If you’ve ever liked a popular band such as B*Witched, S Club Juniors or Shed 7 then you’ll have realised that the press quickly stops running stories on them when they split up.

The same rule of thumb however doesn’t apply if you happened to enjoy the titillating musical delights of The Beatles, though.

Liverpool’s finest export have been delighting music lovers for generations. Their songs about peace, love and the results of multiple drug binges helped them to keep a presence in the public eye. During their career, The Beatles didn’t do much to piss anyone off, apart from the time John Lennon claimed that his band were “more popular than Jesus” in 1966. For 42 years, The Vatican has never forgiven the Beatle for what he said. But in a swift change of heart, they’ve decided to kiss and make up. Not literally of course, kissing the corpse of a dead man would be sick and wrong.

Since The Beatles split up, the four members have been doing their own respective thing. Paul McCartney continued to knock out record after record, tour around the world, get threatened by terrorists and marry a peg-legged vegan who he eventually managed to shake off. Ringo Starr on the other hand evolved into moody old bastard who would shout at the people who supported him and make crap records about Liverpool which made everyone cry.

George Harrison never really had any crazy moments during his solo career – though if today’s society is anything to go by, we expect a salmon farmer to come forward and claim that George Harrison signed him the deeds to his entire assets after a night on the drugs in the old days.

It was John Lennon who gave one of the most memorable quotes during the legacy of The Beatles. During an interview with the London Evening Standard newspaper in 1966, he said:

“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Now if Lennon had actually said The Beatles were bigger then Jesus, he could have technically been right. Remember, Jesus had been kicking around the planet a few thousand years before the band had been born. In terms of physical height, we’re pretty confident that Jesus would have been quite a small chap. Thanks to something called evolution, John Lennon would have surely been taller than him. Even if it was by a few inches.

Because the Vatican Church been keeping up with the latest events in pop culture, they’ve finally decided that John Lennon was having a bit of a joke. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano which normally reports on hot topics involving The Pope has issued a statement about the incident. Remember, John Lennon was killed in 1980 – perhaps it was a slow news at L’Osservatore Romano regarding The Pope. Or he fell off the toilet and injured himself and they didn’t want to make The Pope look like a stupid twat. Anyway, the newspaper issued a statement saying that Lennon was:

“Showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success.”

Of course, it all makes sense now! He was a mischievous rascal from Liverpool who was easily influenced by a cheeseburger-munching American, so all is forgiven. We have to blame Elvis instead for corrupting the mind of an innocent youth. All because the Vatican says so.

With the hatchet buried between the two, we can only hope that Jim Davidson gives every ethnic minority a cuddle to make up for being an obnoxious old bastard to them and that Bono will finally realise no-one cares about him, his music or his plans to single handily save Africa.

Well we can imagine can’t we?

If there's one thing sadder than seeing a grown man cry, it's seeing an overgrown, bright-orange man with a preposterous blonde mullet and leather waistcoat combination crying.

And if there's anything sadder than that, it's seeing an overgrown, bright-orange man with a preposterous blonde mullet and leather waistcoat combination openly wonder if he should commit suicide or bury himself in an unmarked grave like the slaves, which is how Dog The Bounty Hunter has spent most of this week to atone for the tape of him being racist about his son's black girlfriend. But even though his career is in tatters and he's become something of a public hate figure, Dog The Bounty Hunter says he's forgiven the son who shopped him in, and wants to prove his forgiveness by only spraying three full cans of bear mace into his son's face next time they meet, when the traditional family greeting involves five.

Ever since Mel Gibson set the rulebook on how to seek forgiveness for being unstoppably bigoted last year, it's been followed to the letter by the likes of Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington who know that to make amends they have to apologise to the public, then offended community leaders, then do some sort of rehabby course thing or make a violent historical epic with a script written in a dead language if things get really serious.

But Dog The Bounty Hunter is going over and above his call of duty to make amends for the now infamous Dog The Bounty Hunter 'nigger' tape which saw him throw out classy one-liners about his son's black girlfriend like:

"I'm not going to take any chance ever in life of losing everything I've worked for 30 years because some fucking nigger heard us say nigger and turned us into the Enquirer magazine… If Lyssa was dating a nigger we'd all say 'fuck you' and you know that." 

Lord knows that Dog The Bounty Hunter has his work cut out for him, because A&E has stopped making Dog The Bounty Hunter, stopped repeating Dog The Bounty Hunter and lost a bunch of Dog The Bounty Hunter advertisers. So now Dog is hitting the apology circuit as hard as he can, first telling Fox News that he's realised that he isn't black and now telling Larry King that no matter how much his career has been tainted forever by the tape of him, Dog has forgiven Tucker Chapman, the ex-con son who sold the tape to The Enquirer for $15,000:

"He will not talk to me. His mother's in on it with him. I have been away from her since the '80s so now she is like getting even… I tried to take control of his life. I heard this girl was maybe not being the best for Tucker — and I'll leave it like that — so I tried to interfere. I don't care if she is black at all. He's on parole for a 20 year sentence and if he messes up he goes back. All I want him to know is that I love him very much."

It seems as though Dog The Bounty Hunter is genuinely horrified at his behaviour and – aside from his new plans to be buried in an unmarked slave grave at George Washington's house so people will know that Dog The Bounty Hunter is sorry, possibly with some sort of elaborate grave-marking – he seems to be doing all he can to put things right.

And what could be better to speed this up than a public reconciliation between Dog The Bounty Hunter and his treacherous son? After all, if Dog can forgive Tucker then maybe the world can forgive Dog. And people from all ethnic backgrounds could come and witness the joyous family reconciliation and enter into the all-encompassing interracial spirit of forgiveness.

Well, all ethnic backgrounds except for the stinking Dutch, that is. But who likes them?