The week's trivia round-up

• If.comedy winner Brendon Burns says he wishes people would take more notice of ‘how bloody humble I’m always being’.

• Keith Allen slept with Dawn French after a bad gig in the early days of her career – and told her to give up comedy. ‘Her tastes had yet to include black comedians and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges, so on that particular night I would have to do,’ he gallantly said, adding that he told her: ‘If I were you Dawn, I’d go back to teaching. At least it’s rewarding.’

• A new book is reopening the stories that Robin Williams was a notorious joke thief early in his stand-up career. Fellow comic David Brenner was so enraged to see material he used appear on Williams’s HBO special, he called his agent to yell: ‘Tell Robin if he ever takes one more line from me, I'll rip his leg off and shove it up his ass.’ Williams’s defence is that he was simply ‘sampling’ material from others.

• Patrick Kielty is stripping naked for his new West End play, A Night In November. He said: ‘I'm getting it all out, my beer belly and my knackers - everything. I'm a bit nervous about it but there's a musical number in it so I'm sure I'll distract the audience with my terrible singing.’

• When the Brass Eye paedophile special aired in 2001, the Daily Mail launched a hard-hitting campaign against what it considered ‘the sickest TV show ever'. Chris Morris’s controversial programme was repeated on More 4 last weekend to mark Channel 4’s 25th birthday, and guess whose advert ran in the break? The Mail on Sunday’s.

• Joan Rivers: ‘I've been thinking of murdering someone to get into the papers. That Phil Spector, no one had heard of that bum till he shot that girl in the face!’

• Ricky Gervais says his Extras co-star Ashley Jensen has not let Hollywood go to her head. ‘Right now she’s probably drunk in a ditch,’ he said. ‘You don’t see Michelle Pfeiffer walking round with a can of lager - Ashley would.’

• Norman Lovett overheard someone in a queue say ‘I love Norman Lovett but someone told me they thought he was dead’.

• Jo Brand was reportedly upstaged during a Q&A session at the Cheltenham Town Hall ballroom this week, when she performed as part of the town’s literature festival. A punter asked her: ‘What’s it like appearing in a venue where the Lord Mayor holds his balls and dances?’

• Roy Chubby Brown was once dating three women at the same time. ‘They caught me out and all tricked me into meeting them at one if their houses,’ he said. ‘I ran like the wind when I got there and saw all three starring back at me, waiting for an explanation.’

• Armando Iannucci doesn’t go the gym any more, after someone stole his towel when he was in the shower. ‘When I asked someone there why it had happened, they said it was “because I was on the telly”,’ he says. ‘That towel’s probably on eBay now as a damp relic.’

• A fan posting on Chortle’s page about Ricky Gervais defended his hero against detractors, saying it was because the comic was simply too smart for dumb people to get. His argument was only slightly undermined by him writing: ‘He has found a level of comedy that sits above some people's interlect.’

SOURCES: The Independent, News Of The World, New York Post, The Mirror, Chortle, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Western Mail, The Sun, Chorley Citizen, The Times, Chortle

Published: 12 Oct 2007