Strumming The Pink Ukulele

The Winehouse biopic isn’t even out yet and already Marisa Abela can’t get any peace. Online media has been scrutinising the latest clip of her singing all week and things haven’t been much better offline either.

She was spotted trying to enjoy a quiet drink in the Blue Posts in Soho yesterday. But when staff twigged who she was, the next song they bumped on the playlist?

Rehab.

Kate Middleton’s Uncle Gary has clearly developed a taste for acting the prick in public after his recent stint on Celebrity Big Brother. He and a couple of friends were in Benihana in Covent Garden last week for a lazy lobster lunch and they all wanted to play a little game with their server afterwards.

Holding the bill hostage, they refused to hand over a card to pay for the meal until she was willing to guess which of them around the table had had hair transplants and which hadn’t.

Excruciating though it was, she gamely played along. And how much did Mr Millionaire tip her for her trouble? 5%.

Which media gobshite – usually so hard to shut up – has been extremely quiet about the £19,000 they’re having to pay after another failed adventure in libel law?

Rebel Wilson’s body double has now stepped up to give her account of how Sacha Baron Cohen made the shoot of Grimsby an unpleasant experience for her, backing up Rebel’s contention that Sacha seems to thrive off making women uncomfortable.

Sacha denies the allegations – but, while we can’t speak to anything that happened on the set of Grimsby, around the time it was released in 2016 we were getting reports from a set that Sacha was on in Hollywood where somebody was definitely upsetting the women.

Someone had been arriving on set every morning at the crack of dawn to do a humungous shit in the ladies’ toilet and leaving it unflushed for some poor woman to find later. The phantom pooer was never unmasked, but it didn’t go unnoticed around set that the only consistent early bird there was… Sacha.

Elsewhere from our Phantom Poo correspondents, we hear that Price Waterhouse Cooper is the latest company to be struck by a stinky menace.

Someone who just enjoyed their final day in the Edinburgh office left a couple of farewell gifts for colleagues to find after their departure – doing some upsettingly sloppy looking poos in not one, but two of the office fridges there.

Their identity might not stay a mystery for long, however, as the miscreant was apparently spotted dropping trou by one of the partners. Which probably accounts for the sloppiness.

With a month to go before TalkTV yanks its TV channel, how is morale around the offices there? In a word: bad.

Not because of the redundancies and other pending job losses (although they haven’t helped). What’s really been bringing the mood down is the senior exec who has been constantly strumming their pink ukulele in the office.

Said exec had to stage a search party this week, deputitzing a handful of staff to help look for it as one disgruntled employee had become so annoyed by it they took matters into their own hands and hid it.

The people behind ABBA’s Voyage have just announced they’ve got a similar hologram show in the works with KISS. We don’t know the full terms of the deal (and very much can’t be arsed to find them out) but they’re going to want to be careful about how much creative control they offer up to Gene Simmons. When it comes to legacy projects, his tastes are… unconventional.

In the late 80s, Gene tried to pitch a book to publishers. He hadn’t been asked to, he would just turn up at their offices with a huge zip-up art portfolio. In it were hundreds upon hundreds of topless pictures of women – portraits of the women he’d slept with over his career. This was his big idea. He wanted to create a coffee table book of all his conquests and fill it with nudey snaps of what he estimated must total 2,000 women.

Even though editors passed on the pitch, he kept the portfolio and added to it over time. His now-wife has attempted to throw it in the bin numerous times.

Lulu gave a big interview to the BBC this week, claiming that she never speaks to anyone before noon in order to take care of her voice. Maybe that’s true but she doesn’t really like talking at other points of the day either. At least that’s what fans who tried to meet her once at a gig in York reckon. They got a few of her other excuses too.

When she arrived for soundcheck at 6:40pm, she breezed past a small group of fans (4) who were asking for autographs, saying “Could you guys come back after the show?”

They duly did, waiting patiently outside the venue for 30 minutes only to be told by security that Lulu wouldn’t be stopping for photos or autographs. Then, as she breezed past them a second time, she trilled “Can’t stop! The cold will go to my head…”

As one of the most tightly controlled brands on the planet, Disney has some very strict protocols aboard their cruises – especially regarding emergency evacuations.

For instance, if a Disney cruise is to be abandoned, any employee who is in costume at the time of the alarm sounding must stay in costume. They are not permitted to remove their heads and ruin the illusion for guests, so therefore have to navigate the deck dressed as a giant Mickey, Minnie, Chip, Dale etc.

Elsewhere on the ship, it’s somebody’s job to head to the costume store and firmly lock it up. This is to ensure that if the ship does go down, the costumes go with it. They don’t want to risk the empty costumes getting loose and floating up to the top – leaving children traumatized by seeing Goofy’s lifeless body bobbing about on the surface.

Barring some unforeseen incident, Donald Trump’s long-awaited hush money trial will start a week on Monday. Longtime Popbitch readers will know the story well: all about how Trump supposedly used his connections to US gossip mag, the National Enquirer, to buy up unflattering stories about affairs with porn stars and Playboy playmates to quash them.

But ahead of the case, a former National Enquirer reporter has just released a huge insider tell-all about how everything went down behind the scenes. It’s a properly eye-opening tale, but one of the most curious details in it is about the phrase “catch-and-kill” itself.

The reason it became so ubiquitous is not because it was apt necessarily, but because it was old. The whistleblower inside the Enquirer was insistent that the exact phrase “catch-and-kill” be used in reporters’ copy. Why? Because he knew it was a term that only the oldest hacks on the mag used – so when the story broke and the bosses wanted blood, it put all of them in the firing line, not him…

[Read the whole account here]

Want to hear John Belushi in that Moby Dick musical we mentioned last week?
[It’s here]

Hyraxes drinking tea
[See on Reddit]

Local News Of The Week: H from Steps is getting an 8ft statue erected in his hometown
[Read on Wales Online]

Nigel Farage had an ice sculpture of himself for his 60th birthday party
[See on Twitter]

Steve Pemberton’s Peg Mavis from Taskmaster is being auctioned for charity
[Not long to go…]

Rubber Soul – but just the drums and bass
[Listen on YouTube]

More reports on Shane Smith and the downfall of Vice
[Read on The Verge]

Still Bored?
The Keith Haring Foundation has made a playlist  of the mixtapes Keith used to paint to.
[They’re brilliant]