Sleb Safari: Is Ed Sheeran the next Simon Cowell?

GREETINGS and welcome to today’s seminar on Ed Sheeran at the College of Further and Higher and Higher Education in partnership with Jackie Wilson.

The proposition for today’s discussion is that Ed Sheeran is an everyman. He’s a red haired geezer who goes on Graham Norton without his glasses and then needs to go right up to the monitor to confirm that yes, the person sitting in the red chair is indeed one of his best friends from school.

Sleb Safari has been reading a lot about Ed lately, in preparation for this class.

It has learned that he writes songs for everyone from Rihanna to Justin Bieber; that his girlfriend plays hockey for Wimbledon Hockey Club; that he suffered serious burns last year when the ground gave way beneath him in Iceland and his feet plunged into a geyser where the water was almost 200 degrees Celsius and that he once got so hammered at Russell Crowe’s house that he ended up stumbling into a field full of venomous snakes and sleeping there.

Cultivating something special at Flax Lane

What is it with Australia and fields full of snakes? When One Direction were on tour in Australia a few years ago their fans were camping outside their Adelaide hotel which happened to be next to a field of snakes which prompted Liam Payne to tweet "Girls behind the hotel please get out the fields there's a huge sign saying snake habitat it's just not worth it someone's gunna get hurt."

Seriously, is there an Aussie St Patrick rounding up snakes and corralling them in fields?

If truth be told, Sleb Safari might know more about Ed Sheeran at this point than it does some of its mates.

He seems like a down-to-earth sort. He told Rolling Stone that when he got eye rolling rich he did “what any bloke would do – sorted my family out, bought a sports car that I never drive... bought a house and built a pub in my garden. I spoke to every dude I know and I was like, ‘What would you do in the same position?’ and they went ‘Build a pub’.”

The one thing that worried Sleb Safari was the plan he shared with the magazine to create a boyband.

He's already written songs for the group which is still at the audition stages. The songs are "really, really decent. Superpop, but obviously credible”.

“I'm gonna put three or four boys together and do all the songs, take them on the stadium tour with me," he said.

Are we looking at the next Simon Cowell? Sleb Safari will be watching Ed’s waistband closely over the next while and if it starts to creep up towards his chin Sleb Safari will expect Elton John to stage a code red intervention. That means helicopters, rehab, the works. Elton John are you paying attention or are you asleep at your desk?

Kanye West moves into skincare

MOVE over Nivea there’s a new kid on the block. Kanye West is planning to produce his own line of “make-up, perfumes, lotions and other cosmetics” according to gossip site TMZ.

Why wouldn’t he? He’s already climbed to the top of the music mountain and has had two shows at New York Fashion Week so why not whip up some lotions and potions.

If a teenage Jenner can make millions from selling lip kits (Sleb Safari has had to Google what exactly a lip kit is. Answer: liquid lipstick and pencil lip liner. Cost: $29) then so can Kanye.

The range is expected to be called Donda after his mum who died 10 years ago, which is a lovely tribute.

TMZ says Kanye’s long-term vision includes dabbling in “medical research”, “alternative energy sources” and the creation of a “luxury search engine”. Not much of an overlap there, granted, but Kanye’s nothing if not a visionary.

Nicole Kidman explains her seal clap

THANK goodness this month's greatest mystery has been cleared up and we finally know why Nicole Kidman was clapping like a seal at the Oscars.

Nicole told Australian radio station KIIS FM that her awkward clap was necessitated by a great big diamond ring she had borrowed for the night.

"I was like, ‘Gosh, I want to clap, I don’t want to not be clapping,’ which would be worse, right? ‘Why isn’t Nicole clapping?’

“So therefore, I’m clapping but it was really difficult because I had a huge ring on that was not my own so it was absolutely gorgeous and I was terrified of damaging it.

“It’s like, is there not more important things to be focused on than the seal clap?”

Sleb Safari has it on good authority that Nicole wore 119 carats worth of Harry Winston diamonds at the Oscars, including the seal clap ring.

If Sleb Safari had borrowed that much jewellery it'd be scared to leave the house unless under armed guard. Nicole, all is forgiven, you can clap and sparkle any which way you want from now on.

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