Dragons’ Den's Scott Cupit's male stripper routine at a hen party went down a little too well

'I’ve never been so happy to get back to my car'

Swing Patrol have broken the world record for the largest Charleston

Since securing a deal on Dragons’ Den in 2014, things have got better and better for Scott Cupit and his dance school and events company Swing Patrol. As well as signing up 12,000 people and establishing the London Swing Festival (27 to 29 May), the troupe have broken the world record for the largest Charleston, while Cupit has won Dance Teacher of the Year, published a book and launched an online shop.

All of which will no doubt be covered when Dragons’ Den: Pitches to Riches (on BBC2 at 8pm on 28 February) catches up with Scott and his team. One aspect of the story that is less likely to be mentioned, however, is an incident that occurred recently. “I was booked to do a hen party, but the brief was that I should pretend to be a stripper,” Cupit says. “I arrived through a back door and was given a fireman’s outfit. Only the maid of honour knew about the prank.

“My brief was to walk out to strip music, sit on the hen’s lap and sort of half take the fireman’s jacket off. When the shy hen looked overwhelmed, I was to say, ‘Don’t worry. I’m just here to give a swing dance lesson. Hi, I’m Scott from Swing Patrol.’”

“This is what I did and the hen was very relieved. The problem was, all the other women at the party were rolling drunk and didn’t realise this was a prank. They were outraged and felt ripped off so getting them to do a dance lesson was a nightmare. I’ve never been so happy to get back to my car.”

Suits who?

With an ever-wider range of voices making themselves heard online, it’s getting harder to sort the sincere from the satirical. A few weeks back it was the daily diet of the LA juice-bar owner Amanda Chantal Bacon that had us all rolling in the (Tesco) aisles, and now along comes John LeFevre, the writer who has given the world “The Goldman Sachs Elevator guide to dressing like a gentleman” (published in all its glory on Business Insider UK last week).

Guys, what you need to know is that, apparently: “Brown suits are for back-office guys”; “Cuffs [turn-ups] are for limo drivers”; “Pocket squares are for bucket-shop bankers and CNBC pundits”; “Flamboyant socks just make you look British”; “Shirt pockets are for Bernie Sanders supporters”; and, best of all, “Monogrammed shirts are passé. Get your gun monogrammed instead.”

As one commenter perfectly put it: “A brilliant guide to dressing, acting and thinking like the worst kind of douchebag.”


 English journalist, travel writer, and novelist Evelyn Waugh 
 (Getty)

Container your laughter

The Tumblr site “Wackaging” has the tagline: “I blame Innocent smoothies” and charts the way that food products have increasingly started to talk to us as if they were our wacky office colleagues: “Best when chilled, as indeed we all are” (on Pret’s lemonade) and so on.

Last week, the trend peaked with the launch of Canny milkshakes. “I’m strawberry flavoured milk. I like walks on the beach and nights in. With you,” says the stalkerberry, sorry strawberry one, for example. “You can’t please everyone,” say the not-so-canny Canny people to the online reaction. “Can’t believe I’m creeped out by a milkshake,” says everyone on Twitter.

How to reset a soul

If you like a good weep as much as I do, might I recommend you type “Robb Scott, Down’s syndrome” into a browser and watch the four-minute clip that a 41-year-old Canadian father posted recently. In it, Scott tells how he was browsing films in a video store when he heard a boy ask his dad, “What is Down’s syndrome?” The father replied “an illness of not knowing anything”, and, instead of saying something, Scott – the father of a five-year-old with Down’s – walked out.

“A voice in my head said: ‘Tell him what it is,’ but instead I let that ignorance grow in another generation and failed my son.”

Recording the clip to “reset his soul”, Scott has now turned that missed opportunity into a lesson for nearly a million people. It’s truly beautiful. One question, though: they still have video stores in Canada?

An oats so simple solution

A report, published in The New York Times last week, concluded that “Millennials don’t eat cereal”. According to Mintel, 40 per cent of young people surveyed said that cereal was “inconvenient” because “you have to wash up after eating it”. Over to Alan Keery at the Cereal Killer Café. “Make a bowl out of tin foil and throw it away.” Grrrreat idea.

Waugh stories

It’s always nice when a reader writes in, but what’s this? “Tell Simmy Richman to stop writing those terrible limericks, she clearly has no sense of rhythm.” Now I understand the confusion regarding my name generally, but here, with that picture?

Happily, solace was at hand in the form of Time magazine’s “100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes”. Below the article online is, surely, the best correction ever: “The original version of this story included Evelyn Waugh, who was a man.” Turns out I am in good company.

Twitter: @simmyrichman