'Men paid £2,000 a night for my company'

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

‘It’s offensive, it’s degrading and it’s not funny.’ A verdict on Jimmy Carr’s act by … Roy Chubby Brown.

Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal got so carried away with the violence while filming Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner that they thought they were going to do serious damage to each other. Bird said the sibling horseplay they were acting out often got out of hand, adding: ‘We did hurt each other quite regularly. When I hurt Tom, he would get me back on the next take. It did escalate. Tom got really into the bit when he is strangling me. There was definitely a moment I thought, “This is the end’, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.” While acting, you want to make it look real, so when we gave each other dead arms or tried to strangle each other, we did it properly. We did have to stop filming because Tom has a weak knee and one of his ligaments snapped after I jumped on him. But it was in the script — I wasn’t just doing these things off my own back.’

Tim Vine is to appear on a celebrity version of BBC One quiz show Pointless this autumn.

YouTube’s London headquarters includes a mock-up of Del Boy’s Only Fools And Horses flat. The Covent Garden premises have just been refurbished, largely to look like the back of film sets, but also includes the tacky Seventies bar and knock-off goods from Nelson Mandela House, Peckham. Hereare some pictures.

Sex worker turned comedian Miranda Kane says of her old job: ‘For a lot of the time, I weighed over 300lbs (21stone) and that was when I was at my most popular. Men paid up to £2,000 a night to have my company. I lost loads of weight, and they lost interest.’ She’s doing a show about her experience at the Leicester Square Theatre later this month.

Newish stand-up Sean McLoughlin found himself in a bizarre twitter conversation with Hollywood star Andie MacDowell. It started when he tweeted: ‘Groundhog Day should have ended with Bill Murray finally getting a new day with Andie Macdowell, who is immediately hit by a bus.‘The actress seemed to mix up her her character with reality, though, for she replied: ‘Is that funny? pretty sad if it is Sean ...I'm 54 how old are you?’ McLoughing replied: ‘Hi Andie Macdowell. I meant your character in the film obviously, not yourself. Also I'm 24 years old. Are you really you?’ She replied: ‘As far as I know I am me ...have a good day Sean.’

Paddy McGuinness wants to do an OAP version of Take Me Out. 'Pop a couple of Viagras in the old Bovril and it'll be brilliant!'

Australian comic Genevieve Fricker was less than happy when she did an interview with a Sydney newspaper about her forthcoming ‘hilariously dark’ comedy show – only to find out that they instead used her in a ‘hot or not’ column next to an actress also performing at the city’s Fringe festival. Random blokes passed comments like ‘I can leave my Beer Goggles at home for these two’. The actress Ciao newspaper used, Annabelle McMillan, was performing a one-woman feminist response to a Robert Browning poem, Porphyria's Lover. The paper’s since apologised.

Howard Read has set himself something of an ill-advised challenge. He’s going to write and animate a song about every town he’s visiting on his current Little Howard tour.. though thankfully for his sanity there are only about half a dozen of them, well spaced-out. Here are the first two:

Simon Evans on the difficulty of telling jokes: ‘Ricky Gervais had a routine about craneflies: they have quite a strong poison but no means of getting it into your bloodstream. Jokes can be a bit like that sometimes: “I’ve got the poison, but I just can’t break the skin”.’

Tweets of the week
Dave Cohen ( @cohendave):And we’ll be bringing you more on the Jimmy Savile scandal, as it happens
Rhys James (@rhysjamesy): The Swiss must’ve been pretty confident in their chances of victory if they included a corksrew in their army knife
Tony Cowards (@TonyCowards): It's a little known James Bond fact that in America, “Casino Royale” was called “Casino Quarter Pounder with Cheese”. #JamesBondDay

Published: 5 Oct 2012