A Year In Eight Weeks

The Sun has had a pretty brutal time of it recently. In slurping up to Boris so hungrily, just 6% of the public thinks the tabloid has done a good job in the Covid-19 crisis (compared to the BBC’s 60%). But they do have a couple of reasons to be cheerful.

First is that political editor and HR regular Tom Newton-Dunn has just announced his departure for Times Radio.

And now it’s emerging that Sun lifer Steve Waring is the one that’s been chosen to head up the Sun on Sunday – killing off Dan Wootton’s hopes of being editor.

We’ve always found it strange that so few stories of Max Clifford have emerged now that he’s dead and can’t make life difficult for anyone any more – but the news that Channel 4 is airing a show of classic Big Brother moments affords a chance to shed a little more light on him.

Clifford always claimed to be the one who came up with the idea to put Chantelle Houghton into Celebrity Big Brother as a fake celebrity. While she was in the CBB house, he worked tirelessly to line up a number of lucrative interviews and appearances for her to launch her post-show career – but someone tossed an unexpected spanner in his plan.

Shortly after she won the show, Davina McCall took Chantelle aside and persuaded her to sign with her agent rather than with Max. Clifford’s revenge? Shortly after, he told journalists off the record that he would be using all of his media contacts and power to torpedo Davina’s upcoming BBC talk show.

“Davina” debuted two weeks later. And was cancelled after eight.

If the writers of Succession are looking for storylines, they might want to ask around to find out which well-endowed media heir is so into sado-games that even some of the most experienced and worldly escorts have had to stop taking their calls because things were all getting a bit much for them.

Over the last two months, we’ve been sending out daily issues of Popbitch to those who wanted a little afternoon pick-me-up in lockdown.

We were expecting it to be a story or two from the archives and a little link to something stupid each day. It’s ended up becoming an amazing little repository of readers’ stories though and by the end of this week we’ll have sent out 52 of these mini-issues – with stories you’re unlikely to read anywhere else.

You can catch up with them all in our designated daily archive (as well as sign up for it yourself). In the meantime, here are a couple of the stories we were sent that we didn’t have space for.

[Sign up / Read back issues]

In Monday’s daily, we asked for stories of celebrity pets – which led to Tuesday’s daily revolving around stars who are too lazy or careless to pick up their dogs’ shit. Which, in turn, led to someone telling us this…

At house parties, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson liked to amuse herself by secretly placing piles of peanut butter styled to look like dog turds somewhere obvious on the carpet. Once a pile was noticed by one of the other guests, TP-T would declare that she could determine which of the dogs was responsible for the mess.

To the horror of on-lookers, she would then dip a finger into the pile, give it a quick taste and then single out the miscreant creature.

Earlier this week we asked daily readers to tell us all about the strangest celebrity hobbies they knew of – hoping to get a bit of inspiration for when the second wave of infection hits and we’re confined to our houses for all eternity.

deep_stoat writes:

“The Prodigy always had a room backstage marked ‘Prodigy – Models’. I went in there expecting to find Kate Moss doing gak or something but instead the band and crew were all making plastic models.

“IIRC Liam was making a Harrier jump jet and Keith was busy finishing off a Mini Metro.”

Yesterday we asked for tales of celebrities acting in ways completely at odds from their public persona. Long time readers won’t be shocked to hear who we heard about…

I writes:
“This won’t come as a surprise to you, but salt-of-the-Earth friendly Scouser Cilla Black was an absolute cunt. She demanded a huge winnebago, to be stocked with tropical fruit, champers and a brand new, state-of-the-art coffee machine, then threw a tantrum because the coffee machine didn’t come stocked with porcelain cups. ‘Cilla Black does not drink out of MUGS!’ was one shriek I still hear.

“Later, I got sent to her dressing room with a cup of tea to see if there was anything else Ms Black required. Her husband Bobby opened the door and was very pleasant, and just asked me to put the tea down on the table near the door. Cilla screamed at me “MIND THE FURS!” and pointed at her wallful of minks a good 10 yards away on the opposite side of the largest dressing room in Granada Studios.

“There was obviously no way I could have spilled tea that far. It was just important to her that I saw how many fur coats she had.”

For the last month or so, we’ve been including stories of Bill Nighy being weird and charming with strangers. This led to us learning that Heat Magazine once had a trophy made for him (which his agent refused to let him accept) because he was – by some distance – the celeb that their readers spotted out and about most often.

“Bill Nighy” became a trending topic on Twitter today. Not because he’d done anything in particular, just because one user had asked tweeters to share their most mundane run-ins with celebs and absolutely everybody had a Bill Nighy story to share.

You can scroll through some here – but we particularly enjoyed the one where Bill told someone to fuck off when he thought they were taking pictures of him. When they showed him that they were just checking Google Maps on their phone, he apologised profusely and blamed his outburst on the fact he hadn’t washed his hair.

The Guardian has announced that its dating service Guardian Soulmates is ending next month, leaving the nation’s single Belle And Sebastian fans to fend for themselves.

As well as providing romance for readers, Guardian writers were also known to use the service to drum up dates. Charlie Brooker was on it back in his single days under the username ‘Blunderbuss’ and was “very charming and attentive” we’re told.

(Also: “shagged, but no second date”.)

Huge thanks to our friends at the Port Of Leith Distillery for sponsoring our live-streamed Popbitch Popquiz on Tuesday.

If you missed out, don’t worry. The code QUIZBITCH20 still gets you £10 off their delicious gin – and we’ve got loads of Popbitch Popquiz packs that you can download and host yourself in isolation.

Last week, our site was down for maintenance so we couldn’t direct you to the recently released Orange edition and Light Pink edition (a special family friendly version, if you don’t want to pose questions about celebrity sex scandals to your gran).

Tomorrow we’ll be releasing the brand new Teal edition too, so if you’re after a quiz to play with mates this weekend, we’ve got everything you need.

[Get your Popbitch Popquizzes here]

Art lessons
[Do Not Draw A Penis]

Seals singing Seal
[Listen on YouTube]

Everyone in Parks And Rec deepfaked as Ron Swanson
[Watch on YouTube]

Someone built their local pub in VR
[An admirable dedication to pints]

Celebrity lego portraits
[Joe Exotic, RuPaul, Winehouse]

Giving her side of one of the biggest stories of recent years, Amelia Gentleman talks to Media Masters about breaking the Windrush scandal
[Listen to Media Masters podcast]

Best named window furnishings shop
[Blindsexpress]

How private equity drained the music industry
[Read on Penny Fractions]

Still Bored?
“It is weird, but my preferences are… just sort of eat like a wild animal. Like, out of a trash can” – Robert Pattinson’s interview is well worth your time
[Read on GQ]