WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• 'Mrs Brown’s Boys is for people who've been in prison since the Seventies’. Channel 4’s head of comedy Shane Allen

• Ricky Gervais has spent £20,000 on astronaut training for a packet of sweets. He had paid for Karl Pilkington to experience weightlessness on a jet flight, but the sidekick fell ill before take-off. The ticket was non-refundable – so Karl's packet of Revels was sent up in his place. The stunt was for the next series of An Idiot Abroad

• Doctor Who star Matt Smith was nearly in The Inbetweeners, playing Will. He got down to the last two in auditions – but lost out to Simon Bird. Writer Iain Morris said: ‘He was really, really brilliant and so funny, just a brilliant actor. And clever. He had all the comic timing you wanted, all the dramatic sense you might need.’ But in a previous interview, Morris said Smith was ‘too heroic’, without Bird’s vulnerability.

• How to make a wedding tense… physically attack the comedian booked to entertain you:
  

• Nick Helm may have the funniest joke on the Fringe, but Michael J Dolan reckons he has the shortest: ‘Everybody generalises.’

• Comic Marc Lucero reckons he has a legal case against O2 for nicking his ideas. The phone company is currently running an ad campaign for the Rugby World Cup In New Zealand called Get Up For England. He thinks it’s stolen from the single he wrote for the football World Cup in 2002, Getting Up For England. Not that they’ve used the song or the lyrics, but Lucero thinks they’ve taken the ‘slogan and the concept of the campaign’ off him.

• Here’s the first picture of Jennifer Saunders as Margaret Thatcher from the new Comic Strip film The Hunt For Tony Blair. She’s in full-on Bette Davies mode from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane – and the Channel 4 press office warn: Do not show to small children, or the infirm.
  

• Tweets of the week:
  Benedict Farse (@BenedictFarse): If Jesus Christ is the answer than I like to think the question was 'Would you like to see my collection of horse pornography?'
  Jesse Belle (@missjessebelle): I don't know why I bought some new coconut shampoo... I haven't even got any coconuts.
  Twop Twips (@TwopTwips): AVOID disappointment when holidaying in France - The Bibliotheque is NOT a Christian disco. /via @cyclingalong

SOURCES: The Independent, The Sun, Heat, YouTube, Chortle, Chortle Channel 4, Twitter

Published: 26 Aug 2011