WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• 'There are a lot of unfunny people who do stand-up.' Lee Mack

• Josie Long passed out in the street last night, following a wild evening at… the National Portrait Gallery. She recounted the drama via Twitter saying: ‘I end up in an ambulance, taken to whitechapel a&e. So weird! The paramedics, the nurse and the doctor were all bloody brilliant of course.’ She later added that she was ‘fine now’, attributing her collapse to the after-effects of flu and ‘trying to do too much, I guess’.

• Picking up his comedy gong at the National Television Awards this week, Mrs Brown’s Boys creator Brendan O’Carroll insisted: ‘I really do respect critics. I know they've got a job to do.’ He showed exactly how much he respected them in almost his very next breath: ‘But as long as you're writing little columns in mickey mouse giveaway newspapers, fuck off."

• Ruth Jones was asked to take part in Strictly Come Dancing, but turned them down because ‘I can’t dance’. But she told them: ‘I’ll do it for £3million.’

• Jimmy Carr broke the booking system for the Oakengates Theatre in Telford yesterday. He announced a £16 work-in-progress show there for March 8, but demand crashed the website, with some fans spending more than an hour trying to get tickets. He has now added an extra late-night show on the same date.

• Yonderland and Horrible Histories actor Simon Farnaby used to work in a hotel as a luggage porter. ‘That was miserable,’ he says. ‘I misplaced some paintings that were worth £500,000. After a massive hoo-ha they turned up, someone had just moved them but they were about to sack me. I met the playwright John Osborne. He shouted at me for dropping his suitcase.’

• At the screening of Frank at the Sundance film festival this week, director Lenny Abrahamson insisted all 1,600 people in the cinema wear Frank Sidebottom masks.

• David Cameron has been watching Armando Iannucci’s White House comedy Veep. ‘It’s quite amusing,’ is his ringing endorsement.

• Meanwhile, Jerry Seinfeld admits he loves Top Gear.

• Tweets of the week
The_No_Show (@The_No_Show): "A Prime Minister is any minister who can be divided only by himself or by One" - the Queen, making thinly veiled threats
Robin Flavell (@RobinFlavell): "Declared all my earnings in the financial year 2012-2013 I have" The Tax Return Of The Jedi.
Dan (@ehdannyboy):"The Chuckle Brothers have left TV and are becoming weathermen."
"Really?"
"They're into.. *looks at camera*
METOYOUROLOGY!"
"Piss off."

Published: 24 Jan 2014