chrissakes. And we can't argue with that. She has undoubtedly paved the way for a whole new world of talentless twats...