The Sunday Times June 5, 2022 2GN 15
NEWS
Chrissie
was
always
faithfulQuestion: How do you go
from living on a park bench to
having a film made about
your life? Answer: By hosting
one of the nation’s most
popular pandemic pastimes.
Jay Flynn became a viral
sensation in lockdown when
he launched a weekly online
quiz that attracted hundreds
of thousands of followers
worldwide. Jay’s Virtual Pub
Quiz has achieved a Guinness
world record for the number
of contestants taking part
(182,500) and secured its
creator an MBE.
Now the team behind the
film A Street Cat Named Bob
has signed the story of the
40-year-old’s extraordinary
life for a picture with the
working title The Quiz Master.
The deal has netted Flynn,
who spent two years living
homeless in London, a “six-
figure sum”. It is expected to
be released next year.
The team at Studio
Pictures, a British production
company, is hoping for
cameos from some of the
celebrities who took part in
the quiz in lockdown. They
included Dame Judi Dench,
who played with her
Sian Griffiths
Education Editor
grandson, Gary Barlow and
Stephen Fry, who hosted
sessions. Flynn, who twice
tried to take his own life in his
twenties, said: “Fourteen
years ago I was wandering the
streets with no purpose. I did
not expect anything like this
to happen to me.”
Garry Jenkins, one of the
writers of A Street Cat Named
Bob, has been signed to the
new film. He said there were
many parallels between the
story of Flynn and that of
James Bowen, the former
London busker and heroin
addict whose unlikely
relationship with a ginger cat
was turned into a series of
books that sold millions of
copies and two films,
generating income that
enabled Bowen to buy his
own home. Both Flynn and
Bowen had lived on the
streets when young and both
found a purpose in life in “the
most unlikely places”. “But
the stories of both men are
really about hope, resilience
and the human need to
connect with others,” said
Jenkins.
“Jay’s is a great British
underdog story... During the
early days of the pandemic,
we all felt fearful,
disconnected, lonely and, attimes, hopeless. “Captain
Tom, Joe Wicks and Jay were
the ordinary heroes of
lockdown. They kept us
going. Jay was transformed
from a guy whose life had not
always added up yet suddenly
found himself as the guy who
had all the right answers
every Thursday night. ”
The remarkable rise of
Flynn started in March 2020.
He was a pub landlord when
Britain went into lockdown
and he contacted friends to
create a pub quiz online. But
he left the settings on his
Facebook page open and “it
went insane”.
“Unofficially we had over
300,000 people join at
various points [that first
night]... I thought it would
be a one-off quiz but
everyone said we want you to
keep doing it,” he said.
Flynn filmed himself
weekly asking questions from
a bank of 20,000. It raised
more than £1.3 million for
charities including for the
homeless outreach
programme The Connection
at St Martin’s. It was one of
their workers who helped
Flynn get back on his feet. He
started work again, ending up
in Lancashire, and is now
married with a young son.These are Jay Flynn’s
favourite questions of
the many he has asked
1 In which country does
cheesecake originate?
2 What is the world’s
largest desert?
3 Which country has the
most time zones?
4 What was the name of
Del Boy’s wife in Only
Fools and Horses?
5 Which foot did Neil
Armstrong put down first
on the moon?TEST
YOURSELF- Antarctica Desert1. Ancient Greece
3. France (with its overseas territories included,
Answers it counts 13) 4. He was never married 5. Leftaccused the pair of ripping off
a song with the same name
that he released in 1989, five
years before Carey’s record.
Stone’s song made it onto the
American Billboard country
music charts in the 1990s.
The songs have different
music and lyrics, but Stone
claims that Carey’s choice of
song title “caused confusion”
for listeners and he did not
give her permission to use it.
Carey’s song has become
one of the most popular, and
lucrative, Christmas hits.
The American is
estimated to have made
more than $70 million
in royalties from the
song, which has been
streamed more than
a billion times on
Spotify.
Carey has not
commented.
@iamliamkellyperception of second-hand
clothes.
Islanders pick their outfits
from a communal wardrobe
and also each receive a
welcome suitcase filled with
clothes. Bannerman has
created a collection of 2,
pieces, ranging from a £
vintage top to designer
pieces. “The first thing I
bought was a Christopher
Kane bandage dress from one
of his early collections,”
said Bannerman. “It’s
super sexy and so Love
Island, but in a way that’s
turbocharged. It set the
tone for everything else.”
She had to convince the
contestants of the merits of
her pre-loved pieces. “They
were confused, then
excited,” she said. “Most said
it wasn’t something they
normally did.”
Love Island begins tomorrow
on ITVGreen tide brings
second-hand outfits
to Love Island stars
Love Island is as famous for its
fast fashion as its flirtations,
with contestants’ wardrobes
featuring hundreds of cheap
dresses and sponsors offering
bikinis for as little as £1.
But, this year, the dating
show will feature its most
expensive wardrobe,
including a Christopher
Kane dress worth £880, as
it showcases second-
hand fashion with rare
finds.
The ITV show’s
stylist, the vintage
expert Amy
Bannerman, spent six
weeks trawling eBay
for “pre-loved” items to
send to the villa and said
she hopes her work on
the Love Island wardrobe
can change publicKaren DacreMy Sex Pistol romance with
Chrissie Hynde? It’s b***ocks
one of which is about their relationship.
“When Chrissie was working at the shop
she’d shut the place up and we’d put Mal-
colm and Vivienne’s gospel of Sex into
practice,” Jones wrote.
Hynde, who has refused to comment,
was brought in by Boyle as a consultant
on Pistol. “Chrissie came in a couple of
times,” Boyle told Variety magazine. “She
said, ‘I only f***ed him once, you know’.”
According to an episode of the guitar-
ist’s podcast, Jonesy’s Jukebox, that fea-
tures Hynde, that “once” appears to have
been in a bathroom at a party. It was
memorable not for the sex, according to
Hynde, but because the staunch vegetar-
ian was so hungry afterwards that she ate
a piece of chicken — or possibly turkey.
However, she did suggest there may
have been other, equally forgettable
occasions. “I think when I didn’t have a
place to live and I used to come around to
the studio, I think he used to give me
one,” she said.
Kent has yet to watch Pistol. “I haven’t
made my mind up yet, but my wife is
keen to see it,” he said. “It’s lovely to hear
how I’ve been portrayed by someone
who wasn’t in the room when the real
stuff went down.
“You want to know the truth? Every-
body got f***ed in the Sex Pistols, this is
just the latest version of that.”Quiz master who lived on the
streets finds home on big screen
He was the damaged prince of punk, she
was his American princess with a lust for
fame. But the great rock’n’roll romance
between Chrissie Hynde and Steve Jones
in a new television drama is a fairytale,
the Sex Pistols’ guitarist has confessed.
The six-part Disney+ series, Pistol,
presents Jones’s affair Hynde — before
she found fame as frontwoman of the
Pretenders — as instrumental to the suc-
cess of the anarchic punk band.
But Jones has said that Hynde was
“shocked” when she saw the show.
“You’ve got to showbiz it up a little bit,
you’ve got to make it interesting,” said
Jones, whose memoir, Lonely Boy, is the
basis for Pistol, which was directed by
Danny Boyle. Jones singled out the
dramatisation of his relationship with
Hynde, who he said had been made
the “love interest”.
“She watched it the other day and
she was surprised,” Jones, 66, told
The New York Times. “She said, ‘I
didn’t realise I was about this much’.”
In the opening episode of the series,
which began streaming last week, Jones
and Hynde are at it in the changing rooms
at Sex, the Chelsea clothes shop owned
by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm
McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager,
where Hynde worked.
Hynde’s actual boyfriend at the time,
the music journalist Nick Kent, is shown
waiting outside.
Kent, 70, yesterday dismissed the
scene as a fabrication and said he was
shocked by Pistol’s portrayal of his rela-
tionship with Hynde. “I definitely dispute
that,” he said. “I know Chrissie was
always faithful to me. It was me who was
unfaithful to her — that was when and
why our relationship broke up, and it
hurt us both gravely.”
By the third episode, Jones and Hynde
are acrobatic at every angle. Jones even
jilts the Ohio-born Hynde on the day they
were supposed to get married to secure
her a visa to stay in the UK. (In reality,
Hynde contemplated marrying John
Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, and Sid
Vicious, not Jones, according to her own
autobiography, Reckless: My Life as a Pre-
tender.) Then she is back breaking down
Jones’s door in the middle of the night to
have more sex before he takes off on tour.
Kent said: “Chrissie and I had a
relationship, we lived together
for a year while she was working
in the shop, then we broke up in
acrimonious circumstances. She
moved to Paris for a while, then went
back to Cleveland. I was never aware
there was a big affair going on between
the two of them.
“Of course, everyone has their own
version, and the Sex Pistols is a story that
lends itself to sensationalising so easily.”
The Sex Pistols released their contro-
versial single God Save the Queen in 1977,
the year of the Silver Jubilee. Despite
being banned from radio play by the BBC,
it reached No 2 in the official UK charts,
pipped to the top by Rod Stewart’s I Don’t
Want to Talk About It. The track was reis-
sued in time for the Platinum Jubilee.
Lydon, the Sex Pistols’ former front-
man, told The Times last week that he
had never harboured any animosity
towards the royal family and merely disa-
greed with the institution. “God bless the
Queen,” he said. “She’s put up with a lot.”
Pistol was made without the involve-
ment — or blessing — of Lydon, who tried
to stop the band’s music being used in the
show. A High Court judge ruled against
him, however, siding with Jones and the
former drummer Paul Cook, who had
sued Lydon in order to allow their songs
to be used. Lydon has called the show
“fluff... and that’s a shame”.
Jones told the New York Times that he
and his former bandmate had not seen
each other since 2008 and were not
“pals”. He said that he respected Lydon
but that, if he saw him in the supermar-
ket, he would “probably run and hide
behind the baked beans”.
He added that Boyle, as director, liked
the fact the series would not take “the
obvious angle” and would instead tell the
story of the band through the guitarist’s
eyes.
Jones said: “I got a shot at telling my
story, based on my book, but you’ve got
to remember, it’s not a documentary.”
That, for Kent, is the real problem with
the project. “It came from Steve Jones’s
book,” he said. “He could neither read
nor write when I knew him. The irony is
painfully apparent.”
Hynde, who wrote the foreword for
Jones’s memoir, barely features in the
book, getting five short mentions, onlyLisa Verrico
Guitarist admits affair depicted in controversial new series about punk band was ‘showbizzed up’
ELISA LEONELLI/REX; FX NETWORKS
A 2007 outfit by
Christopher KaneThe Sex Pistols in
1977, top left, and
as they appear on
the new Disney
show. Left,
Chrissie Hynde,
in 1994All singer wants is
$20m for Mariah’s
Christmas ‘ripoff ’
All Mariah Carey ever wanted
for Christmas was you, but
the singer’s festive hit has also
given her a legal headache
almost three decades after it
was released.
Carey, 53, is being sued for
$20 million (£16 million) for
alleged copyright
infringement over All I Want
for Christmas Is You. Her
fellow songwriter Walter
Afanasieff has also been
named in the writ filed at a
Louisiana court.
Andy Stone, the
frontman of the
country band Vince
Vance & the
Valiants, hasLiam Kelly
Arts CorrespondentCarey: hit
has earned
her $70m