A Subtle Chundertaking

As you may know, Ed Sheeran has a property portfolio worth around £60 million: mostly an assortment of houses and apartments dotted around London. Among them is a swish double-fronted villa in the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham.

Ed doesn’t manage the property personally, so is unlikely to know who its playing host to – but there’s a fascinating bit of chatter on the West London letting agent grapevine that the place is currently being let out as a love-nest of sorts.

To a close, personal friend of… Evgeny Lebedev.

Nobody quite knew what to expect of Sebastian Vettel when he was announced as a panelist on Question Time last week, but the F1 champ remained extremely chilled and nonchalant throughout – which won’t have come as a surprise to those who know him well.

One of his team’s fondest memories of him was at an end-of-season party, where Vettel was sat on a sofa in the corner of the room with four ladies, two on each side, getting tucked into the spirits. Unfortunately, Vettel doesn’t really handle his drink all that well – but rather than leave his plum spot on the sofa when things had got a little too much for him, he would simply turn his head slightly, vomit discreetly down the back of the sofa, and then carry on with the party. With no-one seeming to bat an eyelid.

Which 6Music DJ has been described to us as having “an absolute burrito of a penis”?

There’s been quite a lot of speculation these last few months as to the sudden disappearance of Carrie Johnson. For years, she’d been an unshiftable fleck in the public eye. But since Partygate? Barely a peep.

Westminster gossips all have their theories but Carrie temporarily stopped their tongues wagging on Friday night when she appeared with Boris at the Daily Mail’s (belated) 125th anniversary party at Claridge’s.

And then started them up again just as quickly when she slipped out sharpish, midway through Lord Rothermere’s big speech – leaving Boris behind.

Another stone cold serving of schadenfreude from Piers Morgan’s viewing figures: last night, he cobbled together just 24,000 viewers (shaving another ~50% off last week’s low of 44,000).

While it’s fun to scoff at Piers bleeding out in public like this, the even bigger catastrophe is happening on Tom Newton Dunn’s show. Sources at the Baby Shard are pointing out that if his viewing figures continue on the trajectory they’re currently on, his audience will be in single figures before the month is out.

The Wagatha Christie trial has been everything it promised to be: funny, interesting, not too bleak, wrapped up relatively quickly – a masterclass in litigation as entertainment. But it’s weird, even just a couple of years on, how distant some of the era under discussion seems.

Maybe it was the mention of Splash that did it. Splash (the picture agency that Rebekah alluded to working with) ended up filing for bankruptcy recently, citing pressures from the pandemic and ongoing litigation. Unable to rely on staging the sorts of ‘candid’ out-and-about celeb shots that had become its bread and butter, the paparazzi industry has since had to adapt again.

The smart money for an enterprising pap now – in the #influencer era – is not to go halves with a celeb on a payday from the tabs, but to be employed directly by the celeb instead, advising on their aesthetic and professionalising their pics, building their social media profile into a profitable moneyspinner itself.

Now that he’s spent a bit of time in court, hearing all about how the tabloids work and how closely his wife liaised with them over the years, we wonder if the penny has finally dropped for Jamie Vardy.

Jamie never could figure out why photographers always appeared wherever he went. It used to be a source of much amusement to Rebekah that he never twigged that she was the one who always tipped paps off to their location – keeping them abreast of where they’d be and when.

He just assumed he was so popular that photographers must tail him 24/7.

Consensus on the various Take That shoots we mentioned last week is that most of them will have been for Greatest Days: the film version of the TT jukebox musical, The Band.

The shoot at Stansted Airport (the one crew on the ground were telling passers-by was “Mamma Mia 3”) is almost certainly that, after someone else spotted Aisling Bea filming something there that same day.

However, Greatest Days might not account for every single shoot. We also hear of a secret Take That project that’s being set up by one of the streaming services; a road trip series across Europe, where the band themselves meet up with different musicians around the continent.

MSN’s big plan to replace human journalists with an AI that can scrape, edit and publish news stories hit a bit of a snag this week when it tweeted out the headline “Prince William And Kate Middleton Separate As Duchess Moves Out With Children”.

There hasn’t been a Royal bombshell tweeted out like that since, erm… well… February, when Hollywood Unlocked prematurely announced the death of Queen Elizabeth.

The story MSN ran was a translation of a since-deleted post on the French blog Oh My Mag. Oh My Mag appeared to have taken the story from the German-language site Schlager, which – in turn – had posted it as a ‘Guest Post’ from the German magazine Neue Post: a National Enquirer-style weekly that mostly deals in front covers telling famous women they have three months to live.

Clearly MSN haven’t trained the AI on how to respond to takedown requests much either, as the tweet stayed up for nearly 24 hours – long after the article it linked to got nuked.

To clear up a few points from last week’s issue:

* Sky News Australia’s in-house blowhard who got sidelined to make way for Piers Morgan is Paul Murray, not Pete Murray. (Pete is a folk singer who, we’re assured, would rather lop a ball off than be mistaken for Paul – so hopefully we’ve made this clarification in time…)

* Coleen Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne, is not a QC – and mistakenly referring to him as such might have splashed a little salt and vinegar in the wound. There’s a long-standing joke among lawyer types that the reason Sherborne has yet to be offered the QC title is that his choice of clientele is too low-brow.

Rhian from Wet Leg singing in 2016
[Very different voice]

Niall Horan’s house is up for sale
[View the listing]

The greatest photos from Eurovision 2022
[See on Vice]

John Waters has a birdhouse styled as a miniature version of the Unabomber’s cabin
[Read on BuzzFeed]

Want an Icelandic horse to take care of your outgoing email?
[Because you can]

Who remembers the plot of Avatar?
[GQ asks around]

Otters on the organ
[Watch on Twitter]

Amateur archivists are streaming old VHS tapes on Twitch
[Read on Input]

Why do frogs keep shagging the wrong things?
[Science is looking into it]

Still Bored?
A mural of Johnny Cash has been shot at in Kingsland, Arkansas. The mural was on the side of a local water tank and the shooter hit it right in the crotch, so Johnny’s shadow has been pissing steadily from a great height onto the ground for eight days.
[See it here]