Suburban Pork Drama

It was announced this morning that TikTok star Sam Ryder will represent the UK at Eurovision with his song Space Man. Sam first came to prominence on TikTok when big hitters like Justin Bieber and Alicia Keys saw him performing an a cappella version of a Britney song.

It’s strange how things change. 20 years ago, having long hair and a beard, singing a vocally gymnastic, unaccompanied version of Baby One More Time to show off your falsetto skills with wild gesticulations was enough to make you a national laughing stock (Darius, Popstars, 2001).

Now it gets you the job of representing the UK at Eurovision.

So maybe they don’t change that much…

We were saddened to hear of the death of Shane Warne: cricketing legend and one of the great shaggers of the modern era.

In an unorthodox (but probably fitting) tribute, one memory that’s been circulating Down Under concerns an old sex tape Shane once made where he was enjoying the company of four ladies at once. The ending sounds a little poignant now though as, after putting in an energetic and finger-heavy performance, he finishes up early and then stands by the side of the bed, watching the women continue without him – before saying goodbye and walking out of shot.

RIP mate.

Which bestselling author has bit of a reputation at his publishers for working his way through the women on staff there? At least three colleagues have taken receipt of the exact same bouquet of flowers to thank them for their company; a rather obvious tell to the rest of the office as to who he’s been shagging.

Now that Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the UK government, ruling out the sale of Chelsea, it looks like Nick Candy’s £2.5bn offer will have to be put on ice. It’ll be galling for Abramovich as that particular deal would have worked out pretty nicely for him.

Those who followed the Partygate scandals a few months back might remember Nick Candy as the billionaire Tory donor who posed for photos at Shaun Bailey’s rule-busting Christmas bash. Popbitch readers probably know him better as Mr Holly Valance.

Nick’s bread and butter is luxury property development though and it’s through selling high-end properties to the ultra-rich that he and his brother made their fortune. One of the Candys’ earliest supporters? Roman Abramovich.

So in selling Chelsea to Nick, he’d have basically been getting a wedge of his own cash back. Along with lots of his rival oligarchs’ too.

One of the things Succession is lauded for is its accurate portrayal of the utter joylessness of being rich.

A case in point: Lachlan Murdoch currently owns the most expensive house in California. The main residence has 11 bedrooms, 18 bathrooms, a wine cellar for 12,000 bottles and a 75 foot swimming pool. The wider grounds occupy acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate, with neighbouring properties having been bought up over the years and added to the pile as guest homes.

The only trouble? His wife Sarah doesn’t really like it, so has moved back to live in Sydney with their three children. Which means not only does Lachlan not really get to enjoy his ultra-extravagant home, he now has a 14 hour commute to LA too.

FYI: Weirdly, the property developer who first built the place in the 30s did so as a gift for his own wife. She hated it too and refused to move in, so it’s quite possible the place is cursed. (Or just horrible.)

It’s always tricky with political gossip to know if someone is trying to feed you a company line. For example, when somebody told us this week that Rishi Sunak wasn’t present at the Downing Street parties because he very specifically wasn’t invited to them, we had to wonder if we were only being told that to help clear his name.

But then they told us that he’s also watched the Meryl Streep/Maggie Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady four times – so they obviously don’t give a fuck about his reputation.

We were worried last week that we’d been a bit unfair to London’s legal scene, picking on the individuals that Bob Seely named and shamed in Parliament. After all, the city is awash with many lawyers who’ve nakedly courted the richest, most powerful foreign clients they could and we didn’t want to be accused of diminishing others’ hard-won reputations.

So, in the interests of fairness, we paid a quick visit to Mishcon de Reya’s special “VIP Russia” website last week to see what services they were offering Russia’s super rich. It’s a good job we went when we did as the site appears to have quietly disappeared from the internet earlier this week without any notice.

The old URL now redirects to their generic ‘Services’ page, which makes no mention of the previously stated fact that 70% of their instructions come from foreign clients. Where they once boasted the “largest dedicated group of international injunction specialists in London” there is now nothing.

And as for the advice that their “culturally sensitive lawyers” once offered a “high profile Russian individual in relation to the UK tax implications of his offshore trust and corporate structure so as to maximise confidentiality”? You’d never know they’d done a lick of work for him looking at the site today.

Such modesty!

To help employees cope with the stress of having to report upon a violent ground invasion, after two years of a global pandemic, under the threat of possible nuclear annihilation, the BBC has (very commendably) put a number of measures in place to assist and support workplace mental health. Among those measures, employees are given access to an automated emotional support service that they can chat to at any time.

Though this AI therapist isn’t the BBC’s own invention, its name is so perfectly BBC that it could have been lifted straight from the pages of a W1A script.

It’s called… Woebot.

Sting, in 2010, after getting £2m to sing at the birthday party of the daughter of Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov: “I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.”

Sting, in 2022, after people started remembering that he also played the $1bn wedding of the son of now-sanctioned Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev: “No oligarch in Britain, Russia or anywhere else is in any position to book a gig, a wedding or a party. Those days are over.”

Jason Donovan finally made it to the Jason Donervan
[Read on Stroud News Journal]

Can you guess the song from the first second?
[Play Heardle]

Official research on who grew up finding jazz mags in hedges
[Read on inews]

How an obscure Finnish EDM artist hijacked countless Spotify playlists
[Read on Gawker]

The UK’s Eurovision entry
[Space Man by Sam Ryder]

Nominative Determinism of The Week: Wanted by Warwickshire Police to assist them with a fraud investigation… Steven Fidler!
[Here’s Fidler – on the roof]

Fake Jamiroquai, fake Nirvana, fake Shed Seven – all the fake greats are headed to Scotland…
[Quite a line-up]

A bundle of indie games worth $6,500, sold for just $10 in support of Ukraine
[Get one here]

From our New Zealand correspondent: The enduring mystery of the Hobsonville Point ham
[A ‘suburban pork drama’]

The Kardashians talk money
[Read on Variety]

Still Bored?
Did Dua Lipa really plagiarise Levitating?
[A theoretical breakdown]