The Fatboy Family Enforcer

Fans of Britain’s Got Talent have been moaning that this latest series barely features any Brits with talent; that it’s mainly acts imported from around the world instead.

Things are even worse in the pop charts. This week’s UK Top 10 contains no Brits at all. In fact, Artemis’s I Like The Way You Kiss Me and Myles Smith’s Stargazing are the only ones in the entire Top 20.

And you have to go down to No.26 to find the next British artist. The very contemporary Natasha Bedingfield with Unwritten. A song she released in 2004.

There’s been a lot of rumours in recent months about Paul Mescal’s pulling technique. Talk that he’s picked the Old Queen’s Head in Islington as his preferred stomping ground. Talk that he treats women to breakfast at Gail’s the next morning. Talk that he takes them out for a walk in the park, then literally sprints away from them the second their heads are turned.

Here’s another.

We hear Paul was at the Dalston Superstore recently where he bumped into a group of speed-daters who had decamped there for an after-event drink. They all got chatting and Paul invited them back to his for an after-after-party, where he suggested they play a kissing game.

His prompt was “Kiss the person who you think has kissed the most people”.

No prizes for guessing who everyone picked.

Which Tory cabinet member is really trying to look their best out on the campaign trail ahead of an expected post-Rishi leadership challenge – having stocked their office fridge with Ozempic?

Manchester United fans think they’ll be waving goodbye to Brazilian superstar Casemiro this summer, as speculation mounts that this second season at the club will be his last.

Perhaps the saddest Manc to see him go though will be Oasis guitarist Bonehead.

Bonehead lives right across the road from Casemiro. About a month after Casemiro and his family moved in to this mansion, they bumped into Bonehead in the street. He greeted them with huge warmth – telling them how happy he was they’d moved in as they were so quiet. He went on to explain that the previous tenant had been a nightmare, having hosted big, noisy parties seemingly continuously for years.

The previous tenant being Manchester United fullback Aaron Wan-Bissaka.

News UK big cheeses were away at a corporate getaway last week when Sunak suddenly called the election. Times and Sunday Times editors Tony Gallagher and Ben Taylor were yanked back home super quick and sent off to have lunch with Keir Starmer.

Naturally, the conversation was entirely focused on the big issues facing the British public today and not their own narrow corporate self-interest. So the burning question they put to the potential next PM: Can you assure us you will not be embarking upon Leveson 2?

Starmer declined to confirm or deny – so it will be interesting to see if the papers end up endorsing Labour at the election.

Further to last week’s story about the Tories trying to coax D:Ream into writing them their own election theme in the Cameron Years; previously they’d tried to use Fatboy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now.

For the local elections in 1999, a group of Tory canvassers tried to entice people into talking to them by blasting the track out in a shopping mall.

Until they were emphatically told that they weren’t allowed to play the song. By Fatboy’s sister…

All sorts of political journalists and pundits have had their summer plans upended by Rishi’s surprise election announcement – but none quite so funnily as Matt Chorley.

Times Radio chartered a big branded battle-bus ready for what they assumed was probably going to be an autumn election – with the giant faces of their on-air talent pasted along its sides.

Matt Chorley threw a slight spanner in this plan by announcing he’ll be leaving Times Radio for 5Live in the autumn (with a press release trumpeting how exciting it will be to launch the show ahead of an autumn election).

So Times Radio duly sent the bus for a rewrapping to better reflect their expected election line-up. No sooner had the bus returned sans Matt, Sunak sprung the surprise July election news on everyone. Months before Matt’s leaving date and slap bang in the middle of his summer notice period.

The bus could have been sent back for another re-wrap to reinstate Matt’s face, but apparently they’ve decided just to stick with a logo instead.

If you work on LBC breakfast, one of the perks is that you are entitled to a free breakfast. Staff can choose anything they want from the standard menu, but there’s also a daily breakfast special on offer.

Some of these specials clearly live up to the name as Nick Ferrari threw a big hissy fit over one recently. It was only after all the orders had been sent in, cooked and delivered to the studio that Nick found out he hadn’t been informed that his favourite special was on the menu that day – breakfast kedgeree naan.

He got very upset, telling producers he should have been told and insisted they have the chefs cook him a new breakfast to be delivered immediately.

Until recently, Merck Mercuriadis and the Hipgnosis Song Fund enjoyed breathless coverage in the financial press for its bold business strategy of spending insane nine-figure sums on things like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ back catalogue.

We’d first urged caution back in 2018, raising two big red flags. First, the Hipgnosis growth plan had worrying similarities with that of his previous employer Sanctuary Records – which went spectacularly tits up. Second, there’d been another iteration of Hipgnosis, one based above a kebab shop in North London, which had also gone tits up, owing millions.

The days of good PR are long gone now though. As Hipgnosis’s financial woes grew, so the business pages came round to our view. But we still never expected things to flip quite so drastically. Even his ex-business partners from those kebab shop days can smell blood in the water. They’re suing Merck for “breach of fiduciary duty”, claiming he took their initial idea and transferred it into a new company without them.

Merck’s just had to file his defence – and it’s a robust one. He points out that his former partners know all about breaches of fiduciary duty; they defrauded a Maltese pension scheme of tens of millions of euros for the money to start their business. A fraud that resulted in them going to prison.

This court case is going to be fun.

A TikTok street interviewer interviews Baz Luhrmann – having no idea who he is
[Watch on TikTok]

Paul Reubens’ (a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman’s) house is up for sale
[$5million]

North Korea is dumping balloon bags of suspected shit on South Korea
[Read on BBC]

Paula Vennells finally catches a break – as a touring sock puppet musical of the Post Office scandal gets pulled from her home town of Bedford…
[Read on Bleeding Cool]

Robert Peston’s son’s band
[It’s… fun?]

How easy is it to make a movie?
[An insider tells The Fence]