The Second Serve // Worldwide Embarrassment

Those who worked with Anne Robinson on Watchdog aren’t surprised in the least that it’s Rachel Riley she’s fallen out with on the set of Countdown.

As we mentioned on Thursday, Anne used to view all the filmed inserts for Watchdog ahead of broadcast – but it wasn’t just to veto any footage that featured scam victims’ tacky home décor. Producers used to make a game of counting the seconds between the moment that one of Anne’s younger female co-presenters appeared on screen – and Anne barking “I think this should be a voiceover.”

Is it a coincidence that the Daily Mail has suddenly started going in hard on Tory sleaze now that Paul Dacre has finally left the building? Probably not, but one easy way to gauge how much personal influence he was exerting over the company’s editorial line is to see how much coverage the Mail gives to Royal baldness over the next few months.

This was a particular fascination of Dacre’s. Both he and Prince Charles were born on the same day (they both turn 73 this Sunday) and he is obsessed with comparing his own ageing to that of Charles – regularly asking colleagues who they think looks better for their age.

Part of the reason the Mail followed William’s balding with such fervour, and have recently been keeping tabs on the thinning of Harry’s hair, is not because he cares about the boys’ hairlines especially. His interest stems from this same obsession with Charles and his conviction that Charles has had a weave.

After years of media whinging, Thomas Markle is finally gearing up for a fight – suing the paparazzi agency that staged those infamous pre-wedding photos of him. He filed a case in LA last week, seeking $1m in damages for having suffered “two heart attacks, worldwide embarrassment and ridicule while losing my relationship with my daughter Meghan [and] son-in-law Prince Harry.”

He alleged that he agreed to be photographed by Coleman-Rayner in exchange for approval on all photos prior to their syndication, $1,500 cash and a 30% share of future sales of the images – but that nothing went to plan and his relationship with his daughter went tits up into the bargain.

Not only do Coleman-Rayner dispute this, they’re also having their lawyer send out legal threats to anyone who covers it as a story: including the Daily Star, the Daily Beast and USA Today.

Richard Desmond’s decision to hire lawyers to strong-arm Wikipedia into removing any description of him as a “pornographer” has gone about as well as you’d expect. Not only does the word still appear in the first sentence of his bio; not only is an entire subsection entitled “Pornography” still present – but the page has now been semi-locked for a month because of all the vandalism that the story has attracted.

It’s incredible how embarrassed Richard Desmond continues to be about having become a billionaire off the back of adult entertainment. In his 2015 autobiography, The Real Deal (which he billed as “a no-holds-barred account of an extraordinary career that has taken him from cloakroom attendant to billionaire media owner”) he doesn’t once mention his TV company, Television X.

It’s particularly strange because – as a proud British patriot and a million-pound donor to UKIP – you’d think Desmond would have been keen to take some credit for bankrolling such trailblazing, homegrown erotica as Friends With Benefits Street, The Great British Bonk Off, Gobblecocks, BellEnders and Cum Dine With Me.

Or, perhaps his crowning glory, the 18+ XXX Margaret Thatcher series he broadcast: The Iron Lady Garden.

One of the inadvertently recurring threads in Richard Desmond’s autobiography is how his investments in pornography always happened by accident. Every single time, he offers some convoluted explanation as to how he came to be involved in it – and the story he tells about purchasing softcore video company Electric Blue is Larry David-Curb Your Enthusiasm grade.

As Desmond tells it, a business acquaintance of his asked if he’d mind taking a meeting with his son-in-law, Adam. Adam had a softcore skin-flick business and figured it might be a good fit for Desmond. Desmond ‘reluctantly’ agreed to the meeting to hear the kid out, but was furious when he was left waiting for over an hour and a half before Adam finally arrived.

Desmond immediately tore into the kid, screaming that it was disgraceful to waste his time like this, that he should fuck off and never darken his doors again, etc. Adam meekly agreed, apologised and left with no further comment.

Still furious, Desmond then called up the father-in-law to bawl the kid out further, only to be told that the father-in-law couldn’t come to the phone as he was away on compassionate leave. There had been a death in the family. His grandson. Adam’s son.

Desmond says he was so mortified that he had no choice but to buy up his pornography business.

We promised you a little look at the inner workings of Popbitch in this these Monday mails, so here’s one for you. One of the more delicate tasks we have each week is coming up with a subject line that walks the line between sounding intriguing and Popbitchy, without accidentally triggering everyone’s spam filters/getting you all pulled into meetings with HR.

“Good Cunt, Bad Cunt” (from Thursday’s Paul Dacre story) felt like the most natural subject line last week, but we figured it might not be the smartest choice. We ended up plumping for “A Lot Of Spunk”, but only after deciding that most email companies are American and would therefore consider “spunk” to mean “determination” – and not spunk.

Anyhow, here are some of the other subject lines we’ve had to reject in recent months:

* Dominic’s Cummings

* Abnormally Horny Chihuahua

* Sex Pests Need Not Apply

* Live By The Pork Sword

* Carl The Dog Cock Wiper

* How Deep Is Your Gove?

* Harvey Weinstein’s Fucking Kids

* Horrendous Bonking Machine

To explain the rejected “Harvey Weinstein’s Fucking Kids” subject line, because we realise it sounds miles worse than it is:

At a Miramax party many years back, Weinstein was greeting new guests as they swam into his ken, giving them a little tour of the event and taking great care to point out all the A-list attendees. There’s Leonardo DiCaprio, he’d say. Look, there’s Ryan Gosling.

And then, when he passed his kids, he’d say “…and these are my fucking kids.”

We’re working on a slightly more user friendly system for updating these daily music quizzes, but in the meantime these will be the ten-song mix themes for this week.

Mon/ ft. Pharrell

Tue/ The Berlin Wall Top 40

Wed/ Stargate

Thu/ Muppet Covers

Fri/ 8-Bit

You can play them, and the previous ten, here.

Pete Tong’s cover of Farley Jackmaster Funk’s seminal house track Love Can’t Turn Around
[Play here]

Charli XCX & Christine and the Queens dream team
[Play here]

X Factor’s James Arthur has gone full-on guitar solo
[Play here]