MISSING LINKS
HOW two seemingly unrelated figures in the news are joined by a series of unexpected connections.
MATT HANCOCK
… makes his first appearance on I’m A Celebrity tonight – though the jungle challenge will not be the first daring thing he’s done. When he was a 26-year-old banker, he played cricket close to the North Pole on an expedition that almost cost him his fingers to frostbite. He claimed it was the most northerly game ever, though early Arctic explorer…
WILLIAM PARRY
… played cricket with crewmates when his ship got stuck in Arctic ice in 1822. The explorer now has a crater on the Moon named after him, a tribute reserved for great scientists and pioneers. Craters on Venus are named after prominent women, while those on Mercury honour artists including…
JOHN LENNON
One lesserknown fact about the Beatle is his love of Monopoly. Despite insisting we should ‘imagine no possessions’, he took this most capitalist of games on tour. The Queen banned her family from playing Monopoly as it was ‘too vicious’, but devotees include…
JOHN TRAVOLTA
… who plays it with real money, that’s how rich he is. The Hollywood star is almost as famous for the movies he’s rejected – including Forrest Gump, Splash! and The Phantom Of The Opera – as for those he took. Another star who declined to play the Phantom was…
MEAT LOAF
… who said: ‘I hate that show. I took five people to see it once and three of them fell asleep.’ His own music has the opposite effect, as a 2000 Sussex University study found it stimulated plant growth. Wallflowers, carrots and mung beans played Bat Out Of Hell for a week grew faster than those serenaded by Rachmaninov. Plenty of research suggests music aids growth, which may be why…
KATY PERRY
… promised to sing to the King’s flowers when she met him in 2020, having heard of the then Prince Charles’s reputation for chatting to shrubbery. Last week the singer made the newspapers by celebrating them, tweeting: ‘One of my favourite sounds ever is the sound of a crisp new newspaper being read over breakfast.’