The Second Serve // PIN’ll Fix It

Nigel Farage caused an almighty stink on social media this weekend by posting a picture of himself, Donald Trump, Nick Candy and Holly Valance all posing together at Mar-A-Lago.

The sound of early 00s pop fans’ hearts breaking was practically audible, and anyone holding on to the hope that she was simply doing it out of a wifely sense of duty should brace themselves for disappointment. Holly has a private personal Instagram account where she posted the same picture herself.

Only hers had the caption: “With my favorite people.”

Jared Leto holding up filming on Morbius by insisting on using his prop crutches to piss might have generated the most headlines, but that wasn’t the only reason he was so disliked on set.

When the production was shooting in London for a week – doing five days’ filming in a rather grand building just off Whitehall – Leto spent two of them refusing to come out of his dressing suite, leaving co-stars Jared Harris and Matt Smith just waiting around, kicking their heels.

The only reason he gave for not coming to set? He wasn’t “feeling the character”.

Rock Family Trees on BBC2 this Saturday took a look at the rise of Cool Britannia, starting off with a trip down the well-worn path of the Suede-Elastica-Blur love triangle.

The documentary gave us Justine Frischmann’s first impression of Brett Anderson when the two met at university (“I just saw this strange creature with two earrings and a ladies handbag… he just had some sort of magic around him”) but not Brett’s of Justine.

Maybe that’s because his first impression was a little less sweet. Brett was so confused by Justine’s posh accent, he says he thought she had a speech impediment. That combined with his belief that she had the brownest teeth he’d ever seen in his life, led him to use the charming opener: “What is wrong with your mouth?”

We’ve pointed out moments of overlap between Steve Coogan and Alan Partridge before. Like the night during an early West End run when he took Zoe Ball up to his hotel room to show off all the money he was earning by spreading banknotes over the bed (“That… is two thousand pounds!”)

Or the time he tried to dazzle his Spitting Image colleagues by turning up to the office Xmas party in a brand new Ferrari – telling them all that, yes, it was expensive but it was “worth its weight in twat”.

It seems his inner Partridge is still at large. In an interview with the Sunday Times this weekend, he described the burning question at the heart of his new show about the #MeToo moment in much the same way you’d expect Alan to broach it on North Norfolk Digital.

“How do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater? By that I mean, throw out the horrible old bathwater, but how do you keep the baby of romantic love?”

We didn’t want to get too far into the self-referential stuff about Popbitch appearing in the Netflix Jimmy Savile documentary last week, but there was something else about our little cameo that caught our eye.

If you haven’t seen the doc yet: to illustrate the part on internet gossip, there’s a scene where an unseen reader scrolls through a Popbitch mailout. As far as we can tell, the producers mocked-up a special composite edition for this purpose – presumably because they couldn’t find a single Popbitch issue that didn’t contain something they weren’t allowed to broadcast.

Despite having an archive of over 10,000 possible PB stories to pick from, they still chose one that they had to redact the names on.

So if you’re curious to know who it was in those blurred out stories that flash up on screen about shagging in a toilet and shagging on that little bit of beach by the Thames, they were Judith Chalmers and Sian Lloyd. (Respectively, not together.)

One of the climactic scenes in the Netflix Savile doc is a compilation of clips in which Sir Jim makes the same joke to interviewers again and again about his “case coming up next Thursday”. If he really was using the same crap patter to cover up his crimes, someone might want to look into whether or not he was Britain’s most prolific credit card fraudster too…

B writes:

“From 2005-7 I worked as a receptionist in the Pursers Office on the QE2 and Jimmy Savile was a regular guest. He was always bowling about in his lime green tracksuit and was generally very nice to everyone onboard.

“When he came to settle his bill at the end of each voyage he would always crack the exact same joke about ‘finding a credit card on deck’ and ‘having a guess at the PIN’. Of course it was his card and his PIN number, but we all had to laugh along.”

The Savile documentary has also caused us to reminisce a bit about the late Reverend Goatboy, the legendary Popbitch messageboard poster who led the charge on Sir Jim stories. A local Leeds lad, the Rev was also a roadie for Motorhead and Thin Lizzy in his time, with plenty of stories about them too.

One story of his we’re not sure we ever ran came from the hotel lobby when he was on tour with Motorhead. The afterparty that night had gone on quite a bit longer than usual and Philthy Animal (a.k.a Phil Taylor, the drummer) was extremely refreshed by the time they all piled into the van.

Phil kept on drinking all through the journey home too, so when they finally arrived at the hotel, he was struggling a bit to complete his journey from the van to the hotel door.

When he finally did get there, the rest of the band and crew watched on in hysterics as, for a full ten minutes, he placed his head up against the glass of the revolving door and started pushing. He continued to go round and round and round, his head gradually slipping lower and lower, until he started to crawl, then collapsed, then fell fast asleep, still wedged in the door.

This week, we conclude our trip through the hits of the 90s: ten songs a year, crunched into a quick two-and-a-bit minute mix. You get a point for every song title you correctly identify and a further point if you can name the act/artist.

Some are still big hits today. Others… less so.

Monday’s theme: 1995

[Play it here]

Every non-word in Smooth Criminal
[Listen on YouTube]

An oral history of Aqua’s Barbie Girl
[Read on Rolling Stone]

Hilaria Baldwin conspiracy theories
[Read on Buzzfeed]

Does spunk really have anti-aging properties?
[Scientists weigh in]