The Second Serve // Big Answers

In a Big Question we posed recently, we asked “What’s so bad about the error in the early copies of Denise Van Outen’s upcoming autobiography that stock recently sent out to a major retailer is now having to be destroyed?”

A possible answer was tucked in the tabloids this weekend. Having written in this memoir that she had found “lasting happiness” with fiancé Eddie Boxshall, it emerged that the pair have since split up after she caught him having phone sex with other women – prompting an emergency rewrite.

This little mystery solved, we figured it might be time to revisit a few other Big Questions to see what extra details we can slip our Club Popbitch members.

In Popbitch #993, we asked:
“For all their on-screen tough-guy bravado, Hollywood action heroes can be awfully delicate wee flowers – but which one is so desperate to add a few sly centimetres to his height that he not only puts lifts in his shoes, he has special built-up socks too?”

This story was about Sylvester Stallone (hence the “few sly centimetres”).

Stallone’s caginess with his height is particularly legendary among costumiers in Hollywood. Crew on the set of Judge Dredd were worried that it might even derail the entire shoot at one point as his costume designs were pretty elaborate and no-one could get a start on making them because Stallone kept stonewalling whenever he was asked for his measurements.

In Popbitch #1028 we asked:
“Which TV host had a bit of a panic when their car broke down driving home after a show one night – as they accidentally spilled the two glasses of wine they’d stolen from the studio green room all over the rented car’s gearbox?”

This was Richard Madeley. He and Judy had a well-known habit of nicking a couple of glasses to take home from the backstage catering when they were doing their C4 show. What crew always found weird about it was that they never took a full, sealed bottle (which they could have easily done). They’d only ever take two glasses.

Until this incident, that is, when their modest haul of wine ended up spilling everywhere. After that, they took to transporting their stolen wine in those sealed travel flask-mugs.

In Popbitch #919 we asked:
“Where many Hollywood stars resort to cosmetic surgery to keep themselves looking taut and youthful, which actress has come up with an ingenious natural alternative? She insisted that a recent sex scene she filmed be shot on a bed that was tipped up at a 45 degree angle, with matching tilted cameras, so that gravity pulled her boobs down (rather than apart, as happens when she’s flat on her back) to give them an on-screen effect of pertness.”

This was a technique employed by Jennifer Lopez – a clever repurposing of the method that once allowed Fred Astaire to look like he was dancing upside down on a ceiling, and the actors in Hunt For Red October to make it look like they were actually in a submarine.

In Popbitch #1047 we asked:
“Which former panel show host would start each morning, whenever his show was in production, by asking the same colleague if he could borrow her laptop – then use it to run a Google search for “James Corden”, every single day?”

It won’t shock you to learn that this was James Corden. If you’re wondering if the man has absolutely no shame, we’re happy to tell you that it seems he does have a shred of it. Because when he bumped into this colleague at an awards show some time after, he became visibly flustered when he recognised her and pretended to get a text so that he could extract himself swiftly.

There was one person we meant to pay tribute to in our 2021 RIPbitch round-up, but worried that he might be too much of an unknown industry figure to be of interest to the general Popbitch reader. There was always something we liked about this story though, so figured Club Popbitch might be the place to tell it.

As a producer, multi-instrumentalist and member of P Diddy’s team of “Hitmen”, Chucky Thompson was not only responsible for a lot of the stuff Diddy built his reputation on, he also had an uncanny knack with the numbers side of things.

Chucky was renowned for his near-psychic ability to determine the true production cost of any pop or hip-hop album made since about 1995, and was the industry’s go-to guy for guesses on costs. Execs across the business would seek out Chucky to horse-trade information with him, hoping to get his read on how their rivals’ albums were doing on the down-low.

To check the accuracy of his guesswork, they’d also have him take a punt on what their own releases were doing. According to the finance guys at some of the biggest labels in the world, Chucky would – without fail – guess their numbers to within a margin of +/-5%, long before their own internal numbers came through.

The other death-adjacent story that didn’t quite fit for RIPbitch 2021 (but we enjoyed nevertheless) was this one:

Darts champ Andy “The Viking” Fordham (RIP) used to host darts training days at the pub he ran. One of the famous faces to attend this training was Johnny Vegas, who was getting himself prepared for a celebrity darts tournament.

After a full day of drinking and darts, Vegas returned to his hotel for the evening to find a bedding convention in town, and their evening festivities were in full swing. Vegas joined in, entertaining the crowd until the early hours of the morning.

And then entertained a few others when he fell asleep in reception with his trousers round his ankles.

A brand new year means we’re looking down the barrel of about 250 new audio quizzes in 2022. That’s 2,500 songs that will all get a bit scooped out of them and slopped into a number of three minute mixes that we’ll pose you each weekday to test out your pop knowledge.

If you’re ready to play today’s (the vague theme of which is ‘Comebacks’) it’s ready and waiting for you.

[Play it here]

What did Americans get stuck in their orifices last year?
[A comprehensive list from Defector]

Sad news as Turkmenistan closes its popular tourist attraction “The Gateway To Hell”
[Read on BBC]

RIP Betty White, swapping filthy jokes on the set of Golden Girls
[See on TMZ]