The Second Serve // 74 Tons Of Poo

If you wanted any further proof of Paul O’Grady’s hellraising credentials, perhaps you’ve seen one of the clips of him filming his American travel show in New Orleans? The one where he gets absolutely ratarsed in a succession of bars, starts falling about on the streets with a ciggy and a bevvy, bickering with his long-suffering crew as they try to wrangle him back to his hotel room to sleep it off.

It’s not a patch on what happened in Miami. There, Paul managed to lay his hands on something a little stronger than booze and ended up giving his crew the slip for two full days. There’s no incriminating footage of that though as nobody – absolutely nobody – was able to find him until he turned up on day three, right as rain and ready to shoot.

Paul Mescal won himself an Olivier Award last night for Best Actor. It’s nice to see him getting some approval from his peers, because it’s not always the case.

There’s a rumour going around theatre land that when Broadway star Andrew Rannells came to the Almeida Theatre to see Paul in A Streetcar Named Desire (after having been on the same stage in the Tammy Faye musical earlier in the season) Rannells supposedly got so pissed ahead of the show that he fell asleep in the first act and snored loudly throughout.

bob writes:
“Your Spamalot story reminded me of a night at We Will Rock You that Roger Taylor attended. He was a semi-regular guest and one night he brought a blonde woman with him and took his place in the royal box, stage right. We could see the two of them sat there enjoying the show but, after a few numbers, she disappeared.

“We wondered where she was, until we saw the back of her head bobbing into view every second or so as Roger sat there smiling, listening to his own music. Rock and roll…”

We have a minor correction to make in defence of Gwyneth Paltrow.

On Thursday we told you she demands the fruit in her trailer to be washed in Evian. Apparently this request is quite common on movie sets. Not because Hollywood types are all massive divas (or not just because of that, at least). The water in trailers is usually chemically treated, so the advice is not to drink it. Therefore many actors insist bottled water is used to wash their fruit.

Gwyneth does go a little further than most though. She also insists on washing herself with mineral water too.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s old phone system (having a separate mobile for every boyfriend she was juggling at the time) is decent, but it wasn’t a patch on Pavarotti’s.

Pavarotti only allowed seven people to call him – ever. He had a separate phone for each of them. The seven phones were all marked with a name and he would lay them all out on his terrace table by his swimming pool in a row, so he could see which one of his select seven was calling.

And even then, depending on who it was calling, he might or might not answer.

Following the success of their C4 Book Club in the 2000s, Richard and Judy started a Wine Club, attempting to educate their viewers about good wine.

To shoot some VT footage to include in the show, they hosted a glamorous garden party at London’s Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath where viewers could apply to attend and spend the day drinking free wine, meeting wine experts and rubbing shoulders with Richard and Judy themselves.

Things started going south a couple of hours in though as – smashed on free wine, with no food on offer – the lack of toilet facilities led male and female guests to start pissing in the surrounding manicured bushes.

Richard and Judy could just about cope with that, but they took their cue to leave when they spotted two female guests, sat on slatted wooden garden chairs at a table full of friends, casually hitching up their dresses just far enough so that they could piss through the slats of the chairs in the middle of the lawn without having to get up.

Last week, we started a musical journey through the alphabet, with music quizzes tackling the letters A, B, C, D and E.

This week, we carry on. Each day your quiz will take a letter of the alphabet as a loose theme – with the song’s title, artist or lyrical content revolving around that same letter.

You get a point for every title you correctly guess and a point for every artist too. A maximum of twenty points per quiz.

Monday’s theme: F – and this one (predictably) is not safe for work…

[Play it here]

Can you guess the pixelated album cover?
[Play it here]

Soho in the 1980s
[Watch on YouTube]

New pictures of Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew
[See on Metro]

How does Trump plan to fight the Stormy Daniels’ case?
[The Daily Beast]