The Second Serve // Tremendous By-Election

There’ll be a lot of eyes on the seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in this Thursday’s by-election. That’s the one Boris Johnson is leaving vacant, so it’s of particular interest to news editors eager for a good story.

There’s a decent Popbitch angle there too, as the UKIP candidate aiming to take Boris’s place in the Commons is Rebecca Jane Sutton: the former Big Brother contestant that Michael Owen was caught sexting a few years back, telling her to “fire through” those infamous tit pics (the ones which were “tremendous, by the way”).

GB News have had quite the social media crisis brew up over these last few days, with some very heavy allegations being levelled at Dan Wootton online. Luckily they’ve got an expert on hand to do their PR.

The channel is repped by Magnify PR, a relatively new outfit set up by a former Sunday Mirror journalist, Nick Owens. Nick has done his time at the news-gathering coalface, so understands how the system works and how to handle things. Sexual misconduct stories are something of a speciality for him too.

He left the Sunday Mirror back in 2019 under a bit of a cloud; an absence that was explained to colleagues as being thanks to “an incident involving drink and a female member of staff“.

So it looks like the station is in experienced hands.

In Dele Alli’s poignant interview with Gary Neville this weekend, he spoke about how hurtful it was to be called lazy by Jose Mourinho in that Amazon interview. He gives Mourinho the benefit of the doubt on that one; suggesting it was probably TV editing and/or the manager’s attempt at psychology behind the claim.

Club insiders credited something else for it though. They reckon the barb came about because when previous manager Mauricio Pochettino was sacked, Dele went round to his house to say how sad he was and to thank him for all his help.

Then Mourinho found out – and wasn’t best pleased.

If we’ve led you to believe that Harrison Ford only shares his weed with ultra A-list types like Paul McCartney over the last few weeks, we’ve done him a bit of a disservice. He’s very generous with it.

When he was filming out in the Caribbean many years ago, he got chatting to one of the families who lived in the area where he was staying. Not expecting much to come of it, they offered him a tour of the island on their boat one day – which he accepted.

When they got out to a peaceful spot, Harrison asked them if they would mind stopping the boat. He then proceeded to take a spliff out of his pocket, light it up and pass it round his new shipmates.

A few years ago we mentioned – to the delight of many readers – how easy it was to get a snog off Fleabag’s Hot Priest Andrew Scott if you were so inclined. All you had to do was approach him at a bar and tell him that you loved his work and he’d be on you like a rash.

Not only is it still easy to capture his attention this way, we hear he’s upgraded his standard package.

Someone who approached him at a bar in Stiges earlier this summer to tell him that they loved his turn as Moriarty found Andrew running both sets of his fingers through their hair in response and very quickly turning the conversation around to wanting his face spunked on.

The fan made a swift exit.

On Thursday we ran a reminiscence from someone in TV who said that the only two people they knew of who had licked the arms of female colleagues at work were Rolf Harris and Hardeep Singh Kohli. Obviously we should never have let such a claim run without double-checking it first. Because, naturally, there’s a third…

NB writes:
“The corpse-botherer Savile used to do exactly the same thing, in public, when he walked into a BBC office. To the intense embarrassment of all present. Most especially of course the victim.”

V writes:
“Jimmy Savile used to do it too. Wasn’t strictly live TV but he definitely did it to a poor unsuspecting female researcher on a TV show I once worked on.”

Last week saw quizzes on the themes of Key Changes, Beatles Covers, The Osborne Wedding and other hits from the infamous Blur v Oasis chart battle.

This week we’ve got another five rounds lined up for you. Each two-and-a-bit minute mix is made up of ten songs. You just have to identify the titles and the artists, for a point each. That’s twenty points in total.

Monday’s Theme: 808s – songs made with the legendary drum machine

[Play it here]

Local News Of The Weekend: 100 people get stuck in a power-cut at Agatha Christie’s house for seven hours…
[Read on Devon Live]

Jung Kook from BTS’s new single is basically Craig David’s 7 Days – but more explicit
[And no day to chill]

John Hinkley Jr’s album is out now…
[Signed with Asbestos]

The catastrophic failure of the Metaverse
[Read on the Nation]