Brazil/Nuts

You may have seen that Floyd Mayweather was at the SuperBowl on Sunday, swanning around dressed as a big bit of Louis Vuitton luggage. Floyd has form when it comes to making himself look more extravagant than he actually is though.

His well documented habit of showing off huge stacks of hundred dollar bills isn’t exactly what it seems. The top bill and the bottom bill are hundreds, for appearance’s sake.

The rest of them? $1 bills.

The latest issue of GQ sees Stormzy grace its cover, but getting the whole thing arranged hasn’t been without its complications.

Stormzy was supposed to get his first GQ cover back in July 2017. He did a big shoot for it, offered himself up for a profile, etc. But thanks to editor Dylan Jones’s unwavering bonk-on for the Royals, he ended up being shunted off to make way for Prince William. Stormzy’s team were so livid about getting bumped they refused to give the magazine any further interviews – even when GQ tried to make it up to him by giving him a ‘Men Of The Year’ cover in 2017.

This most recent feature might not have happened either had it been left solely to GQ. Media whispers suggest the idea to get Gary Younge in to interview Stormzy for a big cover story was originally one that the Guardian was toying with and pitched to Stormzy’s people.

Maybe Stormzy’s people misheard but, whatever happened, they somehow ended up arranging that very same profile with GQ – instead of G2…

Has the mystery daytime drinker of the Daily Mail (the anonymous boozer who kept leaving empty cans of Amstel in the bogs at Northcliffe House last year) taken on a new job? Early morning empties of Peroni have been spotted in the men’s by the bike storage at NewsUK.

In the era of services like Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, it’s easy to forget that pizza delivery was once a real luxury in the UK – reserved only for the very upper crust.

In the late 80s, before pizza places offered delivery as standard, celebrities would often call despatch riders (who normally couriered scripts/contracts, etc) to pick up their pizza orders and bring it to them at home.

Noted pizzaphile Prince Andrew was one such person who made use of this service. A former courier remembers delivering pizza to the York Household all too clearly, because Fergie was one of only two celebrity clients who ever thought to offer them a slice as a thank you.

(The other was Cleo Rocos.)

Australia’s version of Question Time, Q&A, saw a new host take the chair this week: Hamish Macdonald. Reviews of his debut performance have been pretty positive, but those who know him well knew he’d be more than capable of getting a good handle on his guests and giving them a proper going-over.

In fact, that’s how former colleagues at Network Ten remember him best. They still delight in the story of the night he gave one of his conquests such a rigorous grilling that he accidentally broke the bed and had to buy a new one.

It’s become even more astonishing to us that Alastair Stewart had to step down over his “errors of judgment” on social media after the deluge of stories we’ve heard in the last week. From the sounds of it, he’s always been very capable of talking his way out of a sticky situation.

Back in his big drinking days, Alastair was called into his boss’s office to sit down and watch a clip of News at Ten that he had presented the night before. His boss demanded an explanation for it, saying: “If you say you were drunk during that bulletin, you’re fired. What’s your excuse?”

Alastair calmly replied: “I was… pissed.”

It earned him a reprieve.

Even in the most debauched surroundings, Alastair Stewart still managed to keep his head and was able to extract himself – and others – from tricky situations.

In 1992, ITN sent a delegation out to Brazil to cover the Earth Summit. While in Rio, one of the journalists’ favoured bars in which to unwind of an evening was a place called Frankie’s – famed for staging live sex shows. Alastair could often be found there, chatting animatedly to punters in between pukes.

But when the landlord started getting heavy-handed with a fellow reporter, springing an unexpected $200 rum bill on him and threatening to call his brother-in-law (who he claimed was the local chief of police) if he didn’t cough up, who should fix the situation but Alastair. He stepped straight in to smooth things over with the lairy owner, defused the situation like a pro and stumped up the necessary funds to get his colleague off the hook.

This week, our trawl through the Popbitch archives dredges up a bunch of stories from 2002 – including the pill-popping babies of the Primrose Hill set, Les Dennis and the Groucho gak monsters, Anthony Bourdain’s tales from the top of Trump Tower, Tim Westwood’s chat-up lines and a fax to Kate Moss that cost someone their job…

[Get stuck in to 2002 here]

Jennifer Lopez spent a lot of 2002 trying to convince us that, despite her enormous wealth and fame, she was still just “Jenny From The Block. That wasn’t the only nickname she used to try to distance herself from her well-known diva demands. She also liked to refer to herself as “The Management”.

For example, if she was ever asked to do something she didn’t want to do, she would get herself out of it by saying “The Management doesn’t think that would be appropriate.”

It also stopped her from looking too greedy when it came to striking deals too. When FHM wanted J-Lo to do the cover of their 100 Sexiest Women issue, The Management agreed – in exchange for a Jaguar.

Then when Stuff magazine approached her to appear on their cover a month later, The Management said she’d be delighted to – if they coughed up for a Bentley.

Sharon Osbourne got slammed over the holidays for telling a story on the Xmas special of Would I Lie To You about firing her personal assistant after he complained she’d sent him into a burning house to save some paintings while giving his oxygen mask to her dog.

She’s since rowed it back, saying it was “a comedy show” – but if she needed a mad and fanciful tale to tell, perhaps she should have repeated the one she was telling people in 2002 about OJ Simpson, shortly after The Osbournes had made her a huge star.

Back then, Sharon claimed that she and Ozzy stopped doing drugs after Nicole Simpson was murdered because OJ and Nicole were their dealers. According to her, the couple had carved out a nice little niche for themselves as suppliers of gak to the Hollywood A-list but OJ and Nicole’s dealing led to unwelcome attention from local organised crime, who eventually put out a hit on Nicole to stop their enterprise.

The reason OJ jumped in his Bronco and fled? Sharon’s theory was that he was off his head when the hitman took out Nicole and, in his paranoid state, quite reasonably thought they would be after him too.

If you didn’t get tickets for Madonna’s Madame X shows at the Palladium, console yourself with this massive two-part mix of Madonna rarities and re-edits
[Part One is here]

The inside story of why Wild Wild West was so barking/shit
[Read on MEL]

Cooking with recipes made by neural networks
[Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake, anyone?]

Enjoy playing impossible browser games?
[Try four-way Tetris]

One of the Oscars’ academy members who cast a ballot gives her unvarnished thoughts on the nominations
[They’re pretty blunt]

The weird world of Bob The Builder erotic fan fiction
[Read on World Of Crap]

The further adventures of AMI’s Dylan Howard
[Read on THR]

A bunch of new Popbitch Popquizzes have just gone on sale for March; there’s still a few tables left for Tuesday’s event though.
[Tuesday 11th February]
[Tuesday 25th Feburary]
[Tuesday 10th March]
[Tuesday 24th March]

Still Bored?
If you’ve experienced any disruption in receiving recent Popbitch issues, you’ll find them here…
[Issue 969: Flickbait]
[Issue 970: The Bedsheet Sniff Inspection]
[Issue 971: Shakespeare In Muff]