Kill Keith Chegwin!

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

‘Stand-up on TV is like incest… you’re putting convenience over quality.’ Emo Philips.

At the comedy tent at Latitude, compere Mark Olver’s eye was caught by a punter a few rows back. ‘Wow!’ the comic exclaimed. ‘You look just like Richard Curtis!’ It was, of course, the Four Weddings director himself.

It seems like it’s an easy mistake to make. Only this week a woman ran up to Russell Brand to tell him he looked… just like Russell Brand. ‘She rushed up and babbled, “Wow, you look so much like Russell Brand, you could get work as a Russell Brand impersonator,” said an onlooker. Brand replied: ‘Actually, that's how I support myself,’ and grabbing his beard, he declared: ‘This is a wig!’

Form an orderly queue please, comedians. Producers of a new movie are looking for someone to kill Keith Chegwin. After this week’s furore about him stealing jokes, comes news of a British comedy horror film called Kill Keith! – with a casting call going out for the lead character. The movie, which is being shot next month, is set in a breakfast television show and follows the deeds of a serial killer (dubbed the ‘breakfast cereal killer’, perhaps giving a key to the level of humour) as he slowly kills off celebrities on route to his ultimate goal: Keith Chegwin.

Marcus Brigstocke, like many a comic, hates performing in Liverpool. ‘Every gig I’ve done in Liverpool, I've never felt I had the room with me,’ he says. ‘Everyone in the audience, quite rightly, is convinced they’re funnier than whoever's on stage. And they probably do make their mates laugh more than me, but come up and do it on stage… I just want to go “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I’m really, really good at this – and I’m not tooting my horn – this is different to how you make each other laugh.”’

Tweets of the week. Read them here before Keith Chegwin has them:
Jarlath Regan (@jarlath): Hips make very bad character witnesses Shakira.
Jeremy Hardy (@JeremyjHardy):Is Richard Hammond called "Hamster" because he delights Clarkson by crawling up his bottom?
Simon Evans (@thesimonevans): Inventor of The Black Box dies, aged 85. But how?

Jeff Green walked out on stage once and noticed a man not clapping in the front row, which obviously drew the comic’s attention. Green immediately asked why he didn’t clap – to be told he only had one hand. The punter showed everyone his metal claw to prove it, and put Green in his place. ‘The crowd thought I was an utter shit for mentioning it,’ he recalled.