WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘I'm never going to relate to Gwyneth Paltrow.’ Kathy Griffin

• Want to buy the purple jacket Peter Kay wore in the Amarillo video? Well, now you can – a snip at £2,999. The jacket is up for sale on the Original Memorabilia website, which says: ‘Whilst no sizes are in the jacket or trousers this is an appropriately large suit.’ For authenticity, it still has the dry cleaning ticket attached in his wife’s maiden name ‘Mrs Gargan’. Kay has also signed the jacket lining: ‘Best Wishes and many thanks and garlic bread? and cheesecake? Peter Kay Nov 2006 x’ But for three grand you only get the jacket – the trousers are another £499.

• On the romantic roundabout this week, Sue Perkins has reportedly broken up with her long-term partner, artist Kate Williams; while Al Murray has set up home with his girlfriend, fashion journalist Becky Sunshine – enabling The Sun to run with the headline ‘Pub Landlord pulls Becks’.

• Stealing someone’s act doesn’t get more blatant than this. One would-be magician was so ‘inspired’ by Piff The Magic Dragon, he posted on Yahoo Answers: ‘Does any know how to build Piff the Magic Dragon's Tacular? I want to do his Penn and Teller routine for a talent show and I really want his tacular for it. I have accsess [sic] to all the tools I would need but I have no idea what parts are needed.’

• Here’s a random freaky video: A Christian version of My Humps – yes, really – sung by kids.

• Is there any Twitter user Michael McIntyre’s won’t follow with his official account? ‘He’ – or most likely his crack media team of social media wonks employed to keep up his online profile – keep track of a mere 241,639 of his closest friends, such as the Official Lynx deodorant account (today’s exciting post: ‘Who kick started 2012 with some Lynx 2012 then?’)

• On New Year’s Day, American comedian Marc Maron discovered that someone had shot a hole in the back windscreen of his car, parked outside his house. He revealed on his WTF podcast: ‘It was shattered. There was a hole in it and it had done that cracked thing. So I’m immediately like, “Who did that?” Someone clearly shot out my windscreen. This is a message. So I check my emails for any indication that someone is perhaps after me. That was a fucking bullet. Now I’m paranoid, now I’m scared...‘ But the story took a turn for the weird after his insurance assessors investigated the damage. ‘But here’s the catch,’ he said. ‘It was a bullet that some partying Mexicans had shot into the air... So a bullet went up in the air and then came plummeting down and into my windshield. What are the odds?’

• An example of truly terrible stand-up. By design – we think.
  

• On the subject of truly terrible comedy, Malcolm Hardee certainly saw some stinkers as a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe. In his blog this week, John Fleming, who helped Hardee write his memoirs, reprinted a passage from the book describing the worst show the alternative comedy pioneer ever saw – an offering from the London Hospital Medical School called Jean De Toilette. Hardee said: ‘They did a musical number called Flush Gordon to the music of Freddie Mercury and Queen. At this point in the plot, the hero, Jean, was sitting on a toilet cleaning his teeth with a lavatory brush, surrounded by a bevy of nurses in stockings and suspenders. Someone else sang a song about lentils while members of the cast went into the audience scattering lentils. I watched it with a bloke called Tristram Davies from the Independent who said it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. We couldn’t stop laughing, but we were laughing at rather than with. We almost had to be carried out. The venue was the lecture theatre of a mental hospital in Morningside, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and it was packed. It was a Monday and there were about 300 people there. My show was right in the middle of town and I was performing to about 30 people each night. Proves something, though exactly what I don’t know...’

• Tweets of the week
  Dolly (@ TheDollSays ):Recreate the feeling of watching #cbb [Celebrity Big Brother] by stapling an issue of OK! to your face while listening to eight seagulls fighting over a pasty.
  Bill Dare (@ Bill_Dare ):Since getting my new Kindle, I have absolutely no idea how to judge a book.
  Gary Delaney (@ GaryDelaney ): I'm not very interested in tobogganing but I would do it if pushed.

SOURCES: Gambit New Orleans, Original Memorabilia Company, Daily Mail/The Sun, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Twitter, Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, YouTube, thejohnfleming.wordpress.com, Twitter

Story edited on Jan 8 to fix the Jean De Toilette story, which we initially mistakenly attribute to John Fleming, rather than Malcolm Hardee.