Brett-Butler

I’m pretty sure that Conkers is Tom Daley. The reference to 3 gold stars seem to refer to his Olympic wins, and my wife’s pointing out that there’s a few very cryptic references to knitting hidden throughout.

The Candidates for the Gorton and Denton by-election have been announced - Nick Buckley (Advance UK) Charlotte Cadden (Conservative Party) Dan Clarke (Libertarian Party) Matt Goodwin (Reform UK) Sebastian Moore (Social Democratic Party) Joseph O'Meachair (Rejoin EU Party) Jackie Pearcey (Liberal Democrats) Hannah Spencer (Green Party) Angeliki Stogia (Labour Party) Sir Oink a Lot (The Official Monster Raving Loony Party) Hugo Wils (Communist League) Literally something for everyone there, with commies, social democrats, libertarians and continuity FBPE thrown in to the mix. My predictions - Labour won't win this. They already dropped points when Andy Burnham wasn't selected, and now with the Mandelson stuff thrown in I can't see them taking it. I feel the Greens have been oversold by media wanting a straight Green/Reform fight, they'll poll better than 2024 but nowhere near winning. At the moment, my money's on a tight Reform win.

Forgot I won the last time! I'll take Sweden this time.

He may have said it over 15 years ago, but after the revelations of the past few days, this Frankie Boyle quote remains prescient: “Who made Peter Mandelson a Lord? The Sith?”

7 on The Cure, 18 overall.

Absolutely chuffed to see "Boys Don't Cry" as high up as it is. Hard to believe it's never been a top 20 hit, I hope it hangs in there and gives them a new peak. This post is brought to you by the bloke who appeared on Mastermind with "The Cure" as his specialist subject.

The first music topic of the series came up and it was a picture round as well, so there may not be sound based duels as I'd thought.

The Cure have released a version of “Boys Don’t Cry” this week that is being streamed for the first time, the 86” Mix which was a re-recorded version to promote their “Standing on a Beach” compilation album from that year. It’s slightly remixed and had new vocals from Robert Smith. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets decent streaming numbers alongside the original. This post was brought to you by “the bloke who went on Mastermind with The Cure as his specialist subject”.

As much as I’m glad that “Saipan” made the top 10 (I worked as an extra with someone who played a journalist in that film), it seems like a real cheat that a film can be open for nearly month and not have its figures recorded until it opens nationwide. Also, clucking bell, The Housemaid turning into a phenomenon wasn’t on my UK box Office bingo card a few weeks ago.

I don’t think Burnham has to resign in order to stand as an MP, only if he were to win the by-election.

Looks like Labour’s NEC would rather see a Reform UK MP in Gorton than the risk of Andy Burnham challenging Starmer’s leadership from within parliament. If they thought that this would stop Labour Party psychodrama, it’s a ruddy funny way of doing so.

If he lives on the border he could probably get a down South phone number arranged in some way. If I decide again to apply for the Irish Traitors and there’s the same issue I may try seeing if there’s a workaround.

Oh goodness, hope this doesn't turn into a "minor political celebrity" election - George Galloway contested the predecessor seat of Gorton in 2017 (initially at a by-election, which become the General Election when it was called early), winning 8% of the vote. If he runs for the Workers Party, then there's no hope of them standing aside to give the Greens a boost.

Early rumours (that should be taken with a Lot’s worth of salt) that it could see both the Greens & Reform running their highest profile non-MPs. If all 3 of them end up on the ballot paper I would be a very surprised panda.

A year after being stripped of the whip for sending offensive messages in a Whatsapp group, Andrew Gwynne has resigned as an MP, triggering a by-election in his Manchester based Gorton & Denton constituency. Although Labour won this seat with more than 50% of the votes, the current Nowcast predicts it will be a tighter contest: Of course this doesn't take into account that this is a by-election and there's many factors that could influence the results. The biggest one being whether Andy Burnham will stand (if the NEC don't force an all-female shortlist on the party), as his popularity in Manchester is pretty high. If Labour are hoping that they'll be given a free run by the "stop Reform" alliance, the reinvigorated Greens may look at the above and think they may have a chance of taking the seat, especially if they try to pull away the 8% currently predicted for the Workers Party (especially if they run a Gaza-friendly candidate). Reform would need to run an absolutely spotless candidate to ensure chance of victory, but that would be a mountain for them to climb.

Solely on the fact that there were four bowls of Bon Bon’s in the clip, I think it could be Peter Serafonowicz, given that one of his characters, Brian Butterfield, references Bon Bon Bon Bons from time to time.

My bad, so many PSD singers have been suggested over the years I’d assumed more than one had taken part. And I think everyone has got Busted and McFly mixed up at some point.

They’ve had a fair few Pussycat Dolls, and a few members of McFly, but not in the same series.

Because he knows that useful idiots will end up disseminating the video with comments like “look what this eejit Nigel Farage has done now”, so everyone’s social media feeds are now filled with Farage’s face, therefore increasing his ubiquity in people’s minds. And before you say “but I’m so smart and wonderful, I’D never vote for Nigel Farage just because I see his face everywhere”, that may be the case, but the nature of social media means that when a video is shared, it will have inevitably fall into the feed of many people for whom it could tip them into voting for Reform UK (and before you say that’s not rational, you’re right, it isn’t, but I don’t believe that many people come to their decisions rationally, myself included). So basically it’s evidence of the maxim that the cheapest way to do PR is to let your enemies to your promotion for you. Farage appears to know that being omnipresent on social media is key to keeping himself and his party in the public eye, which is why he still does those Cameo videos whilst still on the sizeable salary he gets as an MP and TV presenter, and why he puts so much stock in his TikTok presence to get his face out there (I’d read recently that he’s the UK politician with the largest following on social media, I think only Zarah Sultana comes close, but I would need to look that up to see if that is still the case). If you really want to stop Farage, then the key is to stop talking about him, even to criticise or laugh at him. Unfortunately like Trump in 2015, people just can’t avoid it. As for K&TG, their creation of the video in the first place should be questioned, just another example of their grift aimed at left leaning individuals, which goes all the way back to 2010 and culminated in that dreadful “Boris Johnson is female anatomy” series of songs that was lapped up in the thousands.

My wife saw the most recent book that arrived and said to me “you have a very weird taste in books,” what what, pray tell, is weird about getting a book that spends 700 glorious pages detailing every single by-election, at council and Westminster, in England, Scotland & Wales, from the year 2024?

Kemi played this one very well, taking the wind out of Robert Jenrick’s sails by turning the narrative from “leading member of the shadow cabinet defects to Reform in massive blow to Badenoch’s reputation” to “Jenrick runs off to Reform after being sacked by decisive Badenoch”. Badenoch has been getting more plaudits for PMQ’s the past few weeks, even from people who had thought she was a dead woman walking, but the past few weeks her leadership has gone from “when she is challenged for the leadership”, to “IF she is challenged for the leadership”, to “after she leads the Tories into the next election.” Whilst I’m terrible at prognosticating, I wonder if this is the moment that Reform begins its descent in the polling (their defection of Nadhim Zahari earlier in the week went down like a lead balloon, with one commenter mentioned that it simultaneously brought up the collective IQ of both the Tories and Reform UK), and the Tories to start rebuilding as the party on the centre-right of politics. The whole story has been fascinating to watch all day. It’s like something out of a political drama, with Badenoch as Francis Urquart, and Jenrick as the unfortunate Nicola Murray figure.

Also, Zi previously won the first series of the UK version of “The Mole” in 2001.

Still surprised we’ve gone 2 episodes without any of the music categories being picked, so still waiting to see how those categories will be played (“Musicals” was as mentioned above, but I expected it to be more visual anyway). Also starting to see territories starting to get bigger very quickly, so things are getting exciting. I’m presuming that once all contestants have duelled at least once, they then pick randomly from those with 2 squares?

Is this the biggest difference in divisions between two teams in the FA Cup where the minnow won? Unless there was a bigger one at some point in the qualifiers or 1st/2nd rounds can’t imagine there’s many other cases.

It would’ve been the 2nd most bizarre if Miley Cyrus didn’t ask for her vocals to be taken off her collaboration with Steven Patrick