The Second Serve // Individual Pube Extraction

All eyes are on Piers Morgan ahead of the launch of his new TalkTV show tonight. He might be a tedious blowhard, but there’s no denying he knows how to make dynamite TV. Even when he’s not trying.

Remember Harvey Price’s sweary outburst on Loose Women a few years ago? One of the production team once told us about their experience of that day. They had to temporarily step out of the gallery shortly after Harvey dropped the C-bomb live on air, mostly because they were laughing too hard at the poor colleague who had to pick up the phone to some screaming higher-up.

The first person they bumped into backstage was Piers Morgan, who was coming out of the studio door. In passing, Piers said “Well, fair play to the kid. He only said to me what lots of people want to say.”

The comment struck them as quite weird at the time because Harvey’s swearing hadn’t been directed at Piers, it had been directed at hypothetical trolls. So it wasn’t until later, when Katie Price started spilling details of what had happened that day, that the whole thing started to square.

According to Katie’s recollections, she and Harvey had walked past Piers backstage just before their segment – and Harvey had greeted Piers with those now infamous words, “Hello, you cunt!”

CR writes:
“For one of his TV series, Peter wrote a scene that involved a large buffet spread. Sandwiches, pies, crisps, cakes… the lot. The amount of food wasn’t really necessary for the story, but artistic vision and all that. At the end of the shoot he had it all bagged up and took it away. Bin bags of the stuff.”

One of the legends of rock lore, Cynthia Albritton (a.k.a. Cynthia Plaster Caster) died late last week. Famous for having made moulds of rock stars’ erections, her work first caught the world’s attention when she managed to capture Jimi Hendrix’s stiffy in plaster (her fourth casting overall, and first celebrity one).

Albritton always maintained that Hendrix was her best subject, and he certainly helped her perfect her method. The original idea was that the celeb’s erect member would be plopped into wet alginate, the mould would set and then – when natural droop set in – the man could safely withdraw.

Only things didn’t go exactly to plan with Hendrix. Cynthia hadn’t quite budgeted for his bush and had applied the lube quite sparsely – meaning she then had to spend 15 minutes extracting each individual pube from the alginate impression. Which made him late to the stage that night.

We might not have been able to capture them in plaster, but Popbitch has a sizeable collection of celebrity penis descriptions – each of them, arguably, artworks in their own right.

Here’s are some of the best descriptions of celebrity dongs we’ve heard over the years.

Axl Rose: “Regular meat; big potatoes”
Gordon Ramsay: “Very large; bright purple bellend”
Liam Neeson: “Size and shape of an Evian bottle”
Billy Bragg: “Balls like grapefruit”
Nigel Farage: “Choad-like qualities; resembles a pepper grinder”
Lembit Öpik: “Like a swan’s neck; occupied both hands”
Jeremy Paxman: “Like a bull’s heart on a tub of Pringles”

Given the airtime they dedicate to kicking off about hot-button gender issues of the day, it was surprising to learn that the GB News studio actually has gender neutral toilets.

It’s not a political choice on the part of GB News, however. It’s much more practical than that. Owing to space constraints in the studio, they don’t have room for two lots of bogs. What’s occupying the space where the other set should have been? The two small gallery rooms from which producers control the shows.

Experts have been weighing in on some of the vital issues raised in Thursday’s Popbitch newsletter.

On drawing dicks on ballot papers, anon writes:
“Just to note that the Australian Electoral Commission aren’t the only ones to permit a cock and balls on the ballot paper. You can, if you so desire, do so in the UK and it will be counted, so long as it shows clear intent to vote for one candidate. All there has to be in the box is a “mark” and that can be a cross, a tick or a crudely drawn cock – so long as it doesn’t identify the voter in any way.”

On Tucker Carlson’s testicle tanning, Dr J writes:
“If you wanted my humble sexual health doctor’s opinion on the ball tanning thing: Likely to do fuck all for your testosterone levels, but a decent chance of heating them up above the 35⁰C required for sperm production.”

Last week saw audio rounds on the themes of Famous Names, Easter and Guns And/Or Roses. This week, we’ve run another fifty songs through the music mincer, grinding them all together and reforming them into little three minute mixes for you to enjoy/endure.

You just have to identify which songs are in there, and who recorded them.

Monday’s Theme: Cops And Robbers

[Play it here]

Sleeping baby possum
[Cute]

A useful guide on how to avoid Piers Morgan in movies
[From Den Of Geek]

Local News Of The Weekend: Grim Hotdog Edition
[Read on WalesOnline]

The worst art on show at the Venice Biennale
[See it here]