GagSlag #3, in which Vegas gets drunk...

• You might have thought they’d seen this one coming: inviting Johnny Vegas onto the inexperienced Charlotte Church’s chat show – then plying him with booze. In the end it wound up with Vegas getting a slap from the 20-year-old, after the comic repeatedly wound her up. Church was said to be ‘out of her depth’ in trying to deal with his leery behaviour, including slurringly telling Church her album was ‘shit’ and that ‘I shagged your grandma’.  Producers might now like to reflect on the wisdom of staging an on-set ‘tasting’ of bizarre cocktails of wine and spirits, all of which Vegas dutifully necked. See what footage makes it to air on Channel 4  tonight…

• Let no one say Russell Brand isn’t ambitious. Of his current tabloid notoriety, he says: ‘If there is this level of interest from newspapers now I'd be intrigued to know what will happen when I'm making $100million.’

• And if that’s not enough Brand news for you, this week he revealed that he’s had a four-in-bed session but ‘it gets logistically difficult after that’, that he first took heroin at 19 and found it ‘was the only drug that delivered for me’, that he would sleep with up to 20 women a week, that he’d like to fall in love with Caroline Aherne because ‘she has lots of flesh and can make me laugh’ and that he wanted to be famous because ‘I thought it would validate me’… all in the space of one interview.

• Stand-up Gabriel Rossi has shown an interesting attitude to hecklers this week – he decks them. Waiting to headline an otherwise dead night at West Hampstead’s Mirth Control gig in London on Wednesday, he had several quiet words with a strange Borat looky-likey who continually interrupted the other acts with loud, incomprehensible babblings. Finally, the visiting Melbourne comic snapped and swang a punch after he interrupted compere Tiffany Stevenson one more time  - and after a brief bundle, the gobby punter was thrown out. Ten minutes later this Russell Crowe of stand-up was on stage – and certainly had something to talk about…

• Simon Pegg started making people laugh at his nan’s Salvation Army club for the over-70s. ‘It was invariably some racially dubious gag I’d heard Jim Davidson tell,’ he says, ‘but I’ve reinvented myself since then.’

• Want to know where the inspiration for the Kumars comes from? Sanjeev Bhaskar’s real-life mum once asked Helena Bonham Carter: ‘You’re so beautiful – why in the last film did they put you in a monkey mask?’

• Al Murray has been left in the lurch by Toby Young. The author put an offer in on his £1.25million house in Chiswick, West London, only to pull out because he couldn’t find enough money. How to lose friends and alienate people indeed…

• Finally, a quote from Dylan Moran we forgot to put in last week’s round-up: ‘Contrary to everything you have heard, performing comedy is the easiest job in the world, bar none. Of all the lies written and said about the preparation and practice of this amusing, indulgent pastime, the myths that you need any real skill or to think about anything in advance are the most pernicious.’

Published: 15 Sep 2006