The Crack Shack

Russell Brand has continued to front his show on YouTube and Rumble, even as new allegations surfaced this week – but his old inner circle aren’t blessed with quite the same confidence.

Russell’s old bodyguard (and regular LA plus-one) Big Danny has been laying low these last few months. C4 came knocking on his door ahead of the documentary, but he didn’t speak to them. Instead, it seems he left the country the day before Dispatches aired and has wound up in Spain trying to avoid any difficult questions about what he may or may not know.

There is a shed on the grounds of Lady Margaret College, Oxford, where – according to campus legend – former alum Nigella Lawson and friends used to sneak off to enjoy the odd illicit intoxicant.

More than 40 years on, students there are doing their best to keep that same tradition alive in her honour – and have affectionately christened the shed “The Crack Shack”.

The much-younger girlfriend of which comedian has managed to double her wardrobe? He’s been giving her all his daughter’s old clothes to wear.

Girls Aloud have secretly reunited to make some new music. Let’s hope it’s all gone a bit better than their first reunion in 2012 for the Ten sessions.

It wasn’t just the Cheryl v Nadine feud that made those sessions tricky. Each of the girls ended up recording their bits at Xenomania studios separately.

It’s been a big year for weird media men having alleged online alteregos uncovered – and this week was the turn of Noel Edmonds.

Noel’s New Zealand adventures over the last few years have been fraught with interest, but a former associate of his has recently come forward to allege that Noel had a rotating cast of “four or five characters” that he supposedly used to help flesh out his businesses, make himself look more professional and keep his fingerprints off certain correspondence.

Among them were “Ahmed Suliaman” (his “Business Affairs Executive”) and “Dudley Windsor” (“Head Of Corporate Affairs”). That name was a bit of a smoking gun though as Dudley was the name of Noel’s dad. Who was born in Windsor.

[Read more of the story here]

Barbra Streisand takes a few paragraphs of her new 1,000-page autobiography to complain about being the namesake of the Streisand Effect.

The Streisand Effect, if you don’t know, is when someone (usually a celebrity) tries to discreetly get rid of something unhelpful or unflattering from the public record and – in doing so – accidentally draws a truckload more attention to it.

Streisand is “appalled” her name is now forever associated with this practice – but the Streisand Effect used to mean something very different. The phrase was originally coined in 1992 by an American horticulturist to explain how horrible plant combinations can sometimes grudgingly work together.

To quote him more precisely: “The Barbra Streisand Effect [is] a jarring combination of plants that initially sets your teeth on edge but you learn to appreciate for its strength of character, its gutsiness.”

Sad though it is that the Sir Captain Tom Memorial Spa & Pool House Complex is about to be demolished, Hannah Ingram-Moore can at least be proud that her website “A Gift Of Kindness” remains standing.

With the very fitting motto “Above all, be kind – it doesn’t cost you a penny”, the Ingram-Moores have been moderating and publishing user-submitted stories from some very real, very sincere people – like Anthony Soprano, Tim Robinson (from I Think You Should Leave) and Luka (aged 8 and a half) who writes…

“My brother was kind to me when my goldfish died. I was very sad but he showed me that if you put a picture of a goldfish inside the aquarium it is kind of the same thing, at least until the paper goes dissolved. I really don’t miss my goldfish any more because I prefer my pictures. My mum said that if my story goes on the kindness website then she promises she will never get me a goldfish ever again so I can keep just my pictures. Yes please!”

[More extremely genuine stories here]

Seems like baboon violence is all the rage again. Last week, we brought you confirmation of the old Sly Stone legend about his pet baboon Erfy’s grisly end. This week, Ridley Scott.

Now that the SAG-AFTRA strike has ended, production is about to resume on Gladiator 2, but Ridley has spent a lot of the strike editing the 90 minutes of material he’d previously shot. Material which includes a scene in which Paul Mescal fights a pack of baboons.

This week’s King’s Speech announced the government’s intention to repeal Section 40: the controversial bit of legislation drafted in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry that would have had news publishers paying the costs of any court judgment (even cases they won) if they weren’t signed up to an “approved” regulator.

It was deeply unpopular with practically every print news organisation – from both sides of the political spectrum, from high- to low-brow. In part because it was bizarre to suggest papers pay their opponents’ costs, even when the papers were right.

But also because the only regulator to win state approval was Impress: the one that was quietly funded by Max Mosley.

Who then tried to gag the papers for daring to mention that.

Good Penguin; Naughty Penguin – excellent penguin gossip from New Zealand’s national aquarium
[Read on The Spin Off]

Antidepressants or Tolkien character?
[Play the quiz here]

Loads of film, TV and music memorabilia up for auction over the next few days
[See the lots]

A colourised, upscaled documentary of 1950s Soho
[Watch on YouTube]

Nominative Determinism Of The Week, II: The press contact for ITV’s documentary The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story is…
[Lyndsey Large!]

Local News Of The Week: Doorstep Poo Pile Edition
[Read on Kent Online]

Want to name some otter pups?
[Whipsnade Zoo has some]

Still Bored?
Have a robotic Michael Bay rewrite you a scene from cinema with more helicopters, explosions and guns
[Needs More Boom]