Bill Bailey, the hobbit hopeful

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

  • ‘If you talk long enough you might say something meaningful.’ Jim Jefferies

  • Russell Brand says he wants his wedding tomorrow to be ‘very normal’. His ‘normal’ plans so far are said to include arriving at the ceremony on a white horse accompanied by camels and elephants. The maid of honour is Rihanna and the wedding singer will be P Diddy. All very normal.

  • Bill Bailey has auditioned for a role in the Hobbit movies. He says he tried out for the part of Gloin the dwarf. ‘It was great, I went for a casting and read some lines so I'm waiting to find out,’ he said.

  • Omid Djalili had to hand over his iPhone this week, when a Californian restaurant refused to accept his credit cards. The comic, who is in LA to film the forthcoming Paul Reiser Show, went to a Thai restaurant alone on Monday night after work. After his meal, he Tweeted from his table: ‘Oh God. Now they won't accept my credit card. What started off as a low key dinner by self is going to end w me cleaning my own dishes.’ A few moments later he added: ‘OK this is serious. No cash and now two cards that don't work. I'm in trouble people. May be my last tweet. They want iPhone as payment.’ He was forced to hand over his phone as security when he went back to his hotel to scrape together the cash. He found £60 in cash to cover the $54 bill. ‘It’s been a dramatic night,’ he said.

  • Shappi Khorsandi used to be a naked life model. She says: 'My brother’s girlfriend did it but couldn’t make a class one day, so for some reason I said I’d do it instead. I was quite a chubby young woman then, extremely self-conscious about my body, but my brother said that if I could stand naked in front of strangers, then I could definitely do stand-up.’

  • Painful death on Bill Bellamy's Who's Got Jokes, a comedy X-Factor-type thing from the States:

  • Stewart Lee has high hopes for the second series of his BBC Two show. ‘What I anticipate happening is that my next TV series is going to be broadcast later in the evening than the first one. I expect it will have the same audience figures, or worse, than the last one. Meaning it will get cancelled.’ But as someone who hates being recognised in the street, he says he’s ‘not entirely unhappy about’ the prospect.

  • Shame on us for not noticing. Last week we highlighted the fact that Roy Chubby Brown and Kevin Bloody Wilson both do a song called Hey, Santa – about a boy's festive disappointment. The song, as one reader rightly pointed out, was originally recorded by punk group UK Subs in 1988.

  • Tweets of the week:
    Armando Iannucci (@Aiannucci): ‘I think the cuts were fair. It's about time bedbound homeless people with learning difficulties were taken down a peg or two.’
    Paul Sinha (@paulsinha): Happy birthday Geoffrey Boycott , who appears to have taken an eternity to reach 70.
    Gary Delaney (@GaryDelaney): Why is that whenever you grow carrots they've always got bits of sick in?


SOURCES: Highland News, Metro, Shortlist, Twitter, Brighton Argus, YouTube, Birmingham Post, Chortle, Twitter

Published: 22 Oct 2010

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