WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘Every time I see Westlife I feel sad thinking of all the cars they could have fixed.’ Graham Linehan

• Jo Brand once compered a charity gig in Bradford, in a theatre that was hosting The Sooty Show for the rest of the week. As the main dressing room was full of all the puppet’s accoutrements, the comic had to use one a long way from the stage. The show was opened by a Zimbabwean singer, and when he finished, Brand had to dash through several backstage corridors to arrive on stage, rather breathless. Feeling she had to explain her state to the audience, she said: ‘I’m really sorry I’m out of breath because that fucking Sooty has go the best dressing room.’ Instead of the expected laugh, she was met with a wall of shocked silence, as the audience thought she’d been referring to the Zimbabwean opening act. The story has a postscript… about a week later she encountered Roy Chubby Brown on the set of Top Of The Pops. He had heard the story and told her: ‘What a fucking great joke that was…’

• Miranda Hart's dad was the commander of HMS Coventry, which sank in the Falklands war. Luckily, he survived.

• An audience member had a fit at the start of Brendon Burns's show in Harlow on Wednesday night. Burns called it off and only restarted once the man had come round… after which he was very British about the whole incident and apologised for causing a fuss.

• Sue Perkins had to fight off an overly amorous pig in her BBC2 show Giles & Sue Live The Good Life. She said the trouble started after the porker she was rearing hit sexual maturity. ‘They [the producers] thought it would be hilarious to put me in with the pig to do a piece to camera and I went from its owner to potential sexual partner in about five minutes,’ she said. ‘It would try to ram me, it would just run at me. It was horrid, really horrid.’

• Want to see a portrait of Billy Connolly fashioned out of haggis, neeps and tatties? Course you do… It’s here.

• Sex toy inventor Scott Maclean says a potential customer has been in touch about commissioning a sex robot that looked like Graham Norton.

• Comedian William Andrews has designed a watch – with the hours and minutes displayed on a skull’s teeth as a constant reminder of inevitable death. He said of the £145 watch that it was based on ‘the theme of the on stage ‘death’ and the drive of performers to go to ever greater lengths to elicit laughs from a crowd. The skull references the ‘tears of a clown’ concept, the widely held belief that comedians are essentially quite sad in nature and the rather pointless desire that many stand-ups have to have the last laugh.”’ Only 100 of the watches have been made by Mr Jones Watches.

• You may remember our clip last week of a comic called Philip Jones performing to awkward silence. Well, he has been working on it, and now here he is again with LOADS of laughter. Which he's cut in from big-selling DVDs, apparently undeterred by the fact that the cutaways of venues like the O2 Arena aren’t entirely convincing…:
  

• The Comedy Bunker club in Ruislip, West London, was cancelled this week after promoter Joel Sanders fell into a canal.

• America’s Fox News understandably got angry at Amazon for selling The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure online. So when the store bowed to protest and removed it from sale, it decided to see what other offensive tomes it could get from internet retailers. ‘At BarnesandNoble.com, consumers can purchase titles like Fun With Pedophiles, The Best of Baiting for as little as $10.65,’ the broadcaster fumed. ‘The 104-page paperback was published in late 2006 by Shake the Baby Press.’ But it was also written by a comedian – Doug Stanhope – who made it very clear that this was far from sympathetic to child abusers. As the sales blurb from the book states: ‘Baiting is the art of luring unsuspecting pedophiles (as well as the occasional religious zealots and others) into online chat with a false persona and then turning the conversations into the most vile, merciless and hilariously abusive logs ever recorded on the World Wide Web.’

• Apparently Chris Lynam’s infamous ‘banger-up-the-bum’ routine originated after some South London gangster threatened to ‘shove a stick of dynamite up Malcolm Hardee's arse’. According to someone called ‘Digger Dave’, posting on Facebook, the geezers were upset after the late comic sold them ‘a jam jar full of wheat seeds for three packets of tobacco, and telling them that it will turn into whisky’.

• Tweets of the week:
  Martin Hastie (@koeman81): If you're wondering why Pudsey's been unusually quiet today, he's had to go for an eye test else he'll lose his Disability Living Allowance.
  Davey Grime: (@DaveyGrime): JLS condoms are perfect because young girls cry hysterically when they split.
  Adam Kay (@amateuradam):My safe word is "RAPE!"

SOURCES:Twitter, Chortle, The Observer, Chortle, The Sun, Glasgow Herald, The Sun, Chortle, YouTube, Chortle, Fox News, Facebook, Twitter.

Published: 19 Nov 2010