Butter The Devil You Know

So what now for Noel Clarke? After 20 women came forward last week with detailed stories of his alleged abuse, word on the wire is that he’s hired noted ‘reputation specialist’ Gideon Benaim to take on his case.

The name possibly rings a bell. Formerly a lawyer for famed celebrity attack dogs Schillings, we had cause to mention Gideon in Popbitch earlier this year when Sony chairman Jason Iley decided to avail himself of his services.

But it’s far more likely you’ll remember him from his career crowning glory. Gideon was the one who helped Ryan Giggs maintain his spotless reputation – by applying for that superinjunction.

After starring in nine series of Made In Chelsea, three Made In Chelsea spin-off series and appearing in over 100 episodes over her five year stint, Georgia “Toff” Toffolo has managed to parlay her fame from that show into all sorts of lucrative appearances, endorsements and partnerships.

Like most of her former Made In Chelsea castmates, you can get her along to the opening of an envelope if the money’s right. There’s just one condition.

You aren’t to refer to her as a “former Made In Chelsea star”.

While the boss is mired in numerous sleaze scandals, which cabinet minister has been managing to sow their oats across most of Westminster and Whitehall largely undetected – rumoured to be shagging a member of the House Of Lords, a fellow MP and one of their SpAds?

Shortly after the Noel Clarke story broke last Thursday, a number of you sent us a video that had been doing the rounds on social media in which Noel tells an audience at a Doctor Who panel about how John Barrowman constantly got his knob out on set.

While it’s true that Barrowman has largely managed to avoid any public scrutiny over what is a very well-known habit in the industry, Noel doesn’t paint an entirely accurate picture.

To hear him talk, you’d think Barrowman just flops it out and taps it against things. As longtime Popbitch readers know, he’s much more flamboyant than that. In his time, he’s used it as a hanger for his castmates’ props in panto, used it to wipe down his breakfast bar for guests, and – in one particularly memorable instance – used it to cut up a birthday cake.

As millions of people watched the final episode of Line of Duty to see the fabled “H” unmasked – the reveal came as no surprise to some of the patrons of Covent Garden’s Lemon Tree Pub. They’d had their suspicions for a while.

Back in 2010, a Popbitch reader was drinking in the Lemon Tree with a group of mates. As their group began to disperse, the remaining drinkers offered up the freed table space to other punters who’d come in – including one pissed-up group that included the actor who would later play H.

H’s group didn’t stick around for very long and it was only when our reader’s friends started packing up to leave they realised one of their laptops was missing. They always figured one of H’s pissed-up mates pinched it. But maybe the OCG links go back a long way?

Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio marked the series finale in his time-honoured fashion – by getting into a social media spat with a journalist.

This time, he called a correspondent from the Irish Business Post “a fucking prick” – and he’s clearly not over the criticism S5’s ending drew either as just a couple of months ago he reignited a beef with a Guardian critic, calling her “a piece of shit” and “a cunt” over comments she’d made back in 2019.

Obviously it’s never fun to see your work criticised, but surely there’s a more edifying way for Jed to work out his frustrations? Maybe he should take a leaf out of the book of one of the Sherlock crew? Whenever their show took a mauling on social media – as it often did – they would head to the gym and take their anger out on a punchbag.

A punchbag they’d labelled “Twitter”.

Eric Burdon, the singer of The Animals, turns 80 later this week. Though his band is best known for their version of House Of The Rising Sun, Burdon has made his own impressive mark on rock’n’roll history.

He was famous in groupie circles in the 60s for using raw eggs in his sex play. The common story that went round was that he liked to crack eggs onto his partners and then slurp the contents off them. Burdon himself contests this, saying he was the one who got egged by a girlfriend who once treated him to a noseful of amyl and then cracked an egg onto his belly as foreplay.

Whatever the truth of it, these stories led to him becoming known as “The Eggman” between friends – a nickname that was later immortalised by his pal John Lennon in I Am The Walrus.

Anyone worried that TV, technology and TikTok are killing the attention span of teenagers can stand down.

Korean boyband BTS release their second English-language single “Butter” later this month, which they announced with a teaser video. The video is one hour long, contains no music (just the ambient sounds of a kitchen) and shows a slab of butter slowly melting into a heart shape.

Not even actual butter. A cartoon drawing of butter.

300,000 fans tuned in to watch the livestream and it’s since racked up another 15 million views.

Nick Cave once said “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Sadly for him, there’s probably going to be even more of it in the near future as the Chili Peppers have just sold their back catalogue to Hipgnosis for $140m.

This new fad of investment funds buying up artists’ oeuvres for eye-watering sums has made a lot of headlines recently, but if they ever hope to turn a profit on this wheeze, the only practical way to do it is to wring out every last cent placing the tracks in TV, films, ads and video games. We’re not so sure ad agencies and streaming giants will want to fork out premium fees for big bands though when there’s a lot more mileage in smaller, cheaper acts.

Take the LA band Caught A Ghost – best known in the industry for being so unknown. They’ve only released one album to date, back in 2014, but their tracks have been endlessly mined for just about everything going. They’ve been used by HBO (Boardwalk Empire, Shameless, Crashing), Amazon Prime (Bosch), US network TV (Grey’s Anatomy, Suits, Vampire Diaries, The Blacklist), movies (Dear White People), video game trailers (A Way Out), commercials (Friskies cat food, Miller Lite beer, dating site BlackPeopleMeet) – as well as providing the soundtrack for a Victoria’s Secret show.

If you can get all of that from one tiny indie act, why would anyone pay the price investment funds will need to charge to claw back the millions they spent on buying the rights to Californication – a song that even a TV show called Californication didn’t think to use?

A new study out of the neuroscience department at Dartmouth suggests that gossip isn’t just “baseless trash talk” but “a complex form of communication that is often misunderstood” which might actually serve a useful social purpose.

You can take Dartmouth’s word for it too – and not just because it’s a fancy-pants Ivy League school. It learned the benefit of gossip the hard way. A few years ago the college had to settle a multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit after dismissing over 15 years’ worth of complaints about three tenured professors who were later found to have persistently sexually harassed, abused and assaulted women on campus.

Professors who all worked in… Dartmouth’s neuroscience department.

Paris Hilton debunks her most famous meme
[See on TikTok]

Journalists remember their worst pitches
[Read on The Fence]

A peek at how those viral ‘isathingstillhappening-dot-com’ websites are run
[Read on Substack]

“Nashville Police Identify Man Who Was Arrested For Swinging Colostomy Bag At Kid Rock’s Bar”
[Headline of the week]

Prince and Mel B in the playground
[See on Twitter]

Someone’s written a book on Jeff Bezos v the National Enquirer
[An excerpt on Bloomberg]