In the Spotlight

This week, the tabloids have been investigating a comedian advertising women’s underwear, a television host’s extravagant taste in interior decoration and a feud between the first lady of Russian pop and the plaited former first lady of Ukrainian politics.

Comedian Sergei Svetlakov, best known for his roles, including a gay metal worker and two gastarbeiters’ loud-mouthed boss, in sketch comedy “Nasha Russia,” is complaining that a Perm store has illegally taken his face to advertise women’s tights and underwear, Tvoi Den reported.

It’s a story that could come straight out of “Nasha Russia,” a takeoff of “Little Britain” that mocks provincial life. The offending poster doesn’t involve any sophisticated photographic fakery but is just a terrible cut-and-paste job, with black outlines around Svetlakov and a slogan offering knitwear and hosiery “in bulk or to individuals.”

The owner of the store told Tvoi Den on Wednesday that the campaign was inspired by Svetlavkov’s gay character in “Nasha Russia,” who tries to seduce his hard-bitten boss by saying he’s wearing red panties. “Everyone remembers his famous phrase about red panties,” she said. “I don’t see anything criminal here.”

Svetlakov’s lawyer disagreed, and said they would go to court unless the ad was removed.

Meanwhile, another popular comedian Maxim Galkin, who until a recent feud hosted the Russian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” was revealed in Express Gazeta to be a big fan of the Uzbek oligarch school of interior design.

Galkin, who has spent years building a mock French chateau in the Moscow region, has been inspired by the extravagant residence of Uzbek oligarch Salim Abduvaliyev, the tabloid wrote, showing photographs of the comedian being ushered around a house filled with gilt furniture, stuffed animals and murals of reclining women. Every item of furniture is decorated with the Versace logo and Abduvaliyev’s monogram, the newspaper added.

Abduvaliyev, one of Uzbekistan’s richest men and owner of the Pakhtakor football club, is not someone you would want to argue with on fine points of interior decoration: He is also the head of the Wrestling Association of Uzbekistan.

In a softer side, he is the “best customer” of Versace, Express Gazeta reported. Photographs of his house are even used in Versace advertising brochures, it said.

A Ferghana.ru article said Galkin was a guest at Abduvaliyev’s house in Tashkent, although it seems more likely that he was paid entertainment.

Inspired by Abduvaliyev, Galkin has now decided to add a hookah smoking room to his “Victorian-style” castle interior, Express Gazeta reported. The house has already been furnished with $100,000 worth of curtains, the newspaper added. And yes, you read that correctly: curtains.

It’s an odd image, but according to Express Gazeta, Russia’s top pop diva Alla Pugachyova likes to spend her evenings smoking a hookah in her Rubylovka mansion.

One guest who won’t be welcome now is former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Pugachyova has been photographed smiling broadly next to Tymoshenko. This winter, she filmed a concert called Christmas Meetings in Kiev, and Tymoshenko was a guest of honor.

In a major falling-out though, the then-prime minister’s people ordered that Pugachyova’s song “Rus,” or Old Russia, be cut out of a television broadcast of the concert because it could offend residents of Western Ukraine, Tvoi Den reported Tuesday.

A famous Soviet-era joke about Pugachyova runs that Leonid Brezhnev was a “political activist during the reign of Pugachyova,” and she is not a lady who takes insults lying down.

“When Alla found out, she stopped any communication with our premier,” organizers told Tvoi Den.