Sophie's choice means former friends go to war

The genteel streets of Hunters Hill were the scene for one almighty showdown last weekend as two of Sydney's leading agents – Titus Day and Sean Anderson – went head to head over the spoils of celebrity Sophie Monk.

"We had been friends for 20 years, I went around to his [Sean Anderson's] home to sort it out on Saturday and look him in the eye ... let's just say we are not friends anymore, it was a pretty tense visit," Titus Day, who had been managing Monk's career on and off for a decade, told PS.

In December, Monk's lawyers sent her management firm Media Talent Management, owned by Day's wife Courtney, a notice of termination. Day says he was completely "blind-sided" by the news that his former close friend and ally, Anderson, had signed Monk up as a client.

"Sean and I worked together for five years, we were incredibly close. Even after I left him to set up on my own I would call him up about clients that wanted to come with me, to give him notice as a courtesy ... I had no warning this was coming."

Anderson confirmed Day's visit to his family home, which is understood to have caused considerable anxiety given it was unannounced and had followed heated exchanges between the two over Monk.

Anderson told PS Monk had approached him to represent her in mid-January, and that his new client had no existing contract with Day when he took her on.

Agents such as Anderson and Day charge their celebrity clients up to 20 per cent of all earnings they help generate for them. The bigger the star, the greater the revenue.

Last July, PS revealed Day's foundation client, Guy Sebastian, was digging in his heels over claims his former manager owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For months Sebastian, Day and their lawyers have been embroiled in an ugly stoush in the Federal Court.

It was Sebastian who convinced his good friend Monk to sign up with Day, and it is understood it was the fallout between Sebastian and Day which prompted Monk to seek new representation and make contact with Anderson.

Last year Day, who with his wife also represents some of Australia's top cage fighters, told PS he had been forced to sell his family home and liquidated his firm, 6 Degrees Management, because of Sebastian's lawsuit.

Australian Securities and Investments Commission records reveal Day's company 6 Degrees Management Pty Ltd was wound up in early July, shortly after mediation failed with Sebastian and following the loss of one of Day's other clients: game show host Grant Denyer.

ASIC records also reveal that in April, Day's wife Courtney, a yoga enthusiast, set up two new celebrity management businesses, Rival Sports Management Pty Ltd and Media Talent Management Pty Ltd. Courtney Day previously worked at 6 Degrees, managing Sebastian’s wife Jules' attempts to launch a media career. Several of Titus Day's former clients at 6 Degrees, including several UFC fighters, signed on to his wife’s new businesses, along with his former star client Sophie Monk, who was initially listed as a 10 per cent shareholder in Media Talent Management, with Courtney Day holding the remaining 90 per cent. ASIC records now show Media Talent Management is now wholly owned by Day.

Coldest 100 a viral hit

With around three million page impressions, it was clearly one of the success stories of this year's Australia Day, but who was the brains behind Australia's Coldest 100 Twitter sensation?

PS can reveal it was the work of former journalist turned corporate public relations executive Andrew Sholl, who said his masterpiece was something he works on throughout the year during his "downtime".

"I chase a lot of rabbits down holes on the internet and come up with some really ghastly and amazing things," revealed Sholl, who operates under the Twitter handle @OzKitsch.

"It's the anti-list of Triple J's Hottest 100, all with some kind of reference or relationship to Australia, from the Miss USA pageant contestants singing Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky in 1989 to Bea Arthur covering Helen Reddy's I Am Woman."

Other highlights included Dean Martin doing a version of Waltzing Matilda and Elvis Costello singing Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport on an episode of Frasier.

"It's purely for fun and just about celebrating some of the most ghastly things loosely connected to Australia," he added.

And clearly there was no other choice for the No.1 spot than the video of Alan Jones singing – or more accurately "talk-singing" – his way through Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Changes Everything in 2010.

The video shows the broadcaster wearing a jaunty striped blazer on stage and delivering the tune with all the melodic elegance of an alley cat on heat.

Sibling revelry for Alice and Tom

Scrolling through former Sydney public relations dynamo Alice Hampton's Instagram feed certainly reveals her successes in America, having worked with some of US showbiz's biggest names, from Giuliana Rancic to Hailey Bieber.

But it wasn't one of her famous mates' names but rather one she had not heard of in over 20 years who followed her just before Christmas that turned her world around. It was her long lost half-brother, Tom Haviland, whom she had not seen since they were youngsters, having drifted apart thanks to family politics and ever-expanding careers.

"My heart skipped a beat. He had been a missing part of my life for so long, I always wondered if we would ever cross paths again and I had searched and searched for him for so long, but I kept coming up against walls," Hampton told PS. Tom, who shares his late father with Hampton, had also left Australia and been working internationally in defence for many years, making him more difficult to track.

"I'd been searching for Alice for years, but it wasn't until Christmas Eve when I had been talking about her, that I had the impulse to search on social media again. To my amazement and disbelief she appeared and this whole journey began," he told PS.

The pair reunited in Sydney at Christmas and have been in constant contact ever since, with Hampton returning to her home in Chicago.

Holding court at the Australian Open

There was almost as much action going on underneath and around Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open this year than what was taking place on the court.

PS ended up in the labyrinthine tunnels that snake their way around the giant sporting complex trying to make a short cut between the fabulous Piper Heidsieck marquee – where everyone from actor Lily Sullivan to uber stylist Elliot Garnaut were holding court – and the luxe Tennis Australia private club Eight, which was filled to the brim with the corporate glittterati of the tennis world.

Sadly I was unable to get into the super exclusive Founders Club, where silvertails including Gina Rinehart had shelled out around $70,000 for a ticket, (having bought three Founders Club tickets, the mining mogul ended up donating more than 60 tickets over the tournament to raise money for bushfire relief).

At one point your columnist ventured backstage and almost ended up in the "stretch room" where Ash Barty was limbering up in preparation for her triumphant match against Petra Kvitova, before security quickly moved me along.

Around another turn and a pile of towels which had been freshly sweated on by none other than Rafael Nadal was being wheeled into the laundry room, which was about as close as PS was going to get to the world's No.1 men's tennis player. Eventually we found our seats, while not quite as close to the action as Margaret Court – who maintained her best poker face throughout the Barty match.

Later, PS's seating neighbour turned out be a somewhat more enthusiastic spectator: music legend Paul Kelly.

Are you Lucan for me?

It's been one of the British press's great hoary old chestnuts of the past 50 years: what happened to Lord Lucan, the dashing British peer who disappeared without a trace after his nanny was bludgeoned to death in his swanky Belgravia home in 1974.

In 2016, a death certificate was issued for Lord Lucan – some 42 years after the peer vanished when his children's nanny Sandra Rivett was murdered and his wife Lady Lucan accused her estranged husband, though he had actually been officially declared dead in 1999. But this week, Rivett's son, Neil Berriman, claims to have tracked down Lord Lucan, supposedly living under a different name somewhere in the "Australian suburbs". Berriman claims he has new evidence which he has shared with Scotland Yard, having paid for private investigators to find Lord Lucan. While he wasn't giving specifics away, he claims Lord Lucan is living in a share house and is now a Buddhist.

Berriman doesn't specify exactly where in suburbia the aristocrat – who would be 85 if he is alive – is apparently calling home, but his most recent claims are just the latest in a long line of supposed sightings of Lord Lucan.

A book, published in 2003 by a former Scotland Yard detective, claimed the fugitive aristocrat was a long-haired alcoholic banjo player called Barry Halpin, who had played in Perth group, the Mucky Duck Bush Band.

Lord Lucan had also been 'spotted' in Africa, India, Holland and living in a Land Rover in New Zealand with a goat called Camilla.

In 1974, Australian police arrested a man they believed to be Lucan but it turned out to be Labour MP John Stonehouse who had faked his own death a month before. Other sightings include Lucan working as a waiter in San Francisco, and at an alcoholics centre in Brisbane and at a hotel in Madagascar. The search continues.