The Daily Tonic: Hookers, Lines And Sinker

The pop scene in 2020 is a hyper-political place, where even the most commercial acts are unafraid to speak their minds on any number of controversial topics – but 2002 was not without its agitators.

Gregg Alexander (one of the most in-demand session writers of the early 00s) wrote a rather edgy verse for Ronan Keating to sing on his track Pickin’ Me Up.

It went:
“The World Bank lets all the black kids starve /
While journalists stalk all the pop stars /
And Hear’Say’s the new kings of rock’n’roll /
But… you’re pickin’ me up”

Unsurprisingly, Ronan’s people requested an edit.

Iris Law has since become a regular fixture on the MailOnline’s sidebar of shame now that she’s all grown up – but Jude Law and Sadie Frost’s baby girl first made headlines back in 2002: the year of the infamous ‘Dropped E’ incident at Soho House.

Iris had to be rushed to hospital after she popped a pill she’d found lying on the floor of the members club. Naturally Soho House took swift action in order to protect its reputation. Not by getting rid of their clientele. Just by making it trickier to physically do drugs there, by replacing all the flat surfaces in the bogs with slanted shelves that made any gak-snorting impossible.

The new surfaces were christened “Goffey Shelves” in honour of Danny Goffey: the Supergrass drummer, legendary caner and host of the party where baby Iris ate the pill.

Having made a name for himself in Guy Ritchie’s first two films, Jason Statham broke out into mainstream action movies in 2002 with The Transporter. He’s since become one of the Hollywood’s leading hardmen, an image which tickles some of the crew on the set of his early shoots.

During the filming of Snatch, crew say that Statham had to wear little bits of tit-tape on his eyelids to keep his eyes open, as he couldn’t stop blinking involuntarily whenever a gun went off.

With the second series of I’m Alan Partridge airing around the same time in 2002, it was hard to know whether this little scene – overheard taking place in the Oxo Tower on the South Bank – was life intimating art, or vice versa.

Agent: Calm down, Les
Les Dennis: I can’t calm down, why didn’t I get the Lottery?
Agent: You’ve got Fortunes, Les, just calm down.
Les: But why didn’t I get the bloody Lottery? I mean, where am I going?
Agent: Fortunes is security, Les. You’ll always have Fortunes.
Les: BUT WHERE AM I GOING? IT’S NOT ENOUGH.
Agent: Calm down, Les. You should be happy with Fortunes.
Les: Sorry.

Angus Deayton was kicked out of the host’s chair on Have I Got News For You after the News Of The World ran a series of splashes on him taking coke and hiring prostitutes.

It wouldn’t have come as any surprise to Deayton. Someone close to the paper went to him with the story ahead of time and he agreed to give quotes on two conditions:

1/ That they said he was good in bed, and

2/ That no money changed hands

The result? Angus got to look – albeit fleetingly – like “one of the lads” when Hislop and Merton took their shots at him for being a rampant shagger.

Absolutely Fabulous found itself getting recommissioned in the early 2000s, in part because there was no shortage of stories coming from the real life world of PR that Saunders could mine for material.

London PR supremo Fran Cutler hired and fired a personal assistant within one week in 2002. She’d asked the PA to fax Kate Moss at a hotel where Moss had checked in under the false name “Pixie”.

But he misheard the instructions and headed the fax “Dear Pigsy” – which didn’t go over too well with the client…

As a few of you pointed out, we the wrong answers up on the site and a bit of a mismatch between audio files yesterday – but you can now (hopefully) find the correct answers for yesterday’s quiz here.

Today’s should be glitch-free, so here we go again. Ten songs that were UK top ten hits in 2002. A point for the artist, a point for the song title. Twenty points in total.

[Play it here]

Data visualisation of the most browsed Wikipedia pages each day this year
[See on YouTube]

Delighted person in local news
[Marmite emoji edition]

Richard Nixon’s “In Event Of Disaster” speech has been deepfaked
[Watch it here]