The Daily Tonic: The ii’s Have It

With news that the New Yorker has suspended staff writer Jeffrey Toobin after he supposedly had a not-so-sly wank on Zoom with colleagues present, we want to know about other bits of bizarre behaviour you’ve seen from famous people in meetings. It doesn’t necessarily need to be dirty dick-out stuff, a la Toobin; anything weird, amusing or incongruous works for us.

Today’s Question: Which celebrities have you taken meetings with, and how did they turn things odd?

Send us the minutes from your strangest celebrity meetings to hello@popbitch.com and we’ll reward our favourites with a little digital goody bag.

Re, celebrity meetings: we’ll start the ball rolling with this one…

celtiagirl writes:
“Dustin Hoffman, generally agreed to be a low maintenance star, arrives for a morning meeting. Everyone orders coffee, except for Hoffman who asks for a bloody Mary, with two shots. One of his people scuttles off and places a drink by his side. Hoffman takes one sip, says a polite ‘excuse me’ to the room, then hairdryers the assistant.

“‘Do you think I’m stupid? What the fuck is this? Did you think I would not notice? I’ve flown in from another country, where right now it’s 7pm. So give me my fucking drink, with my two fucking shots.’

“He got his fucking drink.”

Today is Dannii Minogue’s birthday and, coincidentally, we happen to know a little bit about her behaviour in meetings too.

Some of the people who worked on her team used to amuse themselves by deliberately hiding increasingly mangled spellings of Dannii’s name in various information packs and handouts whenever she was brought in for meetings at their offices.

Without fail, as soon as she spotted one of these ‘typos’, she’d halt the meeting, grab up everybody’s papers, handwrite her corrections onto each and every copy, then redistribute them before letting anyone continue.

anon writes:
“In response to your last newsletter, I just wanted to tell you about my experience of working on the DJ Cassidy ‘Calling All Hearts’ music video in 2014. Robin Thicke turned up several hours late and said ‘Sorry I’m late. I had to wash the smell of pussy off me.’

“He filmed his parts then left with one of the models he’d just met on the set.”

Storm writes:
“I was in an N-Dubz video back in 2009. The director repeatedly warned everyone that there would be strobes and if anyone was sensitive to them they should leave the set and he’d call them for another scene. We shot a scene where Dappy et al walk through a lineup of girls, strobes flashing, and the girl next to me drops to the floor and has a seizure. Dappy was fantastic. He cleared the set, called for help and even came to check on me after to see if I wasn’t too shook up to continue. Absolute professional.”

Today’s ten tracks are all taken from songs with notable music videos. Some won Grammys. Some won Brits. Some caused controversy. Some used pioneering technology. Others have just wormed their way into the public consciousness and refused to budge.

You get a point for each track title, and a further point for every artist. Ten songs means a total of twenty points – so have at it.

[Play it here]

Bristol’s infamous Jason Donervan is struggling for business
[Go and buy kebabs]

The Big Breakfast house is up for sale
[Just £5.75m]

A heartwarming, if unfortunate, example of nominative determinism
[Congratulations Dr Hopper]