Idiot spends £200,000 on champagne at Playground

‘Luxury nightclub’ Playground, located within the Hilton hotel in Liverpool ONE, has had an interesting (by ‘interesting’ we mean ‘hilarious’) start. First: a membership card - yours for £500 a year - designed by WAG extraordinaire (and, apparently, graphic designer) Alex Curran. Second: a sub-plot on laughably doomed TV series Desperate Scousewives where people competed to win a membership. We’re not sure who won - we were too busy bathing our eyes in bleach.

Today the Metro reports that one unnamed businessman - and, it’s fair to say, complete bellend - dropped £200,000 on a round of drinks there over the weekend. Central to his order was a ridiculous 30 litre bottle of Armand de Brignac Midas champagne, costing £125,000. It’s apparently the most expensive round of drinks ever ordered. Not exactly Cheeky Vimto for a fiver at Wetherspoons, is it?

This sort of outrageous incident-slash-PR-stunt was inevitable at a club that openly embraces ostentatiousness and courts the media in the process, and needs to keep in the papers. But there’s something disgusting and completely vulgar hearing about this happening in our city in the midst of brutal cuts and chaos, don’t you think?

We remember when the Vincent Hotel opened in Southport, and a few weeks later the Daily Mail ran a story about a chap who’d spent thousands on his fiance, adorning her room with rose petals straight outta American Beauty. The story was that she’d never seen the film and didn’t get the reference. But it was all PR lies. The chap in question was a waiter from Aloha, and was open about it being a stunt job. So, now that Desperate Scousewives is over, the club needs some way to stay in the public eye, and perhaps persuade TV execs that there should be a second series. Voila! The world’s most expensive bar bill - oh, and a handy press-friendly photographer on stand by for the grand arrival of the bottle. All lies.

That this story came out on the day that Liverpool was named 5th place people are most at risk of falling into poverty makes it even worse. We all know the gap between rich and poor is growing faster and faster - but, Playground, we don’t need it highlighted in our own city.

Pictured: club owner George Panayiotou (yes, he’s wearing shades indoors. Indoors. At night) delivering the champers

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