Despotic Reproduction

Usually when a celebrity is running to the loo every five minutes at a fancy event, there’s a very particular reason for it (and it’s rarely anything to do with their bladder). That’s not why Tommy Fury was constantly taking trips to the toilet at the recent premiere of Conor McGregor’s new film Road House though.

After having called Conor out for a fight earlier this month, Fury didn’t seem all that bothered about watching the film. Instead, he kept sneaking out to hide in the toilets so he could hijack the cast photoshoots taking place and square up to McGregor in front of the cameras.

Staff were consequently tasked with keeping a eye on him, having to continually stop him from intercepting the photos, and ushering him back to the auditorium – as he pleaded like an errant schoolboy that he really did need to go.

There was once a time when the stories we’d hear about Kylie Minogue would be reliably outrageous. Her joining the Mile High Club with Michael Hutchence on a Qantas flight sat behind Aussie PM Bob Hawke. Tales of her doing unspeakable things with Hutchence and a Barbie doll. Rumours of her joint-rolling prowess. Affairs with Jean Claude Van Damme.

At one point she was so gossiped about, she even became linked to a hoary old urban legend about an A-lister needing to be secretly airlifted to hospital after an encounter with an Alsatian – the details of which would make Debbie McGee blush.

How times change. The hottest rumour we heard about Kylie this week? That she and Dannii have got voice cameos in the upcoming half-hour episode of Bluey.

(Hopefully no airlifting involved…)

Which celebrity guest arrived late for kick-off at a recent Wrexham match because she assumed (presumably because Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney own the club) that the ground would have valet parking?

Maybe because he’s always chosen such ridiculous names for himself, it’s easy to forget just how big a deal Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy; aka P Diddy) was around the turn of the century – and how much of the blueprint for modern multi-hyphenate celebrity was set by him.

Starting out as a producer and label owner in the early 90s, before becoming a megastar in his own right with his Police-sampling tribute to Biggie, Puffy was one of the first celebs to successfully parlay his star power into a lifestyle brand, building a vast business empire on the back of his name(s).

By the early 2000s, he wasn’t just a millionaire music star, label impresario, clothing maven and political activist – he was listed as one of the wealthiest businessmen in America under 40. His White Parties in the Hamptons changed the face of the American Establishment, integrating hip-hop and pop culture into the world of the ultra rich like never before.

Now with all the police raids, lawsuits and sex trafficking allegations (some of which date back to the 90s) it looks as though he’s going to be shown as something of a trailblazer in a different field too.

Palling about with politicians, while doing philanthropy with Bill Gates and partying with Leo DiCaprio. Sounds awfully like the same playbook followed by… Jeffrey Epstein.

Weird though it was to see Prince Harry singled out for a namecheck in P Diddy’s sex trafficking lawsuit, Diddy always did have a strange affinity for our ginger royals.

Back when he was trying to rebrand himself from rapper-producer to full-service corporate power player, Diddy liked to pepper his company literature with equally bizarre name-drops.

Among the people he was keen that potential investors knew he was tight with were Sting, Michael Bolton and… Sarah Ferguson.

We’re sure we don’t need to tell the FBI their business when it comes to raiding people’s houses, but if they didn’t check Diddy’s mansion for super-secret spy compartments, they should look again.

When Diddy had his other big altercation with law enforcement, after that New York club shooting in 1999, one of the witnesses called into court was grilled about a concealed compartment in Diddy’s SUV.

Under oath, the witness confirmed its existence and explained the extremely elaborate process to access it. It involved getting a series of particular settings right – first with the ignition, then the radio, then the thermostat – before flicking a hydraulic latch to open the compartment.

It would have been a perfect way to stash a gun out of sight of the cops. Sadly, in the heat of the chase, no-one in the car could remember the convoluted sequence to get the thing open. So they ended up doing the next best thing: chucking it out of the window.

From Popbitch #82 (01//08/01):
“A former party organiser for Puff Daddy claims that he would hide collections of ladies in his cellar while J-Lo visited. She claims that it was a common occurrence for J-Lo’s car to be barely out of the driveway before the cellar door opened and 15 exotic dancers / masseurs would emerge to continue partying with Puffy.”

Traitors producer Stephen Lambert was given the lifetime achievement award at the Royal Television Society Awards this week. Nice to see that, given all that’s been going on with the Royals at the minute, they’ve found time to bury the hatchet with him.

For a while Lambert’s name was mud around the Palace – as he was the one of the people forced to fall on their swords when that misleadingly edited documentary trailer of the Queen was broadcast back in 2007 (the one showing her seemingly storming out of an Annie Leibovitz shoot).

You’d be hard pressed to find a better headline than “North Korea Censors Alan Titchmarsh’s Trousers” – as we were blessed with this week. Western imperialist jeans aside, we actually reckon Alan and Kim Jong-un would get on pretty well. They’ve got more in common than you’d maybe expect.

For instance, Alan once commissioned a portrait for his wife’s birthday one year. Of himself.

We should have learned our lesson with sea otters. After being taken in by their cute, fluffy charm, we were shocked to learn that they were actually monstrously perverted deviants – having been spotted killing baby seal cubs and stashing their bodies to use as sex dolls, while taking each other’s kids hostage as a bartering technique to get food.

It seems marmots – who we were bigging up last week – aren’t quite as sweet as they appear either. They’re blood thirsty sex tyrants too.

The people who study marmots say they’re known for ‘despotic reproduction‘ – a Game Of Thrones style set-up where there’s a dominant couple who get to do all the shagging; a raft of expendable subordinates to do all the child raising; and if anyone ever launches a successful coup, then the first act of the new leaders is mass infanticide.

So instead we’re pivoting and going all in on hyraxes. They are our latest cute obsession. If you don’t know them they are marmotesque, cute little bundles of fluff who climb trees and rocks. And the only weird things we’ve heard about them so far is that the boys have no scrotums and the girls have tits in their armpits.

[Check them out]

Browser game of the week: Dog Poo Golf
[Play on vole.wtf]

Photos of the week: Bears on a pedalo
[See on BBC]

Secrets on the set of The Price Is Right, inc. the Pissed Pants Protocol
[Read on People]

Want to buy a Trump bible?
[Very, very classy]

The reviews are in on Kevin Spacey’s comeback film
[Read on Rolling Stone]

Jawdropping story on an unfolding scandal in the Church of England
[Read on The Fence]

Joel Veitch – formerly of this parish, B3ta and rathergood – has a new show out today on Netflix
[Bad Dinosaurs]

Still Bored?
An oral history of Madonna’s infamous 1994 David Letterman appearance – 30 years on
[Read on LateNighter]