[REDACT] To Black

Beyoncé filmed a Verizon mobile phone ad for the Super Bowl last week. She worked an 18 hour day and turned up to the shoot with a team of 30 security guys – all decked out in matching black business suits.

The ad’s shoot budget (excluding Bey) was $1m, but ended up costing twice that. The 45 second ad slot is costing somewhere in the region of $7m. And on top of that Beyonce is rumoured to have received $30m for it too.

So if Verizon customers are wondering why their fees are so high…

Whenever a big film is released and the stars of it are shepherded around a series of press junkets, it’s common for celebrity handlers to send out a few sentences to journalists, advising them of any topics they’d be best steering clear of.

Not for the new Amy Winehouse biopic. The list of topics that shouldn’t be raised with Marisa Abela currently weighs in at four pages.

Which depraved rock star used to get groupies to take milk enemas, then have them squat over bowls of cornflakes? The last one to let go would get to hang out with him.

The bombshell announcement of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis came at a rather fortunate time for ITV News.

In the hours leading up to the Palace’s statement, a new IT system they’d installed – designed to join up the company’s newsrooms around the UK – failed quite spectacularly, leaving them in chaos and struggling to pull together the usual regional news programmes on Monday evening.

Thankfully, the major breaking story gave them a convenient opportunity to bin off the local news at 6pm in favour of some rolling royal coverage, giving them time to iron out their tech issues.

As Gregg Wallace has been flavour of the week, a short story from the cutting room floor of Masterchef.

You know those moments on the show when Gregg and John go up to contestants to ask questions while they’re trying to cook against the clock? Gregg wandered over to one chef as he was making a dessert to ask if he knew the difference between jam and jelly.

The contestant distractedly answered, “Errr… gelatine, I guess?”

To which Gregg responded, “No. You can’t jelly your dick up your girlfriend’s arse!”

Curiously, that bit didn’t make the edit.

John Travolta made a guest appearance at the Sanremo Festival in Italy last night and looked utterly mortified throughout. Not only did the show’s host make Travolta teach him all the dance moves from his films, he then took him out onto the street outside to make him do the Birdie Dance.

Travolta did it through gritted teeth and is now apparently refusing to sign releases to allow further repeats, but that genie is long since out of the bottle and all over YouTube. So you can enjoy it for yourself.

Tonight’s special guest is Russell Crowe – so hopefully the host has a gumshield.

Chris Morris has been cropping up in the strangest of places recently. A few months back, we shared a video of the famously reclusive comedian giving a keynote speech at the Local Medical Committees conference.

Now he’s throwing his clout behind an equally worthy, but more unexpected cause. A crowdfunding round for his local bike shop, Brixton Cycles.

[Watch his plea here]

The Australian radio prank that currently has Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi under police investigation has created a lot of international buzz about the Kyle and Jackie O Show. The moneymen at KIIS FM will be delighted as Kyle and Jackie O recently signed a stonking $200m deal to keep their show on air for the next ten years and these are the first big headlines they’ve got for their fee.

Usually Kyle’s antics keep the show in the papers – as evidenced by the healthy “Controversies” section on his Wikipedia page (“Concentration Camp Comments”, “Disability Comments”, “Virgin Mary Comments” etc). But he appears to have lost his touch a little of recent. He gave an interview last month mentioning how he’d personally helped advise Chris Brown on his comeback – and it barely caused a ripple.

“Like Chris Brown’s return song after all that drama with the beating and shit with the Rihanna whole bullshit… I consulted with his team and him personally about what songs he should bring out… because he had all these love songs and I was like you can’t be putting out love songs you’ve just bashed your girlfriend, that’s no good. You have to put out these big anthem songs that people are dancing to.”

Holly Valance’s appearance at Liz Truss’s PopCon event, calling for Jacob Rees Mogg to be PM, has had a raft of liberal pop fans decrying her lurch to the right. This won’t have been news to most Popbitch readers though.

Back in 2022, Nigel Farage posted a picture of himself at Mar-A-Lago in the company of Holly, her billionaire property developer husband Nick Candy and Donald Trump – with the caption “Great dinner at Mar-A-Lago”.

People twisted themselves in knots trying to convince themselves that Holly was only there as the supportive wife, doing her husband a favour.

But Holly has a private, locked Instagram account to which she posted the same picture. Alongside the much more fawning caption: “With my favourite people”.

Guido Fawkes had an interesting story this week about Sky News correspondent Inzamam Rashid getting suspended after trying to pull a sickie, then getting caught later that day at a party at Piers Morgan’s house (as Kay Burley’s +1, we hear…)

He’s trying to appeal this suspension by blaming a short lived bout of diarrhoea, which he claims left him genuinely incapacitated early in the day but had firmed itself up by party time.

Inzamam isn’t the only member of Sky News missing at the moment though. In fact, HR seems to have its hands full. During a recent Town Hall event one of the most-liked questions on the anonymous submission platform was “Talent bullies producers with impunity and nothing is done, because they’re the famous face onscreen. How long can they get away with it?”

Unsurprisingly, it was not picked to be put to bosses.

Headline Of The Week: “Sunderland Search For Fugitive Raccoon Enters Seventh Week”
[Free Meeko!]

Ross from The Traitors’ YouTube music
[Listen here]

Otters are saving the world
[Go, otters!]

Films in ASCII
[ASCII Theatre]

Are Tampa residents being kept awake at night by fish shagging?
[Science says maybe]

An exhibition of the world’s worst album art
[See on BBC]

Craig from BB1’s house is up for grabs
[See on Rightmove]

The Pew Research Center has been crunching podcast guest data
[Some interesting trivia in there]

Still Bored?
It seems a blogger behind the gossip site Crazy Days And Nights has been unmasked in a rather dramatic court case brought by his ex-mistress…
[Read on Daily Beast]