WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• 'What makes you unhappy?'
  'All UK comedians.'
  The Fall's Mark E Smith in an interview this week.

• Cabinet Minster Chris Huhne might already have enough scandal on his plate, but one comedian has revealed how he once placed a vice advertisement in a London magazine – while he was still a schoolboy. The famously ambitious Lib Dem decided to launch a capital-wide school magazine called The Free Press, but he didn’t sell enough adverts and needed to fill the space. His friend Charmian Hughes, now a stand-up, told blogger John Fleming: ‘His friends were all making up ads he could stick in. I was about 14 or 15 and I wanted to impress him like mad and I remember we were sitting in a Tube train when I suggested, “How about an advert for Madame Hughes, Maison de Plaisir with my mother’s phone number? That would be good!” I forgot all about it until one day the phone rang. I picked it up and a husky male voice said: “Is that Madame Hughes” My blood ran cold, my stomach sank. I was terrified my mother would hear me talking to the man on the phone and I whispered: “It’s all a ghastly mistake. A joke. I’m a schoolgirl.” The man was very understanding and rang off. My mother was and is a terrifying person with a terrible raging temper. The next phone call was from a tabloid newspaper reporter investigating ‘the schoolgirl brothel’. My mother answered. I heard her Medusa-like voice shrieking and threatening and the reporter scampered away never to ring again. When I told her what we’d done, she summoned Chris round. “Are you going to sue me?” he asked in his most sophisticated timbre. “Sue you?” my mother sneered, “A silly stupid little arrogant schoolboy like you? You must be joking, but I’m going to speak to your parents…”’

• 'I'm about as edgy as the Chuckle Brothers.' Omid Djalili

• Rik Mayall has been signed up to promote Bombadier beer, and the marketing people have promised us that if we featured the video he made for them on Chortle there’s some bottles 'with our name on it'. Are we so cheaply bought? You decide:

• Russell Brand has rushed to the defence of Cheryl Cole, saying network bosses should’t have kicked her off X-Factor for the way she spoke. ‘Is that what they don't understand - the accent?’ he said. ‘Just listen more, just listen very intently. All them things she's saying - that's English.’

• Dick Emery has proved an unlikely saviour of part of the Queen rock archive. For more than 30 years, a performance the band made on Top Of The Pops had been thought lost after the BBC wiped the tapes... but now it is to be screened for the first time in decades – thanks to the dead comic. It turns out Emery accidentally recorded the show at the time, and although the footage was auctioned off with his other possessions after he died in 1983, it has only just turned up. Guitarist Brian May said: ‘In those days of course not a lot of people had domestic video recorders but occasionally things were captured by accident. Dick Emery actually captured one of our performances on Top Of The Pops which the BBC had wiped or lost, I don’t know. And it’s only a couple of months ago that this was found in somebody’s collection.’ It will air in the BBC Two documentary Queen: Days Of Our Lives on Sunday night.

• For a change, a bit of comic-heckler interaction that actually seems good-natured:
  

• Tweets of the week
  Margaret Cabourn-Smith (@MCabournSmith): I find it nose-wrinklingly offputting that Sainsburys online insist on calculating how much toilet roll costs “per sht"…
  Tony Cowards (@TonyCowards): My best friend invented the dishwashable plate, he's been dining out on it ever since.
  @NickMotown: They really should make Graeme Garden a Lord. Not just for his undoubted comic genius, but for how the country would address his wife.

SOURCES: The Guardian, thejohnfleming.wordpress.com, Independent on Sunday, Chortle, Daybreak, BBC Breakfast, YouTube, Twitter

Published: 27 May 2011