The man stole the idea from the other man

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

Ricky Gervais name-drops in a new interview with GQ, revealing his attitude to ‘jumping the shark’: ‘Christopher Guest said to me—we were talking about comedians we used to like and if people go off the boil—and he was basically saying: ‘What if we become the people we don’t rate anymore? What if we lose it and we don’t know it?’ And I went (grins), ‘Who cares?’”’

Daily Telegraph journalist Michael Deacon received a lot of online acclaim this week for his parody of Dan Brown: ‘The 190lb adult male human being nodded his head to indicate satisfaction...’ that sort of thing. Comedy fans might have spotted a certain resemblance to a Stewart Lee routine mocking ‘the famous novelist’ which featured in his Comedy Vehicle on BBC Two. Of course, we can’t rule out coincidence; that the two pieces were conceived entirely independently. But the very same Michael Deacon DID list Lee’s Dan Brown routine as one of his favourite TV moments of 2009, simply quoting this bit verbatim:

The London Evening Standard told Sean Hughes that, at, 47, he was too old for a feature. ‘This made me angry,’ he tweeted. ‘But nothing a little nap won't sort out.

A painting of Golden Girl actress Bea Arthur naked has sold for $1.9million in New York. Auction house Christie’s said artist John Currin based his 1991 oil painting on a picture of her fully clothed, and imagined the rest.The image, right, proved too strong for Facebook, which suspended the account of Newsweek’s sister publication The Daily Beast for featuring it.

Bill Bailey inspired Underworld's hit track Born Slippy, frontman Karl Hyde has revealed. He told Radio 4’s Front Row that he wound up drinking with the comic – who he didn’t know – in The Ship on Wardour Street in Soho, and gave him a fiver to get a round in. ‘I remember him looking at me with a bemused stare,’ the singer said. Until this week, Bailey was unaware of his role in creating the famous ‘lager, lager, lager’ refrain.

Peter Capaldi – aka The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker – sent a rather charming cartoon to the band British Sea Power, depicting him in his most famous role. We’re not sure why he sent it – and the band’s management haven’t told us – but click here to see it.

Got to love local papers. Opening paragraph of a story in the Eastern Daily Press: ‘The Hi-de-Hi! actor Paul Shane, who regularly filmed in Norfolk, died today at the age of 72.’

The IRA loved Dave Allen. As former provo Danny Morrison said: ‘Dave Allen was a subversive in the Seventies. He was anti-establishment, and you couldn't get more anti-establishment than us, so we identified with him.’ He rejected claims in the recent TV documentary about Allen that he had received death threats from the terror group.

Cheeky! John Fleming, organiser of the Fringe’s Malcolm Hardee awards at the Edinburgh Fringe has hijacked the festival’s longest-running awards, and bought the domain name www.fosterscomedyawards.co.uk.

The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a campaign for Modern Family’s gay couple, Mitchell and Cameron, to tie the knot to draw attention to the issue of equal marriage rights.

Who needs knowledge to have an opinion? The man who reviewed Daniel Kitson’s new tour for The Arts Desk - a website which won a ‘best specialist journalism’ award last year – admitted he’d ‘never heard’ of probably Britain’s most revered comic before seeing his show in Brighton.

Tweets of the week
Peter Serafinowicz (@serafinowicz): I might have an open casket funeral. Remains to be seen.
Twitfulp (@twitflup): Nigel Farage is an anagram of Free Anal Gig. Just saying
Ben from Utter Media (@ Utterben ): "Get me outta here, I'm claustrophobic and allergic to nuts!" — that's me in a nutshell