A Fountain Of Celebrity Wisdom

With most of this year’s pantomimes being postponed, it’s not just audiences who will miss out on a month of bawdy entertainment. John Barrowman’s furloughed castmates will too.

Barrowman has a long-established reputation in the industry for getting his knob out for a joke at the merest provocation. One lucky actor who starred in a pantomime with him some years back had a memorable scene in which he’d tell the audience he was just popping off to Tesco. He’d drive off-stage in a little golf buggy, collect a few prop carrier bags from the wings and re-enter with them.

Most of the time, these bags would be handed to the actor. On the occasions Barrowman could muster one in time however, he would kindly proffer them dangling from his erection – just out of the audience’s sightline.

Being an adored celeb might seem like it would be fun for a while, but it quickly starts to grate when all you want is to nip for a quiet wee without anyone bothering you.

Katie Price is full of tales about how fed up she would get at VIP events with everyone stopping her when she tried to go to the toilets, all wanting selfies and asking for autographs, that she eventually gave up.

Instead, she’d just sit on the edge of her seat. As she rarely wore underwear anyway, she would pull her skirt up and piss on the floor under the table. All the while being sure to smile for any cameras or fans nearby.

Which two clubland legends once tried (and failed) to make sweet music together after a big night out, when he requested a rusty trombone – and she promptly spewed at the prospect of it?

Last week, we mentioned that former National Enquirer editor (and noted Trump husher-upper) Dylan “Dyldo” Howard had recently hired some lawyers to rattle the cage of Ronan Farrow for the claims he laid out in his #MeToo book, Catch And Kill – but that there was no sign of any actual case on the horizon.

It’s no real surprise. One of Dyldo’s crack legal team is already stretched pretty thin at the minute. In fact, you may have seen him on the news. Lin Wood? The guy trying his darnedest to file lawsuits to overturn the states that Trump lost (even though documents are riddled with errors; or – in one instance in Wisconsin – completely blank). The guy who was making claims on-air that Trump actually won the election with 70% of the vote, and is now taking fire from his own side for instructing Georgia Republicans to not vote at all in their critical upcoming Senate run-offs.

If you don’t keep up with American politics, you might remember him for something else. Lin Wood was also the lawyer who lost a defamation case last year, when he unsuccessfully argued the case for the British rescue diver that Elon Musk called a paedophile on Twitter.

It’s a well-known story that Sir Philip Green and Kate Moss first met when Green bought a gift that Moss had donated to a charity auction – a kiss. He paid an impressive £60K for this kiss, but chivalrously declined to accept it in the end, giving it instead to the person he outbid (Jemima Khan).

Not long after, Moss and Green worked together on a hugely successful TopShop collaboration that made them both millions.

A less well-known story is that Green tried to recreate a little of that old magic not too long ago, when the Arcadia empire started crumbling and his billions began evaporating. Instead of trying to buy another kiss off Kate though, he tried to buy one off someone else instead: Kate’s daughter – offering her up to “half the year’s profits” in return.

Given the state his business affairs are in now, we can only assume she wisely declined the offer.

Before Sir Philip Green, there was Sir Ralph Halpern. Sir Ralph started TopShop in 1964 as part of the Burton Group and, on the back of the brand’s success, rose to become group CEO. At one point under his tenure, the retail empire employed 60,000 staff across nearly 3,000 stores and he became the first UK CEO to earn a million pound salary.

But Halpern, like Green, is perhaps better known to the public for other reasons. In 1987, tales of his “five times a night” affair with a 19 year-old topless model hit the tabloids, making him a household name.

With 2020 being such a tough time for his old business what does Sir Ralph have to say about it now? Not much. He appears to have retired to MAGA country in Florida, where he spends his days retweeting conspiracy theories to 40 followers about Joe Biden’s links to China, anti-vax doctors and Uri Geller’s thoughts on how Covid was supposed to have been an Iranian biological weapon.

Lockdown 2 is over but, by our count, there’s just enough space to fit in 12 more daily editions between now and Christmas. So rather than stop the little blasts of celebrity nonsense we’ve been sending readers who want a little extra Popbitch in their inbox, we’re going to use the Daily Tonic to revisit some of our favourite stories of 2020 over the next few weeks.

If you want to join us waving goodbye to this shitheap year, you can sign up for it now. Or you can catch up on all of this week’s bonus stories – about Lana Del Rey blasting her own tunes, Sepp ‘Bellend’ Blatter and Oliver Reed’s cannonball bet – on the same page too.

[Sign up/catch up here]

Enobarbus writes:
“I went to a small university that was out of the way and couldn’t afford many of the celebrity visits that our more metropolitan counterparts could, but we were very excited to once host an evening with Dave Prowse.

“He was a lovely guy, stayed afterwards and answered any questions, signed anything people asked for and flogged some of his stuff. I helped him pack this stuff in the back of his car after. His boot had a strange rope hanging down from it which he explained was there because he’d bought the car off Kenny Baker (R2D2) and Kenny had needed the rope to be able to close it.”

With the death of famous wheeler-dealer football agent Eric “Monster Monster” Hall last month, his old neighbours might finally be a step closer to solving a little mystery that has plagued their block of flats.

Someone there had a habit of throwing bread out of their window onto the ground outside. There was no apparent explanation for it, but it became such a problem that the environmental agency needed to be called in as other residents feared the bread would start attracting rodents.

In and of itself, not too weird. But it wasn’t breadcrumbs this person was chucking. It was full loaves. Often more than one at a time.

“Breadgate” (as the incidents became collectively known to residents) was never officially solved, but Eric was a prime suspect. Neighbours tried to bring it up with him but when someone called on him to ask, he pretended to be his identical twin brother and feigned ignorance.

Covid Preacher x Heavy Metal
[Watch on YouTube]

Local News of the Week: Dildo Pottery Dispute Edition
[Read on stuff.co.nz]

Dancing Chinchillas
[See on Instagram]

Coronation Street stars with festive crime warnings
[A curious Twitter thread]

“I’ve tried reading the Bible but it’s in a fucking language that I don’t understand. Someone should do a version in my language: ‘And so Jesus said, ‘Fuck off!’ And lo, they all fucked off.'”
[Ozzy Osbourne in GQ]

A perfect Philip Green anecdote
[See on Instagram]

Meanwhile in Florida, it’s raining frozen iguanas…
[Headline of the week]

Still Bored?
How old ambient Japanese music has found a new audience through YouTube
[Read on arstechnica]