The William Shatner Portrait Gallery

A plagiarism scandal is rocking the cookery world at the minute, with Michelin-starred chef Elizabeth Haigh’s book Makan being pulled from circulation after a number of copycat claims have been levelled at it.

It looks pretty shameless from the available evidence, but it’s by no means the most egregious example of it in the industry.

One TV chef – a housewives’ favourite – has been known to be so lazy when handing in recipes he’s copied and pasted from the internet, that he doesn’t even bother to change the formatting. It just gets dumped in a file as is, making it clear from a glance which website he’s nicked it from.

NewsUK’s broadcasting ambitions continue apace as it debuts a new weekly YouTube series ‘The Sunday Times Culture Show’ this, erm… Friday.

The promotional bumf mentions practically everybody involved in the show by name, from the hosts and contributors, right through to the Commissioning Executives and Editorial Directors. One name is conspicuously absent though.

While NewsUK makes no bones about the fact they’ve commissioned production house whynow to make this new show, they must have run out of space before they could namecheck the company’s founder-director: Gabriel Jagger.

a.k.a. the son of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall.

a.k.a. Rupert Murdoch’s step-son!

Which leading sportsman is lucky to still be in the running for a big trophy this weekend, thanks to an incident from last week being quietly hushed up? People know he got steaming drunk, but not that it led to him getting so irate with a colleague that he threatened to glass them. Thankfully he couldn’t have done much damage anyway, as he was too pissed to notice the ‘glass’ he’d picked up was actually made of plastic.

As the first pictures of Steve Coogan on set as Jimmy Savile emerge, one Popbitch reader was reminded of the time they attended a Q&A event with Armando Iannucci, around the release of The Death Of Stalin.

They were chosen to pose the final question of the night and, curious about all the inventive insults that characters hurled on The Thick Of It and Veep, asked: “Can you give an example of something that you or the writers came up with that was considered just too far?”

Iannucci replied that The Thick Of It was only censored once by the BBC lawyers. The line they put the kibosh on? Malcolm Tucker saying: “That’s inevitable. It’s as inevitable as what they’ll find in Jimmy Savile’s basement after he’s dead.”

A bombshell documentary aired on Australian TV this week about Sony Australia’s #MeToo problems, and it looks to have implicated Sony’s global HQ in NYC in a decades-long cover-up.

With all the NDAs, pay-offs, complaints and investigations of inappropriate exec behaviour that resulted in no action, there’s now talk of a class action suit being brought by former employees down under. On paper, the Aussie office definitely seems to have a case – although if Sony is able to establish that this is all an isolated one-off (the ‘one rogue reporter’ defence) then the global office might just be able to escape any existential reckoning.

So they’re going to have to hope and pray that there haven’t been any other cases around the world where these same sorts of allegations have been brought to the attention of big Sony bosses, with the same (lack of) result.

Because if anything like that was to come to light sometime soon, they might be in a lot of bother…

As well as highlighting some very serious malpractice within the company, the Australian Sony doc also served as a great example of just how batshit drunk a person can get on power if left unchecked. Some of the more eye-popping moments from Denis Handlin included:

* Dressing up as Hitler for a staff video, getting his team to join him in a rousing chorus of “Fuck EMI” – an apparent parody of a Mel Brooks song.

* Throwing his phone at his chauffeur one night after a late night out because he wanted a meat pie to soak up his booze, but the chauffeur didn’t have any cash on him to buy one.

* Made a publicity exec resign when she refused to go topless with the Cheap Trick lyric “I Want You To Want Me” written across her chest for a random stunt.

As bad as all this looks for Sony, they are by no means an outlier in the music business. This sort of behaviour from certain label execs was far from rare in the 90s and 00s.

For example: instead of racking up huge tabs at brothels, a la Sony Australia, another major label used a big wedge of company money to buy apartments for a number of Chinese women who had caught the eye of the boss at the time. Partly so he had a place to enjoy a discreet rendezvous with them; partly to buy their silence.

The same label had to hire a minder to accompany another one of their top execs on all his business trips. Such was his penchant for extreme BDSM whenever he was away from home, the minder was specifically employed to stop him sneaking off to visit dominatrixes – so that he wouldn’t turn up to important corporate meetings looking like he’d just gone six rounds with Mike Tyson.

As publicity campaigns go, it’s genuinely hard to imagine how the rollout for Jesy Nelson’s Boyz could have been any more bizarre. To remind you of the timeline so far:

First, the big VMAs performance was cancelled in a cloud of anti-vax speculation. Then the single got pushed back when Nicki Minaj sparked a three-day international news cycle about her cousin’s friend’s balls. After months of stalled hype, the song was finally released to a chorus of blackfishing accusations. And Jesy and Nicki’s attempts to clear the air on Instagram Live only served to pour petrol on the flames of a fight with her former bandmates (one that has raged so far out of control that there are now headlines about how Jesy has blocked Perrie Edwards’ dog on Instagram).

Sources from the Jesy camp have been in the press the last few days trying to express their sadness that the story has descended into a tawdry ‘Jesy v Little Mix’ fight – but that line is a little disingenuous.

Had it not been for the multiple obstacles that Nicki Minaj placed in the way throughout, the original plan had been to release Boyz back in August, in an attempt to torpedo the Little Mix 10th anniversary.

Tears For Fears have announced they’ll be releasing their first album in 17 years next February. While we can’t account for their whereabouts for the whole of that time – we did hear quite a nice story about one evening.

While Curt went off to the States to live in New York and LA, Roland Orzabal chose a quiet existence in a bucolic English village instead. Occasionally he’d be interrupted with a flash of his old life though, like the evening some years back when he answered a knock at the door to find a pair of American superfans on his doorstep.

The pop star was in the middle of serving up dinner, but rather than rudely sending them packing or letting his meal go cold, he invited them in to eat with him and his friend.

A kindness which alone nearly blew their minds, until they walked in to the dining room to see the friend was… Peter Gabriel.

Seeing as William Shatner is now back safely on the ground, here’s a little story about him.

Henry Rollins tells a tale about visiting Shatner’s home once, pulling up to his garage to find the place absolutely chock-full of portraits of the man himself. There’s paintings of Shatner as TJ Hooker, as Captain Kirk, as himself – at every age and stage of his career – the walls stacked thick with row after row of them.

Even the best-known divas don’t install full-scale galleries of themselves in their own homes. So is this a sign of Shatner’s colossal ego? Not exactly.

Apparently Shatner is constantly being given paintings by Trekkies at conventions and he just doesn’t have the heart to throw any of them out. Bless.

Kanye’s Wyoming ranch is up for sale
[$11m, please]

Crisis management experts weigh in on how they’d handle the Roy family crisis in Succession
[Read on The Ringer]

The people behind The Brexit Opera have got their hands on the Spice Girls’ Spice World bus
[Watch on YouTube]

Local news of the week: Yorkshire Pudding Portrait edition
[Read on Yorkshire Post]

The lost pop of 80s Yugoslavia
[Read on the Guardian]

A Twitter bot that colourises black and white pictures for you
[@colorize_bot]

The Ohio State Marching Band perform a tribute to Rush
[Watch on YouTube]

An animation of every New York Times front page
[Quite trippy]

Cleopatra and the BBC Philharmonic performing Cleopatra’s Theme
[Listen on BBC Sounds; ~57m]

Interesting Billboard piece on the five ways the music industry has changed since Adele last released an album
[Read here]

Still Bored?
A lovely gallery of Eric Clapton’s sex face
[Thank you Gawker]