The Second Serve // Cocktails and Cock Tales

The fall-out at NewsUK from Isabel Oakeshott’s decision to leak Matt Hancock’s texts has been pretty well documented. There have been no bones made about the fact that it boiled the piss of Sun journalists and TalkTV colleagues, who have been screaming at her in the corridors for giving the year’s most explosive scoop to their rivals.

However, one detail that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that Oakeshott’s partner – Brexit bad boy Richard Tice – has been by her side, offering anyone who yells at her the opportunity to meet him outside and “settle things like gentlemen”.

In Thursday’s issue, we ran a small tribute to Pulp’s bass player, Steve Mackey, but the best tribute to him was written while he was still alive. It’s this small segment from an interview with Blur’s Alex James – showing how he clearly got up the nose of the tedious old cheese shagger.

ALEX JAMES: “We felt a common cause with Pulp at first. We really supported them. But in a lot of ways, they were even bigger cunts than Oasis. They were in our birds’ knickers: devious little fuckers. We definitely tried to help them; we thought they were cool. But they never had a kind word for us. Steve Mackey was shagging my bird, the cunt. That’s all they wanted to do. I mean, cheers. I thought they had a bigger agenda than shagging our birds. I was a bit disappointed. I kind of object to them more than Oasis, actually. At least Oasis said ‘We’re going to shag your bird’.”

Best interview of the weekend was Bernie Ecclestone in the Telegraph. It wasn’t just the mad authoritarian quotes (“You see, I’m not somebody who is super-enthusiastic about democracy” / “It’s the wrong word ‘dictator’. You need to have a boss”).

It wasn’t just the titbits of weird Ecclestone trivia either (his ringtone being Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly / that he, a 92 year old man, has called his two year old son “Ace”).

The bit that really made the whole thing shine was the talk about his funeral. He was explaining how he thinks spending money on funerals is a waste, so has been telling his wife to just stick him in a cardboard box and cremate him.

But he wants her to try to sell the space on the box for advertising first.

If you’ve tried Saoirse Ronan’s Tia Maria and Guinness cocktail and are looking for something new to rot your guts with, someone was kind enough to pass us across Cerys Matthews’ slightly stronger alternative.

It’s much the same idea except you make it with Murphy’s and add a measure each of Tia Maria and vodka per half pint.

The drink is called Death By Chocolate, but that’s probably not what the coroner will put on the certificate.

There’s a fantastic clip doing the rounds today of a blowhard lawyer kicking off at a GB News host because he is introduced on-air as someone who has been approached to represent Matt Hancock.

The lawyer immediately gets very haughty and dresses the host down – moaning about how “disappointing” that was, how he had agreed with producers that this wouldn’t be mentioned, and telling him that nobody would take his little station seriously if this was the way he chose to treat guests.

So the host pulls up the email the lawyer had written, which shows him specifically asking producers to mention his Matt Hancock connections on air.

It’s particularly delicious for us because the lawyer in question is Jonathan Coad, whose emails are among the more pompous of our collection. Coad once spent an entire Christmas holiday in 2012, emailing us endlessly in the wee small hours to berate us for an entirely true (and impeccably sourced) story we wrote about Denise Van Outen getting ushers at her Edinburgh Fringe show to hand-select handsome gay men to fill her front row as she was tired of seeing “fucking ugly” people in her audience.

Jokes aside though, Jonathan Coad has traditionally been the lawyer you seek out if you have a leaked sex tape you need quashing. So god knows what Matt Hancock is doing talking with him…

Stories about Oliver Reed drunkenly getting his cock out aren’t exactly rare, but we did enjoy this little follow-up to last Monday’s tale of him doing it.

When shooting Gordon Hessler’s Wheels of Terror in (then-)Yugoslavia, Ollie turned up to set ten days early. There he was informed by production managers he’d be staying in the small town of Vršac, so Ollie killed time by getting pissed.

On the first night he went out with a bunch of young local actors, who all enjoyed the old hellraiser’s antics and found it funny when he drunkenly whipped his knob out to show everyone his tattoo. As he ventured further out into the town on subsequent nights though, the act began to grate. Among the people he had soon shown his cock to were a young female reporter from Zagreb and some local soldiers on compulsory military service.

Production managers began getting rather anxious, so called Ollie’s brother (who also acted as his agent) to see if he could do anything. The brother asked them to bring Ollie to the phone. With some effort, they managed to drag him to the receiver.

To this day, they have no idea what the brother said on that call. Only that, after the conversation, Ollie transformed into a supreme gentleman for the rest of the shoot – with no hint of shenanigans.

Last week saw quizzes on the themes of Musicals, Classics, Something For The Weekend and more.

This week has its own theme: Samples Week. Each of the five daily quizzes will be made up of ten songs that have been sampled across different artists’ careers.

All you need to do is recall the original title and artist of the song (a point for each) and you stand to win 100 points over the course of the week. The points don’t do anything, but they’re always nice to have…

Monday’s theme: De La Soul

[Play it here]

Sparks ft. Cate Blanchett
[Watch on YouTube]

Incredible scenes from Charles Bronson’s parole hearing
[Read on Twitter]

Want to hear that Alan Carr x Gorillaz interview that people are getting refunds for?
[Listen on Soundcloud]

Remember Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos? They might be going global…
[Read on Washington Post]