Raab-a-dub-dub

Sharon Osbourne is well known for the inventively disgusting attacks that she used to launch on the people who displeased her. Her pissing-in-the-Jack-Daniels-bottle routine is legendary. Her shitting-in-a-briefcase one likewise. Here’s another to add to the hall of fame.

Someone who was working for Sharon Osbourne’s lawyers once received a mystery package in the post from the woman herself. Upon opening it they found it contained a single, unwrapped wine gum. When they asked their colleagues if they knew what it was about, they very quickly warned her not to eat it. Apparently Sharon had a thing for sticking wine gums up inside her and then posting them to people for kicks.

Something that one former employee had apparently discovered a little too late.

The Tory leadership contest has been trying enough for most of us as it is, but please spare a thought for one poor Popbitch reader who was recently alerted to the fact that she once shagged Dominic Raab at a wedding in the 90s.

The evening is somewhat hazy in her memory, but she remembers a few key things. She remembers him being kind enough to walk her back to the isolated family pub where she was staying (even after she’d spent the whole night laughing at his politics). She remembers him waking up other guests when he started doing comedy schtick in an extra-loud ‘Tory Boy’ voice.

But the truly indelible memory she has is one of him dancing around her tiny hotel room wearing nothing but a frilly shower cap.

Which high profile celebrity might want to be a little more discreet about their Sunday morning drinking habit? It’s not a great look to be the first one sinking pints at your London local as they open the doors. Even less so if you’re trying to show the world that you’re back on the straight and narrow…

The life of Marco Pierre White Jnr may be no less debauched than it once was, but it’s definitely getting less glamorous.

Gone are the days of Celebrity Big Brother fame and three-month £250,000 drug binges in Ibiza. He’s more likely to be found these days getting kicked off the 11pm ‘nightbus’ in Bath (destination: Chippenham) after failing to pay his fare and being too hammered to explain himself to the driver.

Maybe last weekend was just a quiet one though, eh?

Funny the things you’ll talk about at 30,000ft. Laila Morse (a.k.a. Mo from EastEnders) was on a Ryanair flight from France to London recently and had been struck by a rather unfortunate bout of food poisoning the night before.

How do we know? Because Laila was so relieved to have secured seat 1A on the flight (right near the toilets) that she started telling the strangers in the seats nearby all about it. We now know Laila is an extremely considerate toilet user, habitually carrying a mini pot pourri with her so that she can keep the loo smelling all nice and rosy for the passenger after her.

Luckily, the pot pourri was not required on this particular flight as Laila informed her fellow passengers that she had popped a few of “those Imodium things” beforehand – and they seemed to hold up.

It’s easy to write the Love Island set off as a bunch of airheads, but Molly-Mae is no fool. Word is that she’s already got someone repping her on the outside who’s checking up on media outlets that have scoured her social media for stories, and issuing a £150 invoice for any pictures they’ve lifted from her Instagram without permission.

Online media outlets have commonly used Instagram as a sort of fee-free photo agency (and usually get away with it because both Instagram and the Instagrammer are happy for the exposure) but it seems like we might be on the verge of a new celebrity copyright crackdown.

Not only have the Duke and Duchess of Sussex been very quick off the mark this week to enforce the rights to their massively proscriptive “one day only” approval of their Instagram post of baby Archie – even proper royalty is getting involved.

Mariah Carey’s people are dutifully working their way through a backlog of social media users who used All I Want For Christmas in their Xmas memes – and are still issuing take down orders in the middle of June.

Surprised though we were to see the story of David Prescott shitting on a woman’s floor make it into the Sunday papers, the bigger surprise was that Prescott had enough friends within the Labour party to keep his name out of the papers for so long – as he has a bit of a habit for alienating those close to him.

For example, one of his best friends once refused to speak to him for over a year after David confessed to him that he always thought of said friend’s wife whenever he was knocking one out.

Once upon a time, if Elton John was asking for “Fruit And Flowers” on his rider then it was generally understood to be a codeword for “cocaine”.

So either Elton has truly mellowed with old age or he’s ramping things up for one last blow-out before retirement – because the guy in charge of his catering was seen making his way around Cardiff last weekend ahead of Elton’s gig there, trying to track down “twelve kilograms of jackfruit”.

The Championship play-off final is often touted as the richest game in football, worth an estimated £170m to the winning team.

Ahead of their victory this year, Aston Villa offered one of their best loved legends, European Cup winner Gordon Cowans, a ticket to Wembley to watch the match – as a thank you for all his efforts for the club back in the day.

And all they asked for in return…? £70.

Cowans ended up watching it in the Horse & Jockey in Lichfield instead.

Christina Aguilera is coming back to London for the first time in 13 years in November and, according to an interview on Lorraine yesterday, she’s looking forward to getting stuck into the food here. BBC canteen staff can breathe a sigh of relief then, knowing that they weren’t the reason Xtina hasn’t graced these shores in so long.

On one of her previous UK trips (when she was here performing on the National Lottery show) she demanded to be served fried chicken, mash and gravy: a Southern American classic that we Brits don’t really tend to offer. The runners tasked with sourcing the meal managed to scrabble together the chicken from nearby take-outs, but they had a little more trouble with the mash.

They ended up having to source that from the BBC canteen, where they scraped it off the top of the fish pies on the menu that day.

A Garfield themed restaurant is opening in Toronto this weekend
[Hope you like lasagna!]

A great round-up of the “wrap-up rap songs” featured in movie credits
[Read on Slate]

Local News Of The Week: Mutant flea-cock edition
[Poor old Sheffield]

Pee-Wee’s Jurassic Adventure
[See on Pee-Wee’s site]

The inventor of Tetris ranks his favourite Tetris pieces
[See on Nintendo Life]

If you didn’t see the Pakistani political press conference with the Facebook cat filter, you really should
[See on The Verge]

Slack goes public today, so congratulations to its CTO: Cal Henderson, Popbitch’s first ever intern. Cal coded the newsletter archives that we still have today, 18 years on
[Read on Fortune]

If you aren’t up to speed on the candidates for our next Prime Minister
[Read PM Tea on Popbitch]

POPBITCH QUERY: Anyone based in Asia who knows the local EDM or club scene? Email us at things@popbitch.com

Still Bored?
This week’s Media Masters podcast is an interview with Katy Searle, the editor at BBC Westminster – and there could hardly have been a better moment for it. Katy talks Brexit fatigue, Tory leadership battles and the criticism the Beeb takes from both sides about its choice of guests…
[Listen/Download on Media Masters]