Welcome to the new look, for one day only, celebrity packed version of Gray Matter. That’s the lovely Katie Price, aka Jordan, above, on her visit last year to the Oxford Union. Below is Bruce Springsteen, otherwise known as The Boss, in concert action from 2003. Over on the right is the late Frank Carson, on Celebrity Ready Steady Cook! in 2001. And in the main picture is Dr John Sentamu on his enthronement as Archbishop of York in November 2005.

Some people would probably argue that the archbish doesn’t really qualify for my Hello-like spread. He, after all — in a rare moment of restraint, you might consider — turned down the chance to appear in Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. He explained: “Celebrity can be malign in that it becomes a form of idolatry, and people live their lives vicariously through the rich and famous rather than attending to their own lives.”

Idolatry — now there’s a strange word to come across where religion is concerned! Strange, too, to many more enlightened people, is his recently voiced opposition to gay marriage.

But was anything stranger than his appearance as a new columnist for The Sun on Sunday — and what he had to say this week in his first (and now, some say, possibly last) Sentamu’s Sunday Service?

This was what “a fantastic honour” it was to be writing there. “Today is a new dawn,” he trumpeted, “a fresh start. When I think that we can now get the latest news, politics and sports stories seven days a week from our country’s favourite paper all I can say is ‘WOW’.”

As my old friend, and former Sun columnist, Richard Littlejohn might have said: “You couldn’t make it up.” And this from a man tipped to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr John (do you think Sentamu’s appetite for show-biz might arise from his sharing a name with a seventies rock hero?) is among a bevy of star writers on the Sun that includes Katie Price.

She devoted part of her first column to a tribute to Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war correspondent killed last week in Syria. If I were the sort to make uncharitable judgments, I would say that Katie is no more likely to have heard of Marie Colvin —before her demise, at any rate — than I of Amanda Holden, an account of whose difficulties in childbirth occupied five prime pages of The Sun on Sunday.

Not Page 3, though, which was reserved for the newspaper’s traditional pin-up, with hands coyly hiding boobs. Well, this was Sunday!

A final thought: one Rupert Murdoch newspaper’s attempt to drum up support for another was unlikely to be enhanced by the advertisements for The Sun on Sunday that appeared in The Times (left) in the run-up to the launch. While I know that some authorities — including no less a figure than Robert Burchfield in his updating of Fowler’s Modern English Usage — say there is no impropriety in using the abbreviation ’til, I do not agree. It reveals ignorance, rather than the exercise of choice, to employ it when ‘until’ has a much better — and older — alternative in ‘till’.