When a TV show claimed it was selling Jack Nicholson’s teeth live on air: “It’s weird”
Whether we want to admit it or not, each and every one of us has at least some kind of familiarity with that most bizarre of television institutions: the home shopping channel. Maybe you bought a suspect lamp one lazy afternoon because it seemed like a good deal, or perhaps you just watched with morbid fascination as a smiling presenter poorly demonstrated how to operate a lacklustre kitchen gizmo. What would you have done, though, if you’d tuned in to one of these channels, only to find them hawking Jack Nicholson‘s baby teeth?
As absurd as that sounds, a British home shopping channel claimed to possess these bizarre items in 2001, and even allegedly fielded bids exceeding £5,000. Some lunatic supposedly, and inexplicably, offered to pay thousands of pounds for the opportunity to own the iconic Chinatown star’s gnashers, reportedly a loose collection of baby teeth and some adult molars.
Was any of this actually true, though? And, perhaps more importantly, how did Nicholson feel about it? Well, to answer the second question first, because it’s a shorter answer: no, the Batman star was reportedly not best pleased about the whole thing. In fact, it was rumoured that he was so furious about the idea of someone selling his old teeth to the upstart TV channel Auctionworld that he was considering a unique course of action to return them to their rightful owner.
“It’s weird, yes,” Peter Newby, Auctionworld’s managing director, told the press after rumours emerged that Nicholson planned to bid on his own teeth. “We’re intrigued to see what Mr Nicholson’s agent offers.”
However, no sooner had the British tabloids worked themselves into a lather about the toothy issue and mocked the sanctity of journalism with pun-heavy headlines like “You can’t handle the tooth!”, everything died down almost overnight. It was never reported anywhere how the actual auction played out, and Nicholson never publicly commented on the matter, so the whole debacle was soon forgotten. In fact, if anyone even cared to mention it in the ensuing years, it came with the assumption that the whole thing was simply a publicity stunt.
In 2024, though, Vulture writer Bilge Ebiri decided to do some sleuthing into Auctionworld and quickly discovered something shocking. It turned out the business had folded in 2004 after OFCOM fined it £450,000 for failing to deliver products to customers and using underhanded tactics to inflate its auctions. The channel ended up with £19 million in unpaid debts, and owner George Spitaliotis absconded back to his home country of Cyprus, leaving 40,000 customers and all his employees in the lurch.
As for whether the channel ever really had Nicholson’s teeth to auction off, a public relations agent named Ben Keen admitted to Ebiri that – surprise, surprise – none of that was ever true. Indeed, as everyone with half a brain had suspected, the entire escapade was a publicity stunt brought about when Spitaliotis told Keen he wasn’t happy with the amount of buzz his firm had created for Auctionworld.
Keen felt like he would be fired if he didn’t do something drastic, so he picked the idea of selling Hollywood A-lister Nicholson’s teeth out of thin air and ran with it. Even the suggestion that Nicholson was incensed by the auction wasn’t valid, because Keen admitted he threw that into the press release to give it a false sense of controversy.
Hilariously, Keen admitted that, when his fake story generated an enormous amount of publicity, he panicked and began searching “high and low” for some celebrity teeth he could pass off as Nicholson’s. However, Spitaliotis fired his firm before he could get his hands on any stray celeb molars, and the whole thing went away.
“I’m not proud of making it up,” Keen confessed. “But I did my job, which was to get coverage. Which it did and still does despite the awful channel it supported.” He can’t be too ashamed of the fiasco, though, because he then admitted, “I still get a kick out of googling ‘Jack Nicholson’s tooth auction’ every now and again.”
