WTF: Weekly Trivia File

•'I discovered that big, sweaty slob,' Ricky Gervais on Louis CK.

• As Billy Connolly returned to Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games this week, fans across the city posed for pictures with him and posted them on Twitter. Or they posed for pictures with a guy who looked a bit like him in the mistaken belief it was the Big Yin himself...

• Bitching about reviewers is one of the main pastimes of the Edinburgh Fringe – and now a new website has been set up to focus all that attention. Fringepig's aim is to review the reviewers – and already has commented on 170 of those passing judgment on 2013's shows. The site is anonymous, run by a stuffed elephant called Mr Kipper, who leads an army of soft toy reviewer-reviewers. 'I know what you’re thinking: Not another one. Not another fly-by night Fringe rag in which stuffed toys review all the comedy reviewers,' he says in a Chortle Correspondence piece all about it, heading off any potential criticism from reviewer-reviewer-reviewers.

• Meanwhile, let's start with a couple of the ‘injury hits show’ stories that are the bread and butter of diaries like this during Fringe. First, Susie McCabe has been forced to cancel her run at The Stand because of excruciating back pain which she has been suffering for months; secondly sketch troupe Four Screws Loose are hasty rewriting some of their more energetic numbers after member Joseph Elliot fractured his foot playing football.

• Many comics' careers are in the toilet by the end of the Fringe – but Bob Slayer's starts there. He has been helping fit plumbing in his venue, Heroes @ Bob & Miss Behave's Bookshop, this week.

• Michael McIntyre is to do a gig performing magic tricks at a pub in Hertfordshire next month.

• The house in Barry, South Wales, which was used as the exterior of Stacey’s family home in Gavin & Stacey, has gone on the market for £125,000. But the new owners will have to expect rubberneckers, as organised coach tours pass by on a weekly basis. Interior shots on the estate agent’s website show plenty of the sitcom’s memorabilia on display, including What’s Occurring? T-shirt pinned to the wall and James Corden’s autobiography on the kitchen table…

• Miranda Hart reveals how swimming with seals wasn't quite the experience she was hoping for. 'I was seal whispering and I was keeping up with one and it shat in the water, sausage poo, and I had to dodge to avoid it,' she tells Alan Carr on Chatty Man tonight.

• Aussie comic John Robertson is playing a version of his fiendishly difficult choose-your-own-adventure parody The Dark Room with around 25,000 gamers this afternoon. He'll be facing visitors to twitch.tv in a live online game from 1pm to 5pm. The site previously managed to get 16 million people playing a game of Pokemon at once.

• Comics including Craig Campbell and 'Lost Voice Guy' Lee Ridley are helping out fellow Fringe performers – buy buying them shoes.The Dloko High School Choir from Umlazi Township, South Africa, are playing the Assembly Rooms... but after staff there found that most of the kids own only one pair of shoes, they started a fundraiser, which has been backed by many of the other acts both there and at sister venue The Stand.

• Oh, and the Michael McIntyre we mentioned earlier isn’t the comic but a ‘celebrity magician’ of the same name. As the Hertfordshire Mercury reports, the conjurer ‘is familiar to many from his regular appearances at Loch Fyne Restaurant’. So almost as famous.

• Tweets of the week
Tom Fox (@TomFoxTom): At early marketing meetings about the invention of "scissors", many alternative names were suggested but they decided not to run with them
James Martin(@Pundamentalism): If Mr. Muscle really does ‘love the jobs you hate’, why isn't he a Daily Mail journalist?
Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston): Thankfully I no longer live in fear of being made to protect plants by killing insects. But at first I was afraid I was pesticide.

Published: 25 Jul 2014