Befriend It Like Beckham

The musical Chicago is coming back to London’s West End this spring after a six year hiatus. Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr is confirmed as playing the part of smooth-talking lawyer Billy Flynn, but who will follow in the footsteps of Bonnie Langford, Denise Van Outen and Gaby Roslin and take on the iconic role of Roxie Hart?

Word around the West End is that the front runner is… Cheryl Cole.

Mark E Smith was a famously difficult presence, but one journalist found a trick to make him behave.

After shadowing him while he got pissed and smashed up a Radio 1 broadcast booth as part of his Breezblock session, then following him back to his hotel in a taxi where he barked orders to the driver in German, she knew all along he was going to be trouble.

But when he responded to all of her interview questions with high-pitched giggles, she flipped and told him he was being unprofessional. To which he replied: “I am being a naughty boy, aren’t I? Okay, hit me, and I’ll do it properly.”

It wasn’t a joke. Mark insisted. The interviewer pointed out that, as she did kickboxing, she could actually do him some serious damage, but he wouldn’t budge on the matter.

He took three hefty smacks to the face before he announced that she’d done it hard enough and that he would now allow the interview to continue. After that, he was co-operative as you like.

Which two members of the Britain’s Got Talent family have been getting rather close? Their antics supposedly extend beyond just holding hands.

After the leaked email furore about his lack of knighthood (the one in which he called many of Britain’s best-loved national treasures “cunts” in emails to his PR company, Doyen) you’d think David Beckham would be doing everything he could to give his long-suffering reps a quiet life.

And yet rumours coming out of the company suggest that David’s taken a bit of a shine to one of the women who works there. Given his past history of fraternising with the help, Doyen bosses might be in for a whole load of headaches…

David Walliams was on hand to host the controversial Presidents Club soiree last week. Why on earth the organisers thought that the famed BBC light entertainer would be a suitable choice for the event is anyone’s guess – but we’d better tread lightly when discussing this.

The last time we wrote about Walliams, we got a rather curt letter from his publishers, HarperCollins, suggesting that we’d maligned their client’s good character and were “highly likely to cause serious harm to David’s reputation both as an individual and author”

Might we humbly suggest that if he is so concerned about his reputation as an individual and author, he should refrain from offering Britain’s premier sex pests the chance to be name-checked in his next children’s book?

Just a thought.

Eagle-eyed nomination watchers were quick to point out that former husband and wife Gary Oldman and Lesley Manville are both up for Oscars this year. And while that’s not the first time such a thing has happened (James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were up for the same award back in 2010) there’s an added air of frisson with this one.

Why? Because the son that they share (the one that Oldman left as a three-month-old baby) made them both grandparents in December.

Lady X writes:
“I met Heath Ledger in a bar of a hotel in Melbourne about four years ago. He was instantly recognisable, but he insisted on introducing himself as ‘Keith Fletcher’ to everyone.”

bloodydoorsoff writes:
“When Heath was dating Heather Graham they turned up at the Prince Bonaparte pub for Sunday lunch. They sat down and waited for table service (you order at the bar) and waited and waited and waited. Eventually they left, without sustenance.”

celtiagirl writes:
“I met Heath a few times. Sweet boy. Once he gave me a ball-by-ball recreation of a big Aussie cricket match.”

The BBC have announced the shortlist for this year’s UK Eurovision entry and they all seem to be pretty legitimate attempts. No out-of-touch heritage acts; no X Factor stars – and, best of all, a couple of songs that actually sound like they’d belong in the modern competition.

[Listen to the songs here]

However, it’s not the most exciting Eurovision development this week. Denmark released their shortlist too, and nestled in the middle of it was the name “Sannie Carlson”.

Better known to the world as… Whigfield.

As you maybe saw last week, we have partnered with a company called Agate to trial a brand new micropayment system for online media. Feedback so far has been really encouraging, so if you haven’t signed up yet – try it this week.

There’s more information about it all in our FAQ here, but the basic gist is that it costs 10p per article, and once you’ve read three (i.e. spent 30p) you then get access to the rest of our site for free for the rest of the week.

This week we suggest you break through the 30p barrier by reading:

COOL FOR COPYCATS: Bruno Mars’s latest single sounded awfully familiar to us – and it’s not the first time we’ve thought that. So we took a look over the Mars discography to see exactly how and where he’s been taking his “influences”.
[Read on Popbitch]

EUROVISION: Once again, we’re armed with a bunch of opinions, stats and theory in order to figure out which song on the BBC’s shortlist will give us our best chance in Lisbon this May.
[Read on Popbitch]

THE CONSUMPTION ASSUMPTION: As Friends hits UK Netflix, and thinkpiece after thinkpiece does the rounds about how well/badly it’s aged, we’ve already tackled the only question that’s really worth answering. Namely, exactly how much coffee did those dickheads end up drinking?
[Read on Popbitch]

He may be long gone, but we’re still chipping away at the secrets that Max Clifford took to his grave.

Max’s reputation for selling saucy details to the tabloids was legendary, but there were lines that even he would draw. For instance, when he was repping a Kiwi girl who had a kiss’n’tell story about Robbie Williams, he made sure that one detail was kept out of the papers.

That Robbie had (in Max’s words) “smashed her back doors in, then cried for about an hour after.”

Someone’s put together a nice photo tour of the abandoned Coventry Evening Telegraph building
[Browse on Twitter]

jpegmafia’s latest song is titled I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrissey Dies
[Listen on SoundCloud]

There was some skepticism about Skelmanthorpe nickname last week – but we promise it’s true
[See on Huddersfield Daily Examiner]

If you’re the only person on earth yet to read that FT piece on the Presidents Club dinner, do it
[Read on FT]