Catch-And-Killing Eve

As seen on Dragons’ Den, with over 2,000 five-star reviews.

Here’s a fun little detail about the new drum’n’bass night that George Osborne’s son, Luke, has been running in Bristol.

The venue that hosts the night is called Dare 2. If you don’t recognise the name, it might be because the club rebranded recently to better reflect the increasingly wide array of nights they now put on. Originally the name only alluded to the more specialist events they hosted there… Dare 2 Swing.

(Apologies to Luke if this now prompts Michael Gove to start pestering him for guestlist.)

Having discovered a flaw in his Plan A (hiding out in his mother’s extremely well-known, easy-to-find castle) Prince Andrew has been getting a little more proactive in dealing with his legal troubles – by hiring the notorious US law firm Lavely & Singer.

Lavely & Singer have a fearsome reputation in Hollywood thanks to founding partner, Marty “Mad Dog” Singer. And while a lot has been made of the fact that Andrew’s lawyer is also the one that Armie Hammer hired to help with his recent cannibal sex case, we should make it clear that Lavely & Singer don’t just deal with #MeToo casualties.

Other former clients include:

* Simon Cowell, when he got his friend’s wife pregnant and was consequently named in the couple’s divorce papers

* John Travolta, when a string of massage therapists claimed to have been unexpectedly french-kissed by him during appointments

* Kim Kardashian, when journalists suggested her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries was done for publicity

* Bill Cosby, when… erm… ah…

Anyway, a fine choice, your Highness!

Which burgeoning fashionista made herself rather unpopular at a recent photoshoot by yelling “I AM THE FUCKING REVOLUTION!” at an assistant who displeased her?

Now that the ink is dry on Piers Morgan’s big new contract with NewsCorp, it might interest you to know how it all came about.

Murdoch has been trying to nab Piers for a number of years now and has made him some serious offers. Piers only ever really used these offers as leverage to angle himself a pay rise at his existing jobs, as he never had much intention of leaving his high-profile, headline-generating gig at Good Morning Britain – one which kept him in the centre of the national conversation practically every morning.

When he drove that job into the dust though, Murdoch saw a chance to pounce. From this position of weakness, Piers could easily have been strong-armed into taking a much worse deal in order to spare him the indignity of total irrelevance (or worse, GB News). But Piers ended up coming to the table with a rather well-chosen negotiator acting on his behalf.

Who? Elisabeth Murdoch: Rupert’s once-favoured daughter, who was elbowed aside in favour of her dipshit brothers; now repping the star that the family firm was keen to hire – and taking a great deal of pleasure in using the deal to screw an especially huge sum out of her dad.

FYI: Season 3 of Succession starts on October 17th.

Lionel Messi’s snub of his manager after getting substituted at PSG this week generated miles of headlines. Mauricio Pochettino isn’t the first to come up against the almighty Messi ego, and it really doesn’t take much to set him off. An old colleague of Pep Guardiola’s in New York recounts a story about Pep’s days as Barcelona manager.

One day in the dressing room, Guardiola was having a heated chat with his players, when Messi stood up and said he was going to get a can of coke. Pep told him no, that he didn’t want players drinking fizzy drinks before matches. Messi didn’t just ignore him. Instead, he walked over to the fridge, picked out a can and then opened it right it in front of his manager – before starting to chug it down dramatically, just to show who had the real power.

Guardiola left shortly after.

The acrimonious fallout from GB News continues to amuse, and we very much enjoyed the detail that one of the crunch points was Andrew Neil pissily complaining that the plane the channel had put on for him to fly from his home in the South of France to London was “the smallest private jet in the world.”

Andrew should count his blessings. Not everyone at GB News gets treated to such luxury. In-house legend has it that instead of arranging cabs for producers and crew who work the unsocial shifts, they’ve got a single minivan that winds its way through London dropping off and picking up workers like an airport shuttle.

A service that staff refer to as the ‘GB Cruise’.

There’s a new challenger in the world of online gossip: RadarOnline’s Unreliable Sources column, written by someone using the pitiful pseudonym… Eve S Dropper.

Eve’s most recent column contained one particular story that caught our eye, titled “Catch & Kill: The Untold Secret Of A Top Editor”. The topic of catch and kill is one quite close to the heart of RadarOnline, as Radar’s earliest investor was the disgraced movie mogul and famed sex criminal, Harvey Weinstein.

Investing in Radar was one of Weinstein’s more serious attempts at reputation management. Another – as alleged in Ronan Farrow’s book Catch & Kill – was to enlist the help of the National Enquirer’s former editor-in-chief, Dylan Howard, to be his eyes and ears in the media and glean inside information about what his accusers were saying to the press.

Weirdly enough, that same Dylan Howard is the current owner and editor of RadarOnline. Obviously it would be extremely rich of Howard to put his name on any article that pointed the finger at other editors for engaging in such shady journalistic practices.

The name “Eve S Dropper”, on the other hand…

Clive Sinclair was credited with revolutionising home computing in the UK and kick-starting the British video games industry with the ZX Spectrum in the 1980s. But his influence was especially pronounced in Dundee, where Sinclair sub-contracted the Spectrum’s manufacture to the city’s watchmaking factory, Timex.

At its peak, Timex was producing a new computer every four seconds – but not all of them made it to market. Some happened to find their way into the hands of light-fingered staff, who then moved them on cheap to their pals. This meant that, even with rampant unemployment elsewhere in the city, Dundee homes were still awash with Spectrums.

With nothing much else to do during the dole-dependent early 80s, coding games really caught on and the city consequently became a massive video game development hub. One that would later give the world a multi-billion dollar crime-flavoured franchise in the form of… Grand Theft Auto.

One of the most enduring celebrity beefs of the last decade was the one between Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page: A-list neighbours in West London who had a distinctly D-list fight about the renovation works Robbie was looking to have done on his property.

The details of it are extraordinarily tedious (in the way that most neighbourly disputes are) but the fight became such a big deal in the area that a street artist mocked up a promo poster that featured the pair of them alongside the title “Let Me Excavate You” – and pasted it up on Robbie’s gate.

It pissed Jimmy off something rotten, but Robbie was clearly amused by it. We can tell because Robbie’s currently trying to sell another of his properties – a country mansion in Wiltshire – and the estate agent’s listing shows he has a big “Let Me Excavate You” poster framed and hung in his dining room.

Always meant to do the whole “1001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die” project, but never had the discipline? This website arranges it all for you…
[Get started here]

The legend of Sly Stallone’s “Work the shaft” hot mic moment
[Read on MEL]

Photos of derelict American cinemas
[See on Wallpaper]

Local News Of The Week: Abnormally Horny Chihuahua edition
[Read on Clacton Gazette]

The classic ‘pipes’ screensaver
[A blast from the past]

A Twitter account dedicated solely to documenting if there are cats in movies or not
[@catinthemovie]

Always good to read a Jarvis Cocker interview
[He talks to New Statesman]

Someone’s tested out T-Pain’s new cocktails
[Read on Slate]

Encouraging news that llama blood might help Covid
[Maybe Geronimo won’t have died in vain?]