Pants on fire

Weekly trivia file

‘I think sitcoms are dinosaurs. I think they are genuinely dying. The ones I did in the 70s seem far newer and fresher in terms of ideas,’ My Family star Robert Lindsay.

When Ruth Jones was a child, she entered the Crackerjack Young Entertainers competition singing A Mouse Lived In A Windmill, to her own guitar accompaniment. ‘I couldn't do F sharp 7th’ she said, ‘so I went silent on that bit. I was beaten by a nine-year-old ventriloquist from Rhyl.’

Congratulations to Elbow for scooping the Nationwide Mercury Prize for the best British album this week, but it might have been more interested had fellow nominees British Sea Power taken the prize. Before the awards were announced this week, guitarist Martin Noble promised: ‘If we won £25,000, I'd get a contract killer and send him after Jim Davidson.’

‘Blue collar’ American comic Ron White had $23,000 in cash on him when he was busted for dope possession.

Car-crash stand-up clip of the week. Some comic tries to pretend ‘towel-head’ isn’t a racial slur, and comes a cropper, despite shouting very loudly: Click here to watch it.

East Anglians have voted Michael Palin as the person they would most like to travel with.

One person who loved Russell Brand’s hosting of the MTV video awards was Courtney Love. ‘Well did my brother from another mother go down well with yall? he looked very NOT nervous. I love Russell, VIVA YOU MOTHERFUCKER I LOVE YOU AN DAM PROUD OF YOU BABY’ she wrote, illiterately, on her MySpace blog.

American stand-up Eugene Mirman, pictured, was detained by the US Secret Service at the Republican party conference – because his trousers were emitting puffs of smoke. Mind you that wasn’t the only way he drew attention to himself. ‘I was wearing a helmet and some goggles,’ he said, as if that was self-explanatory. ‘Then I had some instant food that when you pulled the cord, the food heated up. What I didn’t know about the food… is that it starts smoking.’