Another week of comedy trivia

• Peep Show writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain say they have often used the experiences of one of their Channel 4 bosses in their scrips. ‘Like the time he did a shit into a McDonald's bag because he was on the telephone and couldn't get to the toilet. He tried to flush the bag down the loo but it got blocked and for the next three weeks he had to go to the pub every time he needed the toilet. We put something very similar in series three.’

• Ross Noble isn’t taking his mum’s advice about not talking to strangers. While touring Australia on a motorbike, a man approached him in Broken Hill and said: ‘Follow me.’ He did, and was shown a custom-built Harley-Davidson hearse. Noble, naturally enough, lay in the coffin space while the local drove him to the cemetery.

• Peter Kay went to see the Dancing On Ice spectacular at Manchester’s MEN Arena last weekend.

• Rock band Medusa smuggled a goat in to the studios where Russell Brand was recording a pilot of his Marvellous Ballbags chat show. They stole the animal en route to the recording and sneaked it into Brand’s dressing room where it chomped on his clothes and shat in his shoes. The comic apparently thought it was funny. Medusa, you might remember, previously garnered publicity on the back of their relationship Brand after stealing his garden gnome.

• The Daily Mail showed their on-the-pulse grasp of comedy and popular culture this week, when they confused their catchphrases in a picture story that they managed to headline: ‘Little Britain star bovvered by taxi wait.’

• Armando Iannucci loves Battlestar Galactica.

• Ricky Gervais continues to annoy his neighbours with the noisy building work to add an underground swimming pool to his Hampstead mansion. Columnist Antonia Bland this week complains that his Victorian manor ‘now looks like Hitler's bunker’. She added: ‘When I first heard he was moving to our street, I imagined he'd be the most discreet of neighbours. In the event, his entrance has been worthy of P Diddy. For someone so keen on his “ordinary bloke” image, he seems to be flying far too close to the flaming object of his satire, celebrity madness.’

SOURCES:The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, Manchester Evening News, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The First Post .

Published: 20 Apr 2007