WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘I think you can go a long, long way in performance if you have charm.’ Noel Fielding

• Robert Webb says he hates his bald patch, which he calls a ‘lagoon of follicle bereavement winking at me like a glassy eyed, toothless man beckoning towards my future doom’. Speaking in the new series of Room 101, the Peep Show star says: ‘It's annoying as I look 15 years older from the back than the front. It ages me from the back and is annoying for work purposes. I have realised on Twitter that there are a lot of people who think that I might not have noticed it. Well, yes I have noticed that I have become a baldie and a slaphead.’

• Omid Djalili reckons some critics are too stupid to get his comedy, saying of his latest show: ‘A lot of reviewers are too thick to understand it. It's too subtle for them – they like to be hit over the head by jokes.’

• Comic Toby Foster’s offhand comments about how boring New Zealand is has raised hackles down under. On his BBC Radio Sheffield shoe, he said that Kiwis were into extreme sports like bungee jumping because there is ‘sod all’ else to do. He said there comes a point when they think: ‘Well I might as well jump myself off a bridge, just to see what happens’ - just to ‘get some emotion’, before adding that the best thing about New Zealand was Christchurch ‘and even that had an earthquake’. However, his comments did not please the New Zealand Herald which sniped back at Sheffield being known only for its ailing steel industry and for being the ‘bleak and depressing’ backdrop for The Full Monty film – and mocking residents for using ‘all five vowel sounds when only one is required’ We, of course, wouldn’t possibly comment that there’s so little going on in New Zealand that this warranted coverage in the country’s largest newspaper.

• American comic Steve Hofstetter endures (mostly patiently) a night of heckling:
  

• It might have been 34 years since John Shuttleworth had made the phrase ‘Gordon is a moron’ popular in the hit Jilted John – but it’s still causing ripples. But Essex community radio station Phoenix FM has been cleared of causing offence after playing the hit when local fire chief Gordon Hunter pulled out of an interview. Ofcom accepted the explanation it was meant as a jibe against Gordon Brown instead.

• ‘I don’t feel I have enough talent to tell someone that they don’t have talent.’ New Britain’s Got Talent judge David Walliams

• James Corden went out drinking with David Beckham last week, sharing a couple of pints at The Washington pub in Primrose Hill in North London. Sadly it wasn’t the same day the Hampstead Comedy Club takes place in its basement...

• Tweets of the week:
  Henry James (@thishenryjames): The train is late. You know what this means; baby trains!
  jacques_aih (@ jacques_aih ): People who use abstract imperatives need to get a life.
  Andrea Mann (@ jazzchantoozie): Big Ben v. Eiffel Tower, 1973. That was a landmark case.

SOURCES: The List, The Sun, Bristol Evening Post, New Zealand Herald, Essex Enquirer, The Star, The Sun

Published: 13 Jan 2012