Celebrities Category
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.
5 Sci-Fi Movies That Didn’t Deserve the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Treatment
TO the delight of virtually everyone, the late, great Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988 – 1999) seems to be experiencing something of a pop culture resurgence these days.
April 1st of this year saw former Mystery Science Theater 3000 stars Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy return to top form in National Geographic’s Total Riff-Off, and the cable network Retro TV recently announced that it will begin airing MST-3K reruns starting July 5, 2014.
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Posted: 2nd, April 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comments (13)
Free Downlad Of De La Soul Mixtape Smell the Da.I.S.Y.
WE told you De La Soul were marking their 25th anniversary of their great album 3 Feet High and Rising by releasing a free download nearly their entire back catalog. Now you can download their mixtape Smell the Da.I.S.Y., featuring the late Dilla.
If you don’t know which De La Soul songs to download first, here’s our handy guide.
Unreleased Material Tragedy: Michael Jackson’s Rubbish Offcuts of Offal Pop Anyone?
WHAT happens when a musician dies? They get a TV special and a ‘Best Of’. Eventually, they’ll get a musical too, possibly written by Ben Elton or Jennifer Saunders.
Between those, they’ll have their crypt ransacked by music industry CEOs with white ponytails sticking out of the back of their thinning heads. That’s right. Pop deaths mean Unreleased Material Time!
UMT sees tracks that weren’t finished or deemed too poor to be issued in the artist’s lifetime, stuck onto albums that no-one pays for anymore, possibly with a guest rap from Pitbull or something involving a children’s choir. Failing that, just get a load of no-marks to remix a load of stuff you like into something you like considerably less.
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1970: Kate O’Mara And Keith Prowse Horror of Frankenstein Playing Cards
YOU can buy Horror of Frankenstein playing cards, reliving the Hammer House of Horror 1970 blood and babes fest in the comfort of your own game of Patience.
There are cards featuring the late Hammer House of Horror sex symbol Kate O’Mara and ‘Green Cross Caode Man’ / ‘Darth Vader’ Keith Prowse.
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David Hasselhoff Sells Huge Statue Of Himself Dressed As A Lifeguard (Photos)
DAVID Hasselhoff is so rock and roll. And now you can roll him into your room and rock him gentle as you straddle his back and surf along to his greatest hits as a woman in red tosses salty water in your face. You see, David Hasselhoff is selling a David Hasselhoff statue he owns at a Beverly Hills auction.
This is the Hoff who, when appearing in panto with dancing Louis Spence gave him the gifts of “A David Hasselhoff bag, Hasselhoff CD, Hasselhoff calendar and signed Hasselhoff picture” for Christmas. This is the Hoff, the man who brought down the old fault line of Europe by standing on the Berlin Wall dressed in a suit of lightbulbs, a performance of which he said: “I went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum a few years ago. There was nothing of me, and I was disappointed. Look at all these people celebrating! What about me? I was there!”
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Posted: 31st, March 2014 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
Copyright Law Result: Tonight We’re Going To Legally Burn CDs Like It’s 1999
Disc jockey Gregg Whiteside loads a disc into a compact disc player at WOXR radio station in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 1989. Whiteside says he uses CDs for 95 percent of the music he plays because “the sound is beautifully clean.” LP sales are falling drastically while the compact disc’s popularity is soaring. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Date: 15/02/1989
GOOD news people from the past! You can now burn CDs and DVDs for personal use and no-one is going to send you to a jail to be beaten into a Spam fritter by an inmate with hands so large that each finger has it’s own rib cage!
That’s right; the incredibly up-to-date government has put through some legislation to update copyright law which means, from June 1st, people in the UK will be at their ease when copying music music and media purchased on one device, but intended for use on another.
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Nebbish Rap: Dave In Charge Takes His Ghetto Rhymes To The Mean Streets Of Hampstead
“I DISCOVERED rap from a young age,” says David Palmer, 25, who performs under the name Dave In Charge. He’s the grandson of Monroe and Susette Palmer, now life peers Lord and Lady Palmer of Childs Hill, Barnet, London.
The nebbishy looking rapper who recorded his song from his parent’s The Vale, Golders Green crib and the video on the mean paths of Hampstead Heath, goes on:
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Posted: 30th, March 2014 | In: Music, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Exploring the IMDb Bottom 100: The Worst of The 1960s
WITH nearly 3 million films in their database, it’s quite a dubious accomplishment to be ranked in IMDb’s Bottom 100. That’s the bottom of a very deep barrel – the bottom 0.003% in fact. I’d love to explore all the members of this exclusive club; but, in the interest of time we’ll start with the 1960s.
The 2000s are the most represented decade with over 40 films in the Bottom 100. At the moment there are 12 from the Sixties: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964) and these 9 truly awful films (proceed at your own risk):
Monstrosity (1963) AKA The Atomic Brain
IMDb rating = 2.5
An elderly woman hires a mad scientist to transplant her brain into that of a nubile young au pair girl. Somehow this is done without surgery using only the mysteries of radiation. The only way this film could get any worse would be if it starred Adam Sandler.
“Mrs. March had not realized her future body had such a satisfactory shape. Perhaps not as spectacular as the English girl but in excellent taste. She couldn’t help being amused. The stupid girl was not only modeling Mrs. March’s future wardrobe but Mrs. March’s future body: so firm, so nicely round in places men like.”
As luck would have it, some of these films have fallen into public domain, and now you can watch the whole thing for free (the only price you’ll pay is your sanity).
Monster a-Go Go (1965)
IMDb rating = 2.5
The movie begins with the narration: “What you are about to see may not even be possible, within the narrow limits of human understanding.” Oh, how painfully true.
This is the only film in this entire list that defies description because there is literally no plot. It is one random scene after another, with main characters inexplicably leaving midway through the film never to return, and with a twist ending that even M. Night Shyamalan would be ashamed of.
The Starfighters (1964)
IMDb rating = 2.4
There’s a miserable little plot in here somewhere, but this film is basically just stock footage of aircraft lazily pieced together. In fact, there are several – I repeat, SEVERAL – scenes of airplanes refueling… in real time, without edit. It may not have earned the honor of being IMDb’s absolute worst, but it is likely the most boring film in the entire database. When a plane refueling is the highlight of your film, there’s a problem.
For wondrous refueling footage, watch the clip below, but beware of the mind-numbingly infectious “Doo Wah” background music.
Body in the Web (1960) AKA Horrors of Spider Island
IMDb rating = 2.3
“There’s absolutely no reason yet to fear the worst. Until now, we only know that the plane caught fire and we’ve lost radio contact.”
I appreciate his optimism, but that seems like bad news. Indeed, the plane crashes and a troupe of beautiful dancers are stranded on a deserted island. Their routine of skinny-dipping and devising new skimpy outfits is interrupted when a radioactive spider bites their manager and turns him into the dumbest looking monster ever. Recommended for the vision and hearing impaired only.
Eegah (1962)
IMDb rating = 2.1
There’s a serious debate in the film community about whether Arch Hall, Jr. is the worst male lead in the history of cinema. In other words, of the approximately 3,000,000 films in IMDb, the esteemed Arch may officially be counted as the absolute worst. I think Crow from Mystery Science Theater 3000 said it best: “I’ve figured it out. He’s a cyst with teeth and hair.”
Girl in Gold Boots (1968)
IMDb rating = 2.1
A girl with a more than passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie goes from waitress to center-stage go-go dancer. Think Showgirls (1995), but with no gratuitous nudity to redeem it. To quote a reviewer on IMDb: ‘This movie is a big, steaming pile of continuity errors and bad acting.” Truer words were never said.
The Wild World of Batwoman (1966)
IMDb rating = 2.1
The IMDb synopsis pretty much covers it:
A busty Batwoman enlists her beauteous bevy of Batgirls (when they are not dancing the jerk) to help her regain a mad scientist’s invention (an atom bomb made out of a hearing aid) before a costumed ne’er-do-well, Rat Fink, can glom onto it for his own purposes.
Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961)
IMDb rating = 2.0
Again,IMDb explains it best:
A bunch of kids who look like rejects from the Japanese version of ‘Lord of the Flies’ run around while aliens (from Neptune, presumably) blow up stock footage, including a building with a giant mural of Adolf Hitler. After much technobabble and shots of radar displays, they are defeated by a wispy bachelor named Space Chief who has a wobbly flying car.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
IMDb rating = 1.9
A family gets lost and winds up staying with this creepy midget, Torgo, and his caped master who worships the deity Manos. Like most people who’ve seen this film, I came by it via Mystery Science Theater 3000. The plot itself is terrible, but what makes this rock bottom is an almost preternaturally awful execution.
Posted: 28th, March 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comment (1)
Fists Of Love: Kelly Osbourne Dates A Man Who Since Birth Has Had ‘Ozzy’ Written On His Knuckles
KELLY Osbourne is dating an American skater-boi called Braydon Szafranski.
Szafranski has “OZZY” tattooed on his knuckles.
Kelly’s dad is called Ozzy Osbourne. Coincidence?
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Posted: 28th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
How To Seduce Kelly Brook with Dead Badgers, Otters And Weasels
KELLY Brook is engaged to be married.
We know this because she’s bought a ring balloon.
Also, that photo is accompanied by hearts:
Lovely Weekend in Wigan meeting my New extended Family ❤ Such happy times and excited to share my life with the most wonderful man I’ve ever met ❤
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Posted: 28th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
In South Korea, The Diary of Anne Frank Is Sold As A Brian Eno Romance
IN South Korea, The Diary of Anne Frank is a story of seduction, romance, 1980s fashions and a model who looks like Brian Eno.
Spotter: Kotaku
Posted: 27th, March 2014 | In: Books, Celebrities | Comment
First look at the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trailer
Voice actors, from top left, Mikey Kelley, James Arnold Taylor, Nolan North and Mitchell Whitfield pose behind their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters, from left, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello, as they arrive at the premiere of the Warner Bros. feature “TMNT,” the latest installment of the Teenage Mutant Turtles saga, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles Saturday, March 17, 2007.
ONCE upon a time, we had the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on British TV because on these shores, everyone is far too chicken to use the word ‘ninja’. Mercifully, times have changed and now, we’re all set for a brand new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film.
And the new trailer for it has been released.
Of course, there’s only one man childish enough to have fun make a TMNT film, and that’s Michael Bay, who also rummaged through the toybox in his mind to direct the Transformers films.
So how are Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo looking?
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5 Movie Maniacs From The 1980s That Wanted To Be Freddy Krueger
THERE’S an old saying that goes: “if you’re going to take a shot at the king, make sure you don’t miss.”
Such words of wisdom also apply to the movie monsters of the 1980s.
Thirty years ago, in 1984, Wes Craven’s “bastard son of a hundred maniacs,” Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) rose up to become the reigning king of the horror film with the theatrical release of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Gloved One took New Line — “The House That Freddy Built” — straight to the top with him.
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Posted: 27th, March 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (2)
The Big Reunion: Andi Peters and Britpop
ARE you aware of the ITV2 series, The Big Reunion? Thus far, the show has brought Blue, Atomic Kitten, Liberty X and more, back together.
Now, voice of the show – Andi Peters – has said he wants to do a Britpop version. Just imagine. All those 30somethings fishing out their velvet blazers and flared cords out of the bedding box!
“I think there’s a Britpop version to be made,” Peters told Digital Spy. “There’s all those Britpop bands of the same era as the bands on this series. Of course, the adoration wasn’t the same. People didn’t adore them in the same way as they adored pop bands. But, oh my God, they’d have loads of stories.”
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I Was At Diana Dors’ Sex Parties: Max Clifford, Bob Monkhouse’s ‘Slit Eyeballs’ And The Krays
DIANA Dors is in the news. When the tittering had died down in court, Max Clifford told the jury in his sex crimes trial that he attended “sex parties” hosted by the actress Diana Dors. Mr Clifford denies 11 counts of indecent assault against seven women and girls.
Dors was one of the country’s biggest stars. Dors was billed as Britain’s Marilyn Monroe.
Her real name was Diana Fluck – but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema – and one of the letters might fall off.
And she had hosted sex parties at her Orchard Manor home in Sunningdale, Berkshire.
* It really is terrifying how gullible and naïve I was and still am,” she confessed to author Clive Hirschhorn in 1968. “I fell for hard-luck stories the way boys fall for girls. To make things worse I surrounded myself with gangsters, conmen and phoneys!”
Actress Diana Dors, in her early twenties, during the filming of “Value For Money” in 1955.
She had a turbulent love life.
19 year old film actress Diana Dors and her new husband Dennis Hamilton, 26 year old representative of an engineering firm, leaving Caxton Hall register office after their wedding. Date: 03/07/1951
Rob Baker takes up the story.
She married her first husband, Dennis Hamilton, at 4.pm 3rd July 1951 at Caxton Hall registry office in Westminster. She was just nineteen and already a film star. Her parents, not over-enamoured with the proposed union, decided not to come, and Diana, who was still under the, then, legal age of 21, had to forge their signatures on the form that gave permission for their daughter to be married.
Film star Diana Dors, who has filed a divorce petition against her husband, Dennis Hamilton, pictured with actor Tommy Yeardye before they left London Airport for Rome. Date: 02/07/1957
The Caxton Hall wedding between Diana Dors and Dennis Hamilton wasn’t the smoothest of affairs. Before the ceremony the couple had posed for pictures outside (Hamilton had tipped off the press) but eventually the registrar tapped Hamilton on the shoulder and asked for a quiet word. The official discretely told him that he had received an anonymous phone call with the information that the marriage application had been forged.
Hamilton, furious, grabbed the registrar by the throat and shouted: “You’ll marry us, all right, or I’ll knock your fu*king teeth down your throat.”
They had met just five weeks previously after Dennis had chatted Diana up when asking her for a light. She was instantly charmed. Although Diana already had a boyfriend, a man of dubious morals named Michael Caborn-Waterfield, Hamilton sent her flowers almost daily. Unfortunately, Michael went to prison for a fortnight after one too many shady business deals and Dennis pounced. He proposed to Diana at the end of June 1951 and they became Mr and Mrs Hamilton just four days later.
Dors was in the middle of working on a film called Godiva Rides Again [see photo above] so there was no honeymoon after the wedding, just a meal in Olivelli’s in Store Street. The guests all paid for their own meals.
At home in 1960
Said Maxwell:
“There would have been parties from my younger days when I was friends with Diana Dors because Diana had parties. hey were not orgies. Not everyone went there and took their clothes off.”
The sex parties became a feature of her life from her first marriage.
By the time of her wedding she had already been a contract girl for J Arthur Rank for five years and had made some fifteen films including a role in David Lean’s Oliver Twist.
She was certainly not untalented but had always struggled to find real noteworthy roles and a rather turbulent private life certainly didn’t help her cause. She had been renting a small flat off the Kings Road from 1949 for six guineas a week but was eventually thrown out after complaints from the neighbours for the endless parties, late nights and loud music. The nights must have been very late and the music very loud because she wrote in her first autobiography in 1960:
“I didn’t realise it but the cute flat was slap dab in the middle of one of the worst areas I could have established myself in, for Chelsea in those days, just after the war, was much wilder than it is today.”
In 1950, while seeing Caborn-Waterfield, she also had a traumatic illegal abortion, performed on a kitchen table in Battersea, for ten quid.
The ‘interesting’ private life didn’t disappear now that she was married to Hamilton. Not long after their wedding he introduced her to, what were basically, sex parties.
Just a few months after Diana and Dennis’s wedding, Bob Monkhouse, then a 24 year old up-and-coming script writer, was invited to one of their parties. The lights were very low when he got there with almost the only lumination coming from a 16mm projector showing hard core porn (stag films or blue movies as they were known then) and there was a faint smell of Amyl Nitrate in the air.
Monkhouse was quickly invited to bed by a very attractive and comely young dancer. It was a little too quickly and he soon realised that something wasn’t quite right. After his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that there was a false mirror on the ceiling and the other party guests were watching behind it. Furious, he stormed out of the room, with the ‘dancer’ shouting, “I think he’s a homo”. He was met by Dors in the hallway who said:
“Some people absolutely adore putting on a show, they come back to my parties just to do that.”
Scriptwriter and comedian Bob Monkhouse with his family, wife Elizabeth, son Simon (centre behind), and adopted daughter Abigail, in their St John’s Wood home in London. Date: 23/02/1962
The following year Monkhouse and Dors met again at a Sunday evening radio show and they had a brief affair. Diana lied that her husband was in New York to lower Monkhouse’s guard. Eventually Hamilton found out about the affair and threatened Monkhouse with a cut-throat razor screaming at his face:
“I’m going to slit your eyeballs!”
Monkhouse only escaped by kneeing Hamilton in the groin and running away, but he once wrote that he had spent the next six years continually looking over his shoulder. He only had to worry for six years because in 1959 Dennis Hamilton suddenly died. His death was initially blamed on a heart attack but the day after the funeral Dors found out that he had died of tertiary syphilis. It never came to light, despite many autobiographies, whether she had contracted the disease herself.
Head of the panel of judges, Bob Monkhouse gives a hug to 23-year-old Eileen-Elizabeth Sheridan of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, after she had won the title of Miss Great Britain, at Morecambe, Lancashire. To their right is runner up Barbara Smith,23, of Walthamstow, London. Date: 01/09/1960
Her career floundered:
Diana Dors made one acclaimed film in the fifties called Yield To The Night – a movie that was loosely based on the Ruth Ellis story but it’s not entirely unfair to say that she starred in some of the worst films ever made. After an unsuccessful foray to Hollywood (a public affair with Rod Steiger and and an incident where Hamilton beat up a photographer unconscious didn’t help), her film career, despite the very early promise, never really took off.
Dors would later complain that while Marilyn Monroe was making How To Marry A Millionaire in Hollywood, she was up in Manchester making It’s A Grand Life with the alcoholic northern comedian Frank Randle. Diana Dors was always a household name but it was her television guest appearances and roles in saucy sex comedies such as The Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Swedish Wildcats, that eventually kept her in the public eye.
She became the diet guru on GMTV in 1983 – where apparently she would weigh herself with all her heavy gold jewellery so it would look like she lost weight the following week. She died of protracted cancer the following year in 1984.
British film femme fetale, DIANA DORS, 37 holds her five-day old baby son, JASON LAKE in her bed at a Welbeck Street nursing home in London today (Monday). Diana’s third husband, Alan Lake, 28 is the father of Jason. Diana has two other sons, Mark, 10, and Gary, 7. They live in Hollywood with their father Dickie Dawson. Date: 15/09/1969
Off to Hollywood, California from London’s Heathrow airport today, are actress Diana Dors, her husband, actor Alan Lake, and nine year old son Jason. Alan who feels the cold, wears one of Diana’s own Christmas presents – a full length mink coat. In America, Miss Dors will visit her grown up sons and appear on TV chat shows. Date: 28/12/1978
Her son Jason Lake would recall:
“My Dad [Alan Lake] used to get drunk with Richard Harris and Oliver Reed. I’d come back from school and they’d all still be in the living room talking rubbish with the room smelling of cigarettes and alcohol. Lionel Bart had a cocaine habit, so he’d get trashed. I remember him coming out of the loo with cocaine all down his sleeve and Oliver Reed and Dad having sword fights on the lawn.”
With a large ring on her engagement finger, actress DIANA DORS is pictured in London to-night (Monday) with 27 year old actor ALAN LAKE, from Stoke-on-Trent, whom she is to wed. Date: 28/10/1968
* “There were no taboos in our house. I was only seven but I was free to wander in and out of my mum’s parties, no matter how hot they got. I would walk around in my pajamas chatting to John Lennon and Keith Moon. Mum would wander around serving cups of tea and trying to get people up into the bedrooms. She loved having friends round to watch the porn films made at the parties. They would sit around giggling as couples groped each other and made love on the bed. Most of them didn’t even know they had been filmed.”
Lake and Dors acted together.
Diana Dors and her husband Alan Lake together for the first time on the stage, are seen in ‘Three Months Gone’ which opens at the Royal Court Theatre on Wednesday. Date: 26/01/1970
At home, sex was a commodity:
“It was a more up-to-date version of the two-way mirror. Some of the girls were wise to it. Mum just said: ‘This is what happens’, and I thought it was completely normal.’ Diana got her kicks by watching others having sex and procuring young women for famous men.
* Dors… admitted in a series of newspaper interviews to hosting sex parties at her home in Berkshire attended by celebrities including Bob Monkhouse. Guests would be encouraged to have sex with aspiring young actresses and Dors’s son Jason Lake alleged that the bedrooms were rigged with 8mm movie cameras and that his mother would enjoy watching the films later.
Diana Dors performing at Country Cousin. Date: 09/11/1978
Naturally, she knew The Krays.
Actress Diana Dors arriving with husband Alan Lake (right) and actor Andrew Ray (centre) at Chingford Old Church today for the funeral service of Mrs Violet Kray, mother of the Kray twins, two of London’s most notorious gangsters. The twins, Ronnie & Reggie, were brought from prisons where they are serving life sentences for murder for the funeral. Date: 11/08/1982
We’ve nothing to add about Maxwell’s trial, other than that he maintains his innocence.
The man who made a fortune with selling kiss ‘n’ tells about the great and good to the newspapers may take some of the stories he knows to his grave.
Wiping away a tear (l) is comedian Freddie Starr and his wife Sandy at the requiem mass of actor Alan Lake at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Sunningdale. Picture behind Freddie Starr is Max Clifford. Date: 17/10/1984
Adam Curtis has a nice aside about how Dors was tabloid gold:
The News of the World was in trouble – it’s circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports – randy vicars caught with their trousers down – was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
staffords
On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and – as he described it – “pushed the boat out”.“What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It’s going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl.”
In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced – “two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations”
And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.
Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye – Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.
But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything – and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took “all the mucky bits” and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.
Ends.
Posted: 27th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Dylan Thomas Would Have Hated His Welsh Language Royal Mail Stamp
LETTER of the day is in the Times. It concerns Dylan Thomas and the Royal Mail’s new stamps calling him a “Barrd ac awdur” (poet an author).
The stamp has been designed by Purpose as part of a set of stamps for the Royal Mail celebrating Britons with ‘Remarkable Lives’.
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Posted: 27th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities, Reviews | Comment (1)
13 Off Kilter Songs About Drugs You Missed
SURPRISINGLY, Damon Albarn used to be a smackhead. You’d never have guessed would you? More than that, he said that heroin “completely changed” him as a musician and he’s written about being on the brown in a new song on his ‘Everyday Robots’ LP.
“In those… lines I said everything about it that I wanted to. You know, ‘My ship across…’ it has some poetry to it. I’m happy I found that poetry. I can move forward not without all the nudge nudge, wink wink innuendo I’ve had in the background for years. It was a long time ago,” he said.
He’s now off the smack though, which is a relief.
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Posted: 26th, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Music | Comment
Bands Without a Face: When 70s Rock Stars Went Behind the Curtain
ANY clue who these guys are? They’re the band Supertramp. If you didn’t know, it’s either because you are way too young to appreciate this article or it’s due to the fact that almost all Seventies rock acts looked relatively similar – like a generic group of hairy drug addicts.
Plus, it became “a thing” for Seventies rockers to shun the spotlight. Whereas, for most of the 1960s it was just a given that your album cover would feature a photograph of the band, in the 1970s, something changed…
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Posted: 26th, March 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Music | Comments (2)
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin ‘Consciously Uncouple’ Their Caravan Of Love – World Rolls Eyes
AND so it came to pass that Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin are no longer together. She made the announcement on her website Goop. They have not split up. They have had a “conscious uncoupling”. They are like two parts of an inter-city train that has run its course. He heads into the Pumpkin cafe on Reading Station to eat a burger and crisps. She gets her pipes ABS system flushed with coconut water.
Or maybe they are a car uncoupling from a caravan: he the five-year-old Volvo estate; she the plumbed-in yurt.
The message reads:
It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate. We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate. We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways we are closer than we have ever been. We are parents first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time. We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and coparent, we will be able to continue in the same manner.
Love,
Gwyneth & Chris
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Posted: 25th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Bread and Circuses at the Movies: The Six Most Savage Games of the Near Dystopian Future
IN Ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal coined the term “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses), and to his credit, it is one that remains pertinent to this day, especially in our 21st century pop culture and entertainment.
Specifically, the idea of “bread and circuses” involves an artificial means by which the government or ruling class of a nation distracts or appeases “the common man.” In Rome, for example gladiatorial games in the Colosseum fit the bill, distracting and diverting people from significant issues such as poverty, war, and corruption.
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Posted: 25th, March 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comment (1)
Nick Cannon Kicks Up ‘Whiteface’ Argument
WHEN anyone switches up the colour of their skin, an argument ensues. Over the years, there have been hundreds of white actors doing ‘Blackface’ and until relatively recently, the Black & White Minstrel Show was something broadcasters would put on national television, never once thinking that it would offend actual black people.
Since then, everything got confusing for people. In Fonejacker, Kayvan Novak – who isn’t white – indulged in, well, ‘Everythingface’, adopting rubber masks to pull his pranks. Of course, it doesn’t matter what colour you are, you can still be racist, but no-one could agree whether or not Novak’s show was acceptable. Most didn’t even think about it.
After that, ‘White Chicks’ got a cinematic release, featuring two black male actors done up to be white women. Where do you even start with that? For the most part, the response was ‘what a terrible, terrible film’, so everything paled into insignificance. Pun intended.
Now, we’ve got Mariah Carey’s husband (who herself, is a whole essay on skin colour, ‘whitened’ by record companies for years) Nick Cannon, has appeared doing ‘Whiteface’.
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Posted: 25th, March 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
