Celebrity news & gossip from the world’s showbiz and glamour magazines (OK!, Hello, National Enquirer and more). We read them so you don’t have to, picking the best bits from the showbiz world’s maw and spitting it back at them. Expect lots of sarcasm.
The Court of Appeal has allowed a well-known entertainer to keep his extra-marital “threesome” secret in a move which heralds the return of the court injunction.
Are all three parties gagged?
Judges said the man, who can only be named by the initials PJS, was entitled to secure a legal ban on a tabloid newspaper which wanted to report the “open relationship” enjoyed by him and his wife, known as YMA.
As we wonder if PJS wear pjs in bed and ho anyone can be married to Yamaha Motor’s Australia, you also wonder how something open can remain closed?
To Massachusetts, where police are searching for two men challenging passers-by to rap battles.
Charlton police said a black SUV with two or three men in their late teens or early 20s inside, pulled up to three young teenage boys on Dresser Hill Road at about 3pm on Saturday.
One of the men, described as having brown hair and a pale complexion, wearing a grey T-shirt, gray pants and open-toed sandals, got out of the vehicle and started rapping while the other men asked the boys if they wanted to “spit some bars” with them.
When the boys declined, the SUV drove off.
Open-toed sandals. Singing. Brown hair… pale. Hanging out with other men. It’s the second coming!
How do you trail the new series of BBC TV show Top Gear? Easy. You allow the BBC to shut roads in central London so that Matt LeBlanc can wheel spin around The Cenotaph in a Ford Mustang. Then you get the Sun to quote a few old duffers, like Col Richard Kemp – “It’s worse than doing a stunt in a cemetery” – and mop up the outrage with a syndication chitty from US telly.
You then get Chis Evans, show’s main presenter – there are hundreds of them in every conceivable demographic – to say, “If it was my decision I would say that scene shouldn’t be shown… We’re all mortified by it, so absolutely, one hundred per cent, it should not be shown.”
This will prove that whoever the presenters, the old formula of in-yer-face grunt remains undiminished.
Complete tosh, of course, something Evans pretty much admits: “The images on the front pages of the papers today – it doesn’t matter what actually happened – what is important is what these images look like.”
They look like PR bullshit, which is what they are. you can ever see the skid marks.
For those of you with slow broadband, unable to see pictures of Kim Kardashian naked, and for whom footage of the reality TV star’s porn movie is available on VHS, there is the analogue Kim. In Melbourne, Australia, a graffiti artist has daubed a likeness of the family porn star on a wall.
The artist, one “Mark Walls”, aka lushsux, says, “[It was] quite hard to turn an archived screenshot from my phone into a three story nude figure painting.”
But considerably faster than trying to download Kim’s dirty pictures in the countryside.
Investigators say the deaths of all four members of British band Viola Beach was an “accident”. The driver “did not intend to kill himself or the group” from Warrington. As the Times reports:
Kris Leonard, River Reeves, Tomas Lowe, Jack Dakin and Craig Tarry, the manager who is thought to have been driving, died when the vehicle plunged off a bridge, 18 miles from Sweden’s capital Stockholm early on February 13. A preliminary post-mortem examination found that the driver did not have drugs or alcohol in his body. Detectives believe the driver did not intend to kill himself or the band. The crash was due to unfortunate circumstances, they said.
Lars Berglund, of the Swedish police, says: “It looks like the drive acted deliberately… There is no suggestion that it was intended to kill himself or the band.”
And how does the Star report on the tragedy? It yells: “Brit Band Bridge Plunge: It Was Deliberate.”
“Robbie Williams’ wife Ayda Field has been on ITV’s Loose Women. The paper tuned in and tells readers, “Robbie’s never been to a supermarket”.
Says Anya: “Rob is now 42 – for the first time I took him to the supermarket.”
Really? Is that what he told you? Because in Robbie by Sean Smith, we learn:
A supermarket manager once closed the story so that Robbie Williams and his mother could buy their groceries not get hassled by the public… Robbie found it funny, “It was hysterical because it was a Monday morning and there wasn’t a soul in there anyway.”
Or as the papers put it: “Robbie Williams has gone to the supermarket for the first time aged 42” – Daily Star.
High-Rise is a vision of hell set in the 1970s. It’s a bit like the EastEnders omnibus, only without the nightmarish Shane Ritchie. In the Creative Review, Mark Sinclair interviews graphic artists Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson:
Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, looks at mid-70s Britain through the prism of an ultra-modern tower block. Adapted from JG Ballard’s 1975 nove by Amy Jump, the film follows Dr Robert Laing (played by Tom Hiddleston) as he adjusts to his new life as a tenant on the 25th floor and explores the relationships between the building’s various social groups and the tribal mentalities that emerge as the tower gradually descends into chaos. While working families live on its lower levels and aspirant professionals reside halfway up, a wealthy elite is confined to the uppermost floors – a structure that does not last long.
To help realise this unique world, envisioned by production designer Mark Tildesley, graphic artists Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson created a legion of objects and products and several type treatments for the film’s locations: one for the high-rise itself, with its supermarket, gym, spa and swimming pool; a house font for the building’s architect, Anthony Royal; and signage for Laing’s place of work, the School of Physiology.
Bill Wyman is not dead. The former Rolling Stone’s been to the wedding to Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall. The Sunday Times featured him in an article on the “stars aligning for Rupert and Jerry”.
Today the Express leads with news that Bill Wyman, 79, is unwell. He is battling prostate cancer. In paragraph 14 on the paper’s Page 3, we wear that “his life has not been without controversy… There was an outcry in 1989 when after divorcing his first wife he married his 18-year-old girlfriend, the model Mandy Smith, who had had been dating since she was 14. He was 52 at the time.”
Bill Wyman is not dead. In life he’s invited to all the best parties.
The Mirror wants us to be more like “Brave Bill”:
Today the BBC reports:
In recent years, as the Jimmy Savile scandal unfolded, he approached police to ask whether they wanted to question him about their relationship. “I went to the police and I went to the public prosecutor and said, ‘Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to meet up with me, or anything like that?’ and I got a message back, ‘No,'” he said. “I was totally open about it.”
The Press and the BBC love Bill. Last season he was on a BBC sports show predicting the weekend’s Premier League results.
Get well soon, Bill. Don’t die. Because when you do, it’ll be open season on your past exploits. (Unless you’re David Bowie, John Peel or anyone else the BBC and mainstream media likes.)
Cheryl TweedyCole Fernandez-Varsini is seen stepping out with One Direction’s dullest member Liam Payne. The Mirror says the pair are “definitely an item”. In no way is this a PR stunt to keep us interested in The X Factor show, on which both feature, to make Liam look shaggable and Chezza down with the kids.
They were spotted “sneaking into a casino”. The couple – dubbed ‘Chayne ‘ – snuck in by getting out of a large Range Rover and going in the front entrance of Crockford’s a casino in central London.
One “onlooker” there to spot the sneaking and able to contact the press tells the Mirror: “Liam made sure she got out of the car and into venue safely.”
Heather Mills is off The Jump TV event. The former Mrs Paul McCartney was injured, thus becoming the seventh celeb to leave the show under doctor’s orders. In the Star, Peter Dyke gives Heather hope that she can return to celeb-fed telly soon. Stay tuned for Celebrity Competitive Environmentalist of the Year:
Competitive environmentalism will feature competitive environmentalists jetting off for the good of the common man.
The Mirror has a BBC paedophile scoop: “World Famous singer seduced tragic BBC girl”. The “girl” was 15-year-old Claire McAlpine, who committed suicide. The superstar singer who “seduced” her is..?
David Bowie!
No. This one’s still alive. But the Thin White Duke did shag teenyboppers.
Reading on we’re told:
Tragic BBC girl was seduced by world famous singer – and pal vows to reveal name
Woman “vows” to reveal name of pop star her dead pal says she shagged. If you can’t see the holes in this one, get to the opticians pronto. And why wait to name him if naming him is worthy of a vow, a solemn promise? Time’s ticking. Get on with it. Before he dies.
Kelly Gold says her friend Claire McAlpine – at the centre of the Tony Blackburn scandal – was abused by a world famous singer who is alive today
No. The BBC is at the centre of the scandal. It sacked Tony Blackburn last week for his denial that the Beeb interviewed him about McAlpine’s claims made in her diary that a BBC DJ had seduced her. Now we get the story of the popstar who “abused” her.
It was a big shock to Rod Liddle, who quips in the Sunday Times:
I have to say that my reaction to the news that the BBC had sacked the disc jockey Tony Blackburn last week was one of profound shock. I thought he had been sacked in about 1986. It didn’t occur to me that he was still there, smarming away, a sort of cryonically preserved bad joke paid for by the licence fee. I began to wonder if that was the point of the corporation’s “secret memos” that were said to have led to his dismissal.
Something like: “We’re still employing Blackburn? How in the name of Christ did that happen? He was smash-the-radio-set obnoxious in 1971, even worse than ‘Stewpot’. Quick — someone fit him up for a historical sex crime and then we can get shot of him for good.”..
The BBC has defenestrated Blackburn mainly because he is no big loss to the corporation and it gives the impression that it is doing something, taking action.
Blackburn is accused of being less than copious in his response to allegations — made 45 years ago — that he seduced a 15-year-old girl called Claire McAlpine who later killed herself, leaving behind a diary claiming she had been “used” by a bunch of these horrible BBC disc jockeys.
Blackburn denies everything, point blank. And there is not a shred of evidence to implicate him in any wrongdoing, other than that diary. A police officer said of this diary at the time: “It would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything in her diary with reality.” The young convent girl was a bit of afantasist.
So, here’s Kelly Gold with her beckoning finger:..
…she believes the schoolgirl may have been stalked by pregnancy fears before she died from a pills overdose at her Watford home. Kelly also told how she watched her pal being led to Savile’s BBC dressing room at least twice.
Believes. May.
“I’d been to see Top of the Pops regularly and the guards recognised my Corona stage school uniform, so I didn’t need to sign in. We went into the changing rooms to get ready, and these young schoolgirls were transforming themselves into little pop queens…I knew what was happening to Claire. I knew what was happening to all of us, and what everybody who’s been at the inquiry has been saying. It was happening to Claire because she was the new kid on the block. We didn’t go there in the hope that we would be touched up. It wasn’t on our radar. Over the years I’ve thought about the alibi I gave her for that night and I wish I hadn’t. Within a couple of weeks she was dead.”
In other news in the Sunday Times:
IN 1973 the head of programmes at BBC Radio 1 summoned Jimmy Savile to a private meeting to discuss “serious” matters. Derek Chinnery, in the company of executive producer Doreen Davies, confronted Savile over rumours that had reached the ears of Douglas Muggeridge, the controller of Radio 1 and Radio 2, that the DJ had a sexual interest in young girls.
A relaxed Savile began the meeting with a joke and casually dismissed the allegations in much the same way as he would do throughout his life.
The significance of that meeting, however, goes far beyond Savile’s casual disdain; it illustrates how early in his career the rumours about his sexual behaviour reached BBC bosses and how they failed to act on them.
Which make you wonder at this news in yesterday’s Times.
A memo sent in 1971 by Tony Preston, the BBC’s assistant head of variety, claims that Blackburn “was interviewed” by himself and another official. Blackburn said that “the contents of these documents are untrue” and part of a “whitewash and cover-up”. A source close to the DJ said that Mr Preston, who has died, may have fabricated his claim to appear as if he had investigated the allegation. Dame Janet’s report shows that BBC lawyers told him he was “duty bound” to investigate.
That’s Dame Janet Smith, who has published a 1,000-page report on the BBC’s failure to stop sexual abuse.
In other news, over in the Star we read:
THE vile musings of sex monster Jimmy Savile can still be found on a BBC Top Of The Pops tribute site.
Scrub and scrub as it might the BBC cannot get that Savile stain out. That might be because the BBC’s scrubbers have badly stained hands.
But hold on – what’s this?
A big BBC tribute page to BBC Radio DJ John Peel. He’s the ‘national treasure’ who shagged13-year-olds.
“Well, of course I didn’t ask for ID. All they wanted me to do was to abuse them sexually which, of course, I was only too happy to do.’ He complained that American girls had ‘this strange notion of virginity as a tangible thing which you surrendered to your husband on your wedding night. So they would do anything but s*** you’. Aged 26, in 1965, Peel married a 15-year-old American girl called Shirley Anne Milburn. He later claimed she and her family had lied about her age. They divorced in 1973. Some years later, after returning to the U.S., she committed suicide.
Good old Peely the Peelophile. He was hip – so he gets to Rest In Praise:
What an utter…
Savile appears in more places on the BBC’s website:
In other news: no good looking, fanciable or cool pop stars of yesteryear or today have sex with underage fans.
In February 1970 the BBC broadcast the documentary Man Alive: The Disc Jockeys. The series was edited by Esther Rantzen’s future hubby Desmond Wilcox. (More on them here.) The show focused on the new wave of BBC Radio 1 DJs.
As Paul Gallagher writes:
In Britain during those promiscuous 1970s, millions of youngsters were shocking their parents by going to bed with John Peel and waking up with Tony Blackburn… and his dog Arnold. The sound of the DJs could be heard everywhere—from cars, shops, kitchens, homes, factories, schoolyards and those dinky little pocket radios that everyone and their Mom seemed to have, dangling from plastic wristbands.
The music revolution of the 1960s really began with the arrival of cheap polyvinyl chloride in the fifties which meant record companies could mass produce singles and albums. Previously record discs had been made of the far more expensive Bakelite. The PVC revolution tied in very neatly with the incredible flourishing of young musical talent—and so the Swinging Sixties were born.
Suddenly youngsters wanted to hear music before they bought it, or even if they didn’t buy it. This gave rise to Pirate Radio. At the time the BBC was the only organization in Britain with the license to transmit radio shows. However a small loophole in maritime law allowed DJs to broadcast from ships anchored just outside UK waters. And so pop-pickers Pirate Radio was born.
In 1967 the BBC admitted defeat and launched Radio One—a youth radio station for pop music. Radio One became the biggest and most successful radio station in the country with generation after generation of youngsters learning their love of music or finding their inspiration to form bands from listening to the station’s DJs.
This BBC documentary from 1970 looks at the rise of the Radio One DJ and features Emperor Rosko, John Peel, Kenny Everett and Tony Blackburn—a rum bunch of four very different radio hosts. Condescending in tone throughout, the documentary voice over even has the temerity to suggest that sex with fans was one of the perks of working for the BBC—-shurely not:
Radio One belongs to the taxpayer and doesn’t splash princely salaries around for men like Emperor Rosko. He accepts the BBC’s shop policy of paying low wages as both sides know about the big big perks that can accompany the adulation of this new empire—British teeny boppers.
The interviewer then grills one poor little teenybopper about her infatuation with Emperor Rosko:
“I listen to him and I like listening to his voice and I get carried away” says one young besotted teenager about the subject of her adoration DJ Emperor Rosko:
“What do you mean you get carried away?” says Ms. Prim from the BBC
“I just hear his voice and I imagine him…” says adoring young fan.
“When you say you imagine him…you imagine him doing what?” continues our interrogator.
“Talking and smiling and…all the actions with it. It’s just good.”
“And where do you do your listen to this?”
“In the bedroom.”
It’s an interesting hour well spent and worth watching mainly to see the pure genius of Kenny Everett making one of his shows and to hear some of the mumblings of the man himself, John Peel.
‘I’d rather not even opinionate on this. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to sort out the psychology of child abuse.’
Every day a new allegation emerges about Jimmy Savile. These allegations now cover 6 decades, and include allegations of the rape of children, mentally ill patients and the sexual assault of a disabled girl. The police are currently investigating over 300 lines of inquiry.
Savile’s attacks occurred in hospitals, clubs and the BBC. And it is the latter organization that is coming under considerable scrutiny by the police.
The question is how did the BBC employ such an individual, when there were known allegations against him? And what was the everyday culture at BBC that could allow Savile’s behavior to go unnoticed? Uncommented upon? Even tolerated?
In front-page news billed as a”World Exclusive”, the Mirror brings news of Tony Blackburn, the BBC radio DJ of no little vintage. “BBC Axe Sex Probe DJ Tony Blackburn,” announces the dire headline, one seemingly written by an SEO expert for whom English is not their fist language. The headline can be unpacked in the first paragraph:
“DJ Tony Blackburn has been sacked by the BBC is a row about a sex abuse probe.”
Blackburn says he was never “quizzed” in 1971 over a “woman’s allegations” he’d seduced a teenager. The BBC’s report out today says he was. He says, “They are destroying my career and reputation because my version of event does not tally with theirs.”
Radio One Disc Jockeys take time off to push Jimmy Savile from Broadcasting House to Park Lane by bed, in aid of the Variety Club of Great Britain and the Outward Bound Trust. (L-R) Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis, Tony Blackburn, Kid Jensen and Steve Wright.
The story continues over page 4 and 5, “Beeb bosses covered up ‘DJ seduced girl’ claims,” chimes the Mirror. The girl was 15-year-old Claire McAlpine. We’ve reported on her before. In 2012, the Press linked her death to the then Sir Jimmy Savile, who after death became ‘Jimmy The Beast”.
Last month the Daily Mail had more:
“Claire McAlpine, 15, killed herself after being abused by an unnamed DJ on the show [Top of the Pops] on 1971.”
On the same day the Sun led with the Jimmy Savile Report, a review by Dame Janet Smith, who concluded that the BBC “HID” news that Savile had “seduced” a 15-year-old dancer on BBC TV’s Top of The Pops music show. The paper adds: “Clair [sic] McAlpine killed herself weeks after the alleged sexual encounter.”
Back then Jimmy did it.
Now the torchlight falls on Blackburn’s 73-year-old face. The BBC has sacked him. He says he never seduced McAlpine. He says he’s a “scapegoat”.
Looking at the media’s scattergun reporting on the case of Miss McAlpine reveals a story laced with agendas.
PS: On 7th April 1971 the Daily Express had Jimmy Savile news (via Rabbitaway):
Katie Hopkins, for those of you blessedly not in the know, is a former contestant on The Apprentice TV show – the one on which ‘driven’ people try to win a job working for Alan Sugar in a Brentwood office block. Hopkins lost but did score a job belching ‘controversial’ opinions to deadline for the Sun newspaper and, remarkably, a TV show of her own. That all ended, meaning Katie now shouts exclusively on free-to-air Twitter.
The Star thinks her tweets worthy of its front page. Robin Cottle has created a story from a tweet:
She claimed Kate and Gerry McCann should take some blame for her disappearance.
Oh?
The 41-year-old also insisted the heartbroken couple did not “deserve” the £11million of taxpayers’ cash shelled out to search for Madeleine.
This is in the Star, which once libelled Kate and Gerry McCann.
One Twitter user wrote: “Katie Hopkins victim blaming the McCanns suggests people have no self control, the blame lies with whoever wrongly took what wasn’t theirs.”
Good grief. This story had not made any progress.
Another added: “Yes they made a mistake. Thousands do the same every day and get away with it. Cruel for Hopkins to rub salt in it surely. How did she become our moral guide?”
Answer: when the Star wanted cheap filler.
But some supported the outspoken celeb, with one saying: “Agree with absolutely everything @KTHopkins has said about Maddie’s disappearance, she’s only saying what the rest of you think anyway.”
Always useful when talking of “outrage” to report both sides of the shouting match.
Having seduced readers with a limp story on the missing child, the report takes a jerking twist:
Madeleine went missing during a family holiday in Praia de Luz, Portugal, almost nine years ago. Meanwhile, Hopkins announced yesterday that she was about to go under the surgeon’s knife to cure her epilepsy.
“Meanwhile…” Even the Dallas TV show (‘Meanwhile…back at the Ranch’) didn’t jump around like a demented kangaroo – which might very well be writing both the Star’s reports and Katie’s tweets.
She told fans she will “see them on the other side” and claimed not to be scared about the brain operation.
For those of you not on Twitter, ‘the other side’ is thought to be a reference to Facebook.
By now you’ll have seen the photos of Rita Ora, the stalwart of family Saturday night telly, posing topless. But you’ve still not seen her bare nipples in the Daily Star. And that’s odd because the Daily Star is, as it declares on the cover, “Home Of The Page 3 Girl”.
On today’s Page 1 and Page 3, Star readers can see Ora – not topless – but ‘Tops”.
Peter Mayhew, aka Chewbacca in Star Wars, has been tweeting photos of his original Star Wars script from March 1976. We can read The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills.
by Sean Smith, we learn:
The Mirror has a BBC paedophile scoop: “World Famous singer seduced tragic BBC girl”. The “girl” was 15-year-old 
