The Daily Tonic: Perpetual Peanuts

Jamie Oliver opened his first Jamie’s Italian in 2008 – a franchise that would boast 42 restaurants at its peak, before it began collapsing a few years ago.

With all the staff he was hiring back then, Jamie often had difficulty remembering the names of everyone at his restaurants, as well as all the crew on his TV shows.

So he took to giving everyone affectionately sweary nicknames instead such as “Big Bollocks”, “Penis Breath”, “Spermtank” and “Twatface” – which, strangely, he could recall every time with immaculate ease.

Madonna and Guy Ritchie finally filed for divorce in 2008, but their marriage was doomed from the start.

He hated her music (his refusal to join her on tour was supposedly what clinched the divorce, and he would always get drunk and take the piss out of her dance moves whenever he did go to watch her live). She hated his friends (her nicknames for Vinnie Jones and his wife were “Oaf and Oafette”).

The film they made together was so bad, it was a professional low point for the pair of them (and a psychologist’s wet dream as – for reasons best known to Ritchie – he gave his wife’s character the same name as his mum: Amber Leighton).

She did have one good thing to say about him though.

Madonna told friends “He rocks my box”.

Fluff writes:
“I played for a local football team with Bradley from S Club between 2005 and 2008. I was one of the only co-players to recognise him when he joined the team despite the fact he wore his trademark baseball cap in every game, which prevented him from heading the ball even when really he should have.

“He used to do that back flip every time he scored.”

Jonathan Ross got plenty of amusement at the thought of invading the privacy of Andrew Sachs and his family (as he infamously did in 2008 on Russell Brand’s radio show) but you might be surprised to learn that he’s one of the quickest celebrities to use his lawyers to stop any invasion of his own.

Our personal favourite? The time he had a lawyers’ letter sent around to stop anyone from seeing photos of him playing tennis with David Baddiel.

2008 saw the release of JCVD, Jean Claude’s return to major movie making, which gives us a chance to revisit some of his more profound philosophies.

On plants: “They don’t have hands, no ears but they feel things… they are more aware than other species”.

On water: “Water can feed me, but water can also carry me. Water has magical laws.”

On drugs: “Drugs are like when you close your eyes and cross the road.”

On peanuts: “You drink a beer and you are fed up with the taste so you eat peanuts. Peanuts are sweet and salty, strong and tender, like a woman. Eating peanuts, it’s a really strong feeling. And afterwards, you want beer again. Peanuts are a perpetual motion machine.”

Here are ten songs, selected from the 2008 charts. Each was a top ten hit. You just have to remember who performed it and what the song is called.

You get a point for each artist and a point for each title. Couldn’t be simpler.

[Ten songs; twenty points]

2008’s literal video of choice
[A-ha’s Take On Me]

Relive Giles Coren’s infamous 2008 pant-pissing tantrum at his sub-editors
[The initial letter]
[The response]