Tatler’s Ham Flaps

Eamonn Holmes got himself a fair few column inches this last week for grandly announcing he would never date Taylor Swift (much to Taylor’s dismay, we’re sure).

So who does get Eamonn’s sap rising? Who sticks a bit of lead in the ol’ Holmes pencil? Maya Jama. He says she’s “the most beautiful woman in Britain”.

When Conde Nast moved out of Vogue House at the start of the month, the company got a few fun write-ups of their fancy farewell party where Claridge’s threw them a big champagne beano.

We’ve yet to see any reports of the little afterparty that took place in the Tatler office though. Someone decided they wanted to leave a slightly more permanent parting gift so – a few bottles down – snuck back into the building and daubed the same words on every single pillar in Tatler’s office:

TWAT MINGE HAM FLAPS CUNT TURKEY SANDWICH.

Which BAFTA judge has such unpleasant ‘death breath’ fellow judges have gone so far as to feign illness so as not to get trapped in the same room as them?

Bob Geldof hasn’t just been a regular presence at shows of the Live Aid musical. He was sat in rehearsals for it a lot too. More than Midge Ure. (“A lot more.”)

He had some notes of his own to give. Notably one to the guy playing him in the show.

“You’ll have to lose that stomach. I don’t have a belly like that.”

Will Young has been toying with the idea of running for parliament – but we’re not sure he has a great track record when it comes to serving the people.

A Popbitch reader who was a few years below Will at uni in Exeter worked for a spell in a local bistro restaurant called Harry’s. They didn’t last long. Having misbilled every table they served on their first shift, they were fired midway through their second after accidentally spilling a bowl of gazpacho down a diner’s back.

It wasn’t their proudest moment. But they felt the experience was ultimately worth it when their boss fired them by branding them the restaurant’s “shittest waiter since Will Young”.

Amid all the chaos in the Commons over the Gaza ceasefire amendments last Wednesday, there were a number of MPs who were freaking out about a very different issue. Not the votes. Not the threats to MPs’ safety. Not the ripping up of democratic norms – but an email that had landed in their inboxes, apparently announcing that a military coup had taken place in Togo.

Such an uprising could hardly have come at a worse moment. Luckily there wasn’t one. But it was quite some time before anyone realised that the man who had emailed wasn’t actually the President of Togo, but some random internet weirdo who’d appointed himself to the role a couple of weeks ago.

Like Eamonn Holmes, Shane Lynch has been all over the papers this week for taking a dig at Taylor Swift – not for her dateability, but for her ‘demonic rituals‘.

It’s easy to write Shane’s Satanic panic off as the bizarre ramblings of a faded boyband burnout, but Shane knows of what he speaks. He actively flirted with the darkside back in the day; tales of which were among the earliest we ever ran in Popbitch.

Back then, Shane took a very different approach to letting Lucifer in. He said: “I see spirits, the majority of them are evil… They talk to me like they feel they know me… They rule me. There’s something about the darker world I find fascinating. There’s something about the devil that’s intriguing.”

It was around that same time he and Keith Duffy did their cover of Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True. Listen to that and tell us it wasn’t the product of demonic possession.

Ricky Wilson has been out doing interviews to promote the new Kaiser Chiefs album and has been giving journalists some great anecdotes.

One comes from the Kaiser Chiefs’ early days, when they were still getting really starstruck around big acts. Shane MacGowan once came into their dressing room and looked around a bit, before asking if he could take an apple from their rider.

Obviously the band said yes, with Ricky secretly being amazed that Shane was the type to get his five-a-day.

Only to find out later that the reason MacGowan wanted an apple was to smoke crack from it.

T writes:
“Just wanted to share a story about John Savident’s kindness to members of staff at The Ox pub in Manchester (behind the old Granada studios on Liverpool Road).

“Back in 2004, he came in with a young male friend (no doubt wanting to learn about acting skills, etc…). As the evening progressed, John got quite drunk and became quite friendly with this young man. Before things got too messy, but not before Savident fell over due to a booze fuelled loss of balance, a cab was ordered for his friend and then another one half an hour later for Mr Savident (there were always paps outside, just in case pissed Corrie stars stumbled out).

“A couple of days later he returned to buy everyone who worked on the shift he visited a drink to say thank you for not alerting the press to his more recent antics with young men as he was on a final warning from Corrie bosses…”

Ed Sheeran has spent the last decade building up his sprawling Suffolk “Sheeranville” estate, which famously contains such mod cons as a pub, a football pitch, an underground cinema, a pool and a purpose-built crypt. But there’s been a bit talk locally that he might be thinking of moving.

The Glemham Hall Estate – a nearby Saltburn-style mansion – has just been placed on the market this week, and we hear Ed has been one of the interested parties.

What the listing doesn’t mention – but those who know the property advise – is that the £19m price tag also includes a bunch of ghosts that stalk the building. That shouldn’t be a dealbreaker for Ed as he reckons he already has a little girl ghost that lives in the cottage on his Sheeranville estate that’s been upsetting the cleaners.

How much shagging has Paul Mescal been doing at the Old Queen’s Head?
[The Fence investigates]

An interview with the sad Oompa Loompa from the Glasgow Willy Wonka washout
[Read on Vulture]

Daft Punk’s Face To Face where all the original samples have been replaced with more contemporary ones
[Genius remix]

Clive Martin on the death of Vice
[Interesting piece]

Planet Hollywood are auctioning off a bunch of their old stuff
[Browse the catalogue]

Still Bored?
An Instagram account where someone will honour your dead pet by doing her make-up to look like them
[What a concept]