Pick of the week’s Gossip

While pandemic-compliant film shoots are permitted in Berlin, social gatherings are not. So when the producers of The Matrix 4 wanted to host a party to mark the end of shooting in the city, they allegedly came up with an ingenious solution. They told the cast and crew they needed to reassemble to shoot extra footage for a “celebration scene” – but according to witnesses, there wasn’t much actual filming going on. “No directorial instructions were given; there was no clapperboard,” they said. “The mood was exuberant.”

To get her first major film role, in 1968’s social realist drama Up the Junction, Maureen Lipman pretended to be a Londoner. “I kept it up for 13 weeks that I was a cockney,” she recalls. She’d been told that the director, Peter Collinson, wouldn’t cast her otherwise. But when she confessed to him that she was actually from Hull, he admitted that he was from Grimsby, and had faked his London accent too. “How else do you think I got the rights for £200?”

Staring out of the window on the International Space Station, British astronaut Major Tim Peake and his colleagues were once transfixed by the sight of “three lights moving in formation”. At first, he told The Graham Norton Show, they thought they might be looking at “the far away lights of alien spaceships”. Alas, they then realised the lights were in fact “very close small droplets” caused by liquid that had leaked out of a Russian probe and crystallised, reflecting the light. “What we were seeing was Russian urine.”