WTF: Weekly Triva File

• Ardal O’Hanlon’s grandfather Michael was a member of Michael Collins’s assassination squad which killed 20 British spies in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence.

• Omid Djalili says his worst gig was at a muddy Glastonbury festival in 1998, when he was an unknown. He was dying a death, with people hollering incomprehensible heckles at him when, in desperation, he asked: ‘What can I do to entertain you?’ Someone yelled back, somewhat predictably: ‘Get your cock out.’ Djalili replied: ‘It’s a bit cold for that…’ but lowered his trousers and ‘apologetically presented it’. And got absolutely no reaction. He told the crowd: ‘Well, when you’ve got your cock out and no one is laughing, it’s time to go,’ and someone said: ‘Yeah, I think you’d better.’ In an interview to promote his new DVD this week, he recalled: ‘There’s nothing more humiliating than saying goodnight, putting the mic back, then pulling your trousers up.’

• Sod’s law... when using Twitter to take issue with Star Trek geeks who griped about the new movie, Simon Pegg accidentally branded them ‘pendants’.

• Ross Noble once stole a packet of fig roll biscuits and a bathrobe from Jerry Seinfeld’s hotel room. Click here to see him talking about it.

• Tough gig: In the daytime, in the street in Bangalore, with children playing all around you… Here’s the weird stand-up clip of the week:
  

• Paul O'Grady's dog Buster has been put down after being diagnosed with cancer.

• Inbetweeners star Joe Thomas says he's never had much luck with women. Recalling his student days, he said: 'I use the worst chat-up lines.At university, I said to a girl, "Before I met you all I could think about was history, now all I can think about is you." I thought that was the sort of things you had to say.’

• Johnny Vegas has been made into a penguin wearing the St Helen’s rugby league strip – right. It’s something to do with ‘raising awareness’ of climate change. Obviously.

• Pseuds' corner: From the Scotsman's review of one of the new comics at the Edinburgh Stand's Red Raw night this week: 'If you can have concrete poetry and post-deconstruction in art, then his militant Syndicalism was valid.'

• On stage at central London's Soho Comedy Club last Friday, compere Kate Smurthwaite asks one punter the usual ‘What do you do?’ question, to be told: ‘Farmer.’ ‘And where do you do that?’ ‘In the country.’

• Chortle received a complaint this week that we used the full title of Frankie Boyle’s autobiography My Shit Life So Far. The reader wrote: ‘To display this word on your website for all to see - particularly children is unacceptable and requires your urgent attention.’ Good job he hasn’t seen some of the other words we sometimes use…

• We have featured this before, but the footage is being re-released on a new DVD compilation of the best of Ireland’s Late Late Show entitled Gaybo Laughs Back Again. Here is a young Jason Byrne putting a question to Bill Murray:
  

SOURCES: Galway Advertiser, Sunday Mirror, Twitter, Asylum, YouTube, The Mirror, The Sun, gopenguins.co.uk. The Scotsman, Chortle, Chortle, YouTube

Published: 20 Nov 2009