The Daily Tonic: Three Courses, One Spoon

Thanks for all your emails about film sets; we’ll work our way through a few more of those over the coming days. Today we’re interested in hearing your tales from the skies. We’re talking flights with famous people, airport run-ins, celebs you’ve snooped on in the VIP lounge, the inside scoop from cabin crews… That sort of thing.

Today’s Question: Which celebrities have you had dealings with at 30,000ft?

Send your high-flying tales to hello@popbitch.com and we’ll lavish the best ones with digital goodies.

GJ writes:
“I had the pleasure of making my first film with lots of amazing actors including Mos Def. Mos had an extraordinary habit of falling asleep in the middle of the set. There’s a scene in the film we made (The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) where Mos had to be strapped to a concrete block with elastic bands.

“Not only was this very uncomfortable, he was surrounded by hot lights and people drilling and hammering to fix the set… yet Mos fell fast asleep. The only thing that stopped him sliding to the floor were the elastic bands wrapped around his head and body and he was asleep for at least 20 minutes.

“It was an amazing sight. He woke up the second we called action and was brilliant. Mos rules.”

RD writes:
“I was an extra on the Farringdon set of a 2004 Jude Law film which, at the time, was called the ‘Untitled Charles Shyer Project’. Between takes I happened to get chatting to Jude, who explained to me how different he wanted the movie to be to the 1966 classic on which it was based, and that he’d only agreed to star in the lead role if the studio promised not to call it by its original name.

“The eventual title of the production was, of course: Alfie.

“Poor Jude.”

L writes:
“On the set of Surviving Christmas, Ben Affleck buggered off for a Caribbean holiday half-way through shooting and came back with the deepest suntan you’ve ever seen.

“The film is supposed to be set in the middle of the Chicago winter and thus half of the film has Affleck wearing obscene amounts of make-up to try and hide the suntan.”

MP writes:
“In the summer of 2009, pretty much every dancer in London turned up to be an extra in StreetDance The Movie starring Britain’s Got Talent winner George Sampson (dancers who’ve danced for Madonna, Kylie, in the West End, who teach internationally).

“In the long stretches of downtime between takes, cyphers (dance circles) would inevitably break out. Poor George knew he was out of his depth but was too intimidated to ask for help from any of us. Instead he complained we were bullying him. Which I’m pleased to say was roundly ignored and they even started filming us throwing down and having fun. George stayed outside.”

As we’ve done a number of movie soundtrack rounds before [80s/90s/00s/Assorted] we’ve narrowed this one down and taken today’s ten tracks from one specific film franchise.

For this you need to name the artist (for one point) and the song title (for a second point). Sometimes the title is the same as the film it comes from, but not always – and it’s the song name you need for the point.

[Got it? Good…]

How has ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’ become a Scottish football anthem?
[Read on Vice]