Meet Little Anal McPartlin

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

‘ There’s definitely a greater sense of humour among northerners than people who live down south.’ Ken Dodd

Jack Whitehall is posh alright. Even his birth was a black-tie affair. His mum’s gynaecologist turned up in a dinner jacket, because he was on the way to a medical dinner convention; and his dad’s friend Nigel Havers turned up, also wearing a tux, as he had been out at a do, too. Whitehall says it was like something out of Downton Abbey... not that he remembers, of course.

Peter Capaldi – aka The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker – turns up for a GQ photoshoot:

Netflix has added a whole load of fake movies and TV shows to its US catalogue. Why? Because they are the fictional works that featured in Arrested Development, which the company is bringing back for subscribers in the spring. Best is Les Cousins Dangereux – the explicit film Maeby and George Michael sneak into a cinema to see – or possibly Boyfights, the exploitation film George Bluth made of his children. Other titles added by the savvy company (which sadly only link back to the Arrested Development page) include Girls with Low Self Esteem: Newport Beach, Scandalmakers and Mock Trial with J. Reinhold.

The Pollard inquiry into why Newsnight dropped its report about Jimmy Savile cost the BBC £2million. Or as top comedy producer Kenton Allen points out, the price of a whole series of a sitcom.

The Brighton Komedia’s regular MC, Stephen Grant, deals with a Christmas show heckler:

Wen Miranda Hart wants to give performance notes to fellow actors on her sitcom, she adopts a character called ‘Anal McPartlin’. Tom Ellis revealed: ‘After we’ve gone through rehearsal after rehearsal and we’re distilling it down to how it’s going to be on the day of filming, there will be minuscule details we might have brushed over, and Miranda will just have a quiet word with you and say, “Little Anal McPartlin point for you: When you say this could you just say it with this emphasis on that?” And you’ll go, “OK, thanks Anal.”’

With today’s comedy circuit apparently rife with stand-ups fiercely calculating their optimum career moves, spare a thought for Preston comedian Wandering Walter, who has died at the age of 84. His friends say he ‘could have been up there with Les Dawson’ – but he had more modest ambitions. His wife of 53 years, Connie, told the Lancashire Evening Post: ‘He was a very funny man, and he never wanted to go out of Lancashire. He was asked to go to London but his nerves wouldn’t take it for a start. He liked to come home at night.’ She also recalls how Walter - real surname Horam – started his career by riding to gigs on a bike with a suitcase on the back, before he got booked for sportsmen’s dinners, which she said where ‘more glamorous’. She added: ‘He loved being on stage. He had offers to go on television but it just wasn’t the same for him. He thought it was a bit like performing to himself.’ Here, then, is a rare clip of him on the Little And Large Show:

Russell Brand has thanked his yoga teacher and ‘spiritual mentor’ Tej Kaur Khalsa by buying her a new £20,000 Hyundai Santa Fe SUV.

How much work goes into the simplest stand-up ‘bit’? Here’s Jerry Seinfeld explaining in minute detail how he formed his observational routine about Pop Tarts:

Tweets of the week
Scott Hoad (@ScottHoad):I've probably read Peter Pan about a hundred times. Never gets old.
Vivienne Clore (@ Vivienneclore ):To help you wake up in the morning, try counting sheep backwards
Jacques As In Hattie (@jacques_aih): The Queen refers to her Christmas speech as "The One Show".