#5 – Nicolae Ceaușescu and Michaela Strachan

As luck would have it, former Romanian dictator Ceaușescu was executed by firing squad shortly before his long-term girlfriend Michaela Strachan joined The Really Wild Show – children’s wildlife programming ranked just beneath ‘dissidents’ in Nicolae’s Big Bad List, and it would have been a shame to see his ignoble fall from power compounded by the dramatic break-up of his relationship with lovely lion-botherer Michaela. Speculation that they met through an early Usenet newsgroup for people with compound vowel sounds in their names is unfounded; all we know is that, while short-lived, their love was perhaps the best thing to come out of Romania since Dracula. Plans for a biopic entitled Ae is the Warmest Digraph are underway.

#4 – Ginger Rogers and Nikola Tesla

Ginger Rogers has become a byword for elegance and style on the dance floor, but personal letters recently sold at auction reveal that whilst her talent as an actress was all her own, her dancing feet were another matter entirely. Shortly before she was cast in Flying Down to Rio, the first of ten musicals in which she starred with Fred Astaire, the young Rogers entered into a relationship with Nikola Tesla, the genius Serbian inventor who had recently filed his final patent – although he had not created his final device. Using his lost technique for wireless energy transmission and his nascent interest in robotics, Tesla rebuilt his lover’s legs in such a way as to allow them to be remotely guided, granting Rogers superhuman abilities as a dancer. Some of Tesla’s more recent biographers have suggested that the scientist’s apparent lifelong chastity was in fact a prolonged wait for a woman flexible and suggestible enough to submit to his implants (which would certainly have opened up a whole new range of feasible positions for the inventive and the debauched); however, we must stress that this is merely speculation and has no basis in fact.

#3 – Queen Victoria and Mata Hari

As evidenced by the fact that every drooling, haemophiliac nonce to wear a crown in Europe for the last century is one of her descendants, Queen Victoria was really, really into sex. But having shagged Prince Albert to death aged just 42, the Empress of India – forbidden from remarrying by court protocol and her personal conviction that ‘once you’ve had Coburg, you never go back’ – was forced to look elsewhere for playthings to satiate her lust. Mata Hari, the Dutch stripper who was eventually executed for being a German spy (why do people in this blog keep getting executed?) was intended as a brief divertissement, but the Queen took a shine to the gyrating Hollander and kept her in the lap of luxury for nearly three years before meeting John Brown and finally ending her decades of penile penury. And this from a woman who (apocryphally) claimed lesbianism didn’t exist! Slag.

#2 – Klaus Kinski and PG Wodehouse

We were all excited about exposing the relationship between schizophrenic German heavyweight Klaus Kinski and blushing ingénue (well, she was when he died) Drew Barrymore, but then we found out a bit more about what Kinski got up to at home and decided against it. Conveniently, however, the unpredictable actor and favourite of Werner Herzog had more than one improbable affair in his life. During his brief stint in the Wehrmacht, Kinski fell passionately in love with an Englishman almost thirty years his senior, who he’d been assigned to guard at an internment camp; the cheerfully daffy PG Wodehouse, who’d been captured in France after chronically underestimating the significance of the Second World War.

Sadly, when Wodehouse fled Europe after the war there was no room for his Teutonic lover, but there are those who believe their relationship was frozen in time in both artists’ work. Wodehouse conspiracists claim that the later and more deranged antics of Roderick Spode, Lord Sidcup were a loving homage to Kinski, a notable idiot who used to stand outside naked, in winter, eating fags and drinking piss. Slightly less flatteringly, Kinski conspiracists consider the iconic role of Nosferatu to be a horrific caricature of Wodehouse’s eccentric upper-class mannerisms. Both camps agree that the controversial novella Wooster Pegs a Kraut is almost certainly inauthentic.

#1 – Rupert Grint and the ghost of Katharine Hepburn

Ten years is a long time to spend working on one film series; particularly if it’s the ten years you also spend going through puberty. The understanding and overpaid crew of the various Harry Potter sets soon learnt to cope with the unique foibles of their young stars; Daniel Radcliffe had his booze and fags, Emma Watson had her ‘LSD and Tolstoy’ parties, and Rupert Grint had his long, noisy afternoon ‘naps’. However, all was not as it seemed. In a shocking interview with Best For Film, due to be published in full next month, Grint has chosen to reveal the true nature of what everyone had assumed were energetic sessions of self-abuse; from the filming of Goblet of Fire onwards, he was regularly visited in his trailer by the ghost of four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn.

“I was scared at first, but she made me so much more confident; I felt like Spencer Tracy every time I had to look incredibly scared or say ‘Bloody hell, Harry’ in a sort of doleful voice,” Grint told our reporter. “She said I reminded her of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., which was great although I don’t really know who he is, and one time she put one of her ghost Oscars up my bum a little bit.” Attempts to contact Hepburn via seance have been unsuccessful, although Grint has tweeted several photographs of a Tupperware box which he says contains ‘ectoplasm’ gathered from his spectral cougar. Best For Film has no intention of trying to find out whether he’s telling the truth. Ever.

How many of the above people are going to sue us, d’you think?