The Daily Tonic: Bell Of The Ball

Thanks for all your stories of weird Wikipedia trivia over the last week or so. Today, after all this talk of “substantial meals” being a pre-requisite to get a pint once lockdown lifts, we want to hear about your funniest brushes with celebs while working in the hospitality industry.

Whether you’ve served them food or drink, put one up for the night, stripped their sheets in a hotel suite, run them a special errand, or pulled pints alongside them pre-fame, we want to know your best anecdotes about serving the stars.

Tell us your favourite tales from the industry to hello@popbitch.com and we’ll sort the best of them out with a digital goody bundle.

Our favourite bit of Wikipedia vandalism – one we always felt walked the perfect line between being ambitiously bonkers, yet just understated enough to be left untouched for months – took place on Calum Best’s profile.

In among the bits of legitimate TV work Best had done was the claim he had been the star of an MTV reality show called Best In Show, in which: “[Calum] attempted to fool judges at a top dog show in Dallas, Texas, by dressing up as an Afghan hound. Despite some wonderful make up and expert coaching, Best failed to impress and was eliminated after the endurance round.”

While the rest of the page underwent multiple edits, Best In Show kept making the cut for nearly four months. Then, shortly after editors removed it, someone else took a rather more blunt shot at the page. On 28th July 2009, they deleted Calum’s entire profile and replaced it all with just a single word: “twat“.

Usually the biggest impact a Wikipedia hoax can hope to have is that it crosses over into internet infamy. Occassionally though they can cause some pretty high-profile incidents IRL – as happened back in 2010, when FIFA boss Sepp Blatter was awarded a prestigious South African honour for bringing the World Cup to their country.

The announcement that Sepp would receive the award appeared on an official government website, where they had clearly copied and pasted his personal details from Wikipedia.

Which is why they gave him the full name: “Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter.”

anon writes:
“I once edited Svetlana Alexievich’s profile on the day she won the Nobel Prize for literature to insert the claim that she began her career as a journalist on Belarus’s only carp-fishing magazine.

“It was a test and lasted about 20mins before being deleted. But many sites had already picked it up. This fact is still repeated in many profiles of her.”

[For example]

MC writes:
“Just following on from the Ronnie Corbett story, I was working on the British Comedy Awards in the noughties and Ronnie was booked to give out an award – so I was on hand to look after him. During rehearsals he alerted me to say he had lost the neckerchief that Ronnie Barker had given him and it meant a great deal to him, so could I keep an eye out for it.

“An hour or so later, I saw I’d missed a call from him and he’d left me a voicemail. ‘Ronnie, it’s Mark. Doh! I mean, Mark, it’s Ronnie. Panic over, I’ve found it. I’ve been wearing it the whole time.’

“He was a lovely chap.”

Today’s audio round is made up of ten songs that bear some connection to the theme of truth, lies, rumours, falsehoods, veracity and duplicity. You get a point for each of the songs’ titles you can name, and a further point if you can name the artist/s too.

With ten songs, that’s a maximum points haul of twenty.

[Play it here]

Interactive map of most Wikipedia-ed celebrities from each American city
[Play around on The Pudding]

Explore Ronnie Corbett’s old house
[Watch on YouTube]