The Second Serve // Taste The Gravy

Last week we promised you a recipe for Geoff Boycott’s Treacle Pudding. It is far, far too boring to type up in full – but you can read it here. Instead, we’ll give you two other celebrity dessert recipes we learned recently.

Michael Caine’s Bread And Butter Pudding
“My favourite recipe is ordinary bread and butter pudding; the only difference is you add Bacardi rum and bananas. The bread and butter pudding is great but wait till you taste the gravy!”

Lenny Henry’s Assassination By Chocolate
* Melt four Mars Bars, add a Galaxy, put in a Milky Way – melt, melt, melt.
* Pour into a bowl, add a scoop of Vanilla ice cream.
* Crush a Flake and sprinkle on top (optional)
* Et voila! Assassination by Chocolate!

A lovely twist on the old “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” routine took place at TalkTV last week. Tom Newton Dunn was seen confronting a runner, gesticulating wildly at his own picture hanging on the wall.

What caused this scene?

Tom had overheard this runner asking a colleague who one of their guests was. Incorrectly – but, given his viewing figures, understandably – Tom thought the runner was asking who he, Tom Newton Dunn, was.

So gave them an unnecessary (and embarrassingly public) lesson, complete with helpful visual aid.

triflemonster writes:
“Your thing about Chris Eubank’s trousers’ round trip [PB1137: in which Chris Eubank kept a TV interview camera crew waiting in his garden for seven hours while he waited for his trousers to be couriered from Brighton to Essex for a dry-cleaning, then returned].

“It reminded me of a time that Oliver Letwin once sent a government car down to Dorset and back to collect his black tie outfit for a London party. The cost to the taxpayer would’ve definitely covered a new costume. Or, god forbid, a rental.”

To spare you the trouble, we read Phillip Schofield’s autobiography last week to scrape it for clues. There are none – but there were a couple of fun anecdotes about Matt Goss and Jason Donovan, so we’ll give you those instead.

ON MATT GOSS: Every time Phil met Matt, he was always surprised to see a convoy of about ten cars full of Bros fans pulling up and parking near Matt’s car. Phil felt sorry for Matt, thinking how awful it must be to be followed like this constantly. Until Matt arrived to meet Phil one day, telling him all about the terrible ordeal he’d just suffered on the Hogarth roundabout. “I lost the bloody fans!” Matt told him. “Had to drive round three times until they caught up.”

ON JASON DONOVAN: During the handover on Joseph And His Technicolor Dreamcoat – when Phil was rehearsing and Jason was starring each night – Phil used to give Jason a lift home in his fancy new BMW. This was at the height of Jason’s drinking/coke use, so he had very patchy recollections of things happening day to day. One night, Jason dozed off in the car on the way home before suddenly coming to with a start. “Oh, shit mate,’ Jason cried in a panic. “I’m so sorry. I think I’ve pissed myself.” He hadn’t. It was just his first experience of electric seat heaters…

Remember about ten years ago, when Schofield missed an episode of This Morning because of snow and was stuck at his Oxfordshire home? The previous evening he’d presented Dancing on Ice in Elstree – yet, despite all the weather warnings, he was chauffeur driven home.

Why do that rather than stay in a London hotel for the evening when he knew the forecast was grim and he’d need to be back in the morning anyhow? Well, it wasn’t his decision. His wife insisted on him returning home every night and being chauffeur driven so that Schofield was never left alone to his own devices in the capital.

anon writes:
“I worked for Meridian Television in the late 90s on a programme hosted by Nick Owen. It was like a forerunner of the One Show. Whilst I was dodging various advances from the ‘other Nick’ (Knowles – me 19; him 34) my job was to look after the guests in the green room.

“I got chatting to a lovely lady in her mid 30s who was on to talk about a new phenomenon ‘internet dating’ and what she had experienced. Nick Owen did his usual Partridge-esque chit chat on the screen and I thought nothing else of it until the lady returned the following week.

“I was surprised to see her and asked her why she was back. She told me she was Nick’s personal guest and they were going out for dinner later, they took off in his car after holding hands round set. Nick was mid 50s, married with 4 kids.”

Last week, the music quizzes had no theme. Just a random assemblage of songs from the past half-century, stitched together for you to ID. This week, it’s much the same deal except there will be an extremely tenuous thread that ties the ten songs in each quiz together.

It might help. In all honesty, it probably won’t – but who knows? Give yourself a point for every title you get right and one for every artist too.

Monday’s theme: Touch

[Play it here]

Some newly released Epstein files
[Read on Vice]

“How Succession Ended In My Sims Game”
[More deaths by lava]

Ice Cream Van Simulator
[Silly browser game]

Politicians as blobfish
[A hideous slideshow]