Testing The Limits

20 years, 10,000-odd scraps of gossip, a lot of furious legal letters and our very own superinjunction later, Popbitch has somehow reached its 1000th mailout.

By now we thought we’d be kicking back with a rum cocktail on a private island beach, having sold Popbitch off to a wide-eyed Russian oligarch hoping to weasel a peerage or something from the British establishment.

Luckily, we’ve got an even better outcome: we get to hang out with you lot each week. And even though the world is a much weirder place than any of us could have foreseen when we first started this, it does seem like we’ll have plenty to get stuck into over the next thousand newsletters. So we can’t really complain.

After five months of daily Popbitching we’re taking a short break next week, but we’ll be back in September. Thanks for everything, and hope you enjoy the rest of our look through the last 10 years.

Louise Redknapp turned her hand to TV presenting in 2010, taking up a hosting gig on Channel 4’s cookery-chat show Something For The Weekend. It opened up a whole new world of experiences for her, introducing her to many fancy new dishes.

Before filming any food section, producers made sure she was given a full briefing. They figured it was probably a good idea after they saw her in rehearsals trying to bite into an raw oyster. While it was still in its shell.

2011 was the year of the celebrity superinjunction when all sorts of famous, rich men used the courts to hide their sister-in-law shagging indiscretions. But, strangely, the whole story might never have become the huge scandal it did if it wasn’t for one deeply insecure actor.

A lot of the national discussion surrounding injunctions happened when one “world famous actor” took an injunction out to stop Helen Wood from telling tales about the time he’d hired her to stick a sex toy up his bum.

The irony is, he’s not actually all that famous. She only found out he was an actor because he supposedly got in a big huff when she didn’t recognise him.

Something he probably rather regrets now…

Before he got himself a reputation for being a humungous nonce in 2012, Max Clifford had a reputation for being a master communicator, but it wasn’t that well-deserved. A hack who was once sent to Max’s office to meet a kiss’n’tell client got a glimpse of his telephone manner in action.

The girl in question was running late, so after about 15 minutes Max called her mobile and left a shirty voicemail. After 30, he called again and left another, even more curt one. After an hour, he completely lost his rag and called a third time, barking “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE PLAYING AT. I’VE SET THIS UP FOR YOU. THE LEAST YOU CAN DO IS GET TO MY FUCKING OFFICE.”

When she eventually did arrive, Max went ballistic at her, asking why she wasn’t answering his calls. She said she didn’t get any calls. Max told her she did and recited her full phone number for her to hear.

Only, it wasn’t hers.

Cue Max calling the number again to leave one final voicemail: “Hi, I’m really sorry. This is Max Clifford. I don’t know who you are but I’ve left some very abusive voicemails for you. Could you please ignore them?”

Ten years after we first wrote about how commonplace the practice was on Fleet Street, the scope of the phone-hacking scandal widened once again as NewsUK’s finest found themselves in the dock at the Old Bailey.

Phone-hacking had been so prevalent in Britain that one showbiz desk used to make it the focal point of their regular Friday afternoon competitions. After a boozy lunch and a few refreshing lines, they’d race to see who could hack the best story from a celebrity phone.

This led to the infamous hacking black-list: a ledger of names journalists knew to avoid hacking, because their phones were always filled with tedious messages about their domestic admin.

Noel Gallagher was always at the top of that list, but maybe hacks maybe shouldn’t have been so quick to write him off? Those messages about the ‘whites’ that his dry-cleaner was forever sorting? Or the ‘lawn’ his gardener was regularly tending to? They might not have been quite as boring as they first appeared…

For a newspaper that never seems to let a front page go by without using the word ‘bellend’, you’d have thought that hacks at the Sunday Sport would know the in-house style inside out. But apparently not.

The editor of the Sport had to send a rather angry email out to employees in 2014, to ensure that they were all swearing correctly and consistently. Dispiclinary action was threatened for anyone who couldn’t abide by these simple rules:

Censored in headlines and copy: Cunt, Fuck

Censored in headlines, uncensored in copy: Wank, Twat

Uncensored in headlines and copy: Shit, Cock, Bollocks, Bellend

The cause of this email? Someone had put a hyphen in “bell-end”.

Known – and feared – throughout the cabin crew community, the late Cilla Black’s in-flight attitude was the stuff of legend.

Not only would she insist upon travelling first class, she’d demand seat 1A. That was just the first of many demands too – all of which were made through her PA. Cilla didn’t want to speak to any airline staff herself. She went the full nine yards, never even offering so much as a please or thank you.

One flight attendant eventually grew so tired of her behaviour, that he leaned over to speak directly to her: “I knew you couldn’t sing, but I didn’t know you couldn’t fucking speak.”

[Read more Cilla memories on Popbitch]

Carol Kirkwood had an embarrassing slip of the tongue on telly earlier this week, when she accidentally spliced the words ‘joggers’ and ‘dog-walkers’ together and suggested that Greenwich Park was crawling with ‘doggers’. We couldn’t help but be reminded of a segment that BBC Breakfast worked up for her in their summer 2016 schedule that never made it to air.

The plan was to send Carol Kirkwood over to viewers’ houses around the country and have her present the weather forecast from their gardens. It was all set to go ahead until someone pointed out that the working title wasn’t quite… well, working.

That title? ‘Come Over, Carol!’

It must be tricky when you’re consistently cast as an ass-kicking action hero not to let it go to your head.

Bruce Willis, for example, has played so many army men in films that he genuinely believes he is good at war and could fight like some sort of super-soldier if he ever needed to.

Tom Hardy believes the same thing about himself too – but he has gone one further. In 2017, Hardy was telling people that he’d actually been recruited by the SAS on a sort of ad hoc basis. Obviously they didn’t need him on day-to-day duties, but he claimed that they’d hired him to be on call if shit ever goes down.

While filming a package for Children In Need, England goalkeeper Joe Hart was invited to a community centre to surprise some young carers and go in goal for a charity penalty shootout.

However, when one of the kids (a nine year old) started getting a bit mouthy, taunting Joe about the fact he’d been dropped by Man City and had ended up playing for a shit team instead, the keeper’s temper flared up and he booted the kid’s ball over the community centre and out of the grounds.

Then he didn’t let in a single goal for the rest of the day.

There’s an unofficial test that a certain branch of the Civil Service conducts to make sure briefing documents are written clearly enough so that even ministers of limited intellect are able to grasp them by a third reading.

For a while this was known as the ‘Amber Rudd Test’. However, when Ms Rudd found herself promoted to the Home Office, those in the service felt it was maybe a little improper to have such a test named after someone who held one of the Great Offices Of State.

So they changed it. To the ‘Priti Patel Test’.

Thanks to Priti’s surprise promotion last summer, it’ll have to be changed again. But how lucky to be so spoiled for choice…

A Steps x Princess Diana Musical?
[Please, Lucifer. Please.]

Everyone was playing Draw Something for one week in 2012, then just paid attention to Ignore Hitler
[See on Tumblr]

Our favourite Tumblr from 2013 is still going strong
[Pokemon x Nic Cage]

2014 featured one of our favourite YouTube links of all time
[The ‘Kilroy’ intro supercut]

The 8-bit game of 2016: Can you get Leonardo Di Caprio his Oscar?
[Play Red Carpet Rampage]

A 2017 celebrity apology generator
[Sorry if anyone’s offended]

Paintings of cats with pancakes on their heads
[Exactly what it says]

Still Bored?
Kim Noble has a new podcast out, Futile Attempts, starring Julian Barratt as God, Adam Buxton as himself and ‘a bloke Kim sometimes chats to on a park bench’ as himself, with sound by award-winning composer Benbrick.
[Try on all Podcast apps]