WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• Seann Walsh will – inshallah – finally play a gig in Hertford tomorrow – six months after cancelling the show last-minute when he got on a train to Hereford instead. At the time he offered to buy each audience member a drink at the rescheduled date, a vow which he’s promised to honour at tomorrow night’s show.

• Jack Dee says that when he was asked to go on the Great Comic Relief Bake Off, he wrote back saying – as a gag: ‘I don’t want to do it because I find Mary Berry very, very aggressive; I don’t like her at all.’ The comic tells Graham, Norton on tonight’s show that the producers didn’t get the joke, writing back: ‘She’s actually very nice.’

• In the same show David Walliams reveals he got script notes for his Comic Relief sketch show this year from his co-star…  Professor  Stephen Hawking.

• Johnny Vegas is to perform in a One Direction tribute band – No Direction – for Comic Relief. He will appear live at the London Palladium on the Red Nose Day telethon next Friday. Also for the charity, Paul Merton is to make a cameo in West End comedy The 39 Steps on Thursday. He joked that the role of the mystery killer – whose hand is usually the only body part seen onstage – is ‘the summit of my career as a West End actor’.

• Richard Herring has been speaking of a weird gig in Chorley last weekend – when his show was interrupted by a devoutly religious woman who took umbrage at his light-hearted joshing about hymn lyrics. The woman’s outrage right at the start of Lord Of The Dance Settee mortified the man she had come with, Gary Robinson – who later revealed it had been his first date in 18 years, following his divorce. After the show, Robinson sent a text to check if his date was OK and she replied: ‘It would have been OK if you took me to see Peter Kay.’ Garlic bread and fishes, perhaps. Here is the incident

And Herring talks about ‘my greatest heckling experience’ in his latest Lord Of The Dance Settee podcast:

• The humourless Portsmouth News has so far filled three stories with fake outrage after Omid Djalili tweeted a joke unflatteringly comparing the city’s Spinnaker Tower to the UAE’s Burj Al Arab hotel with the hashtag “#DubaiWithNoMoney’.

• Russell Howard completed the Bath Half Marathon – with the help of some porridge. He finished the 13 miles in 1hr 44 minutes, crediting his breakfast with giving him the energy.

• Comics at the Adelaide Fringe played a wind-up on comic Nik Coppin this week. This explains all:

• Thanks to Popbitch, we now know that David Walliams’s school nickname was ‘Cuthbert Hogsbottom’.

• Tweets of the week
Glenn Moore (@TheNewsAtGlenn): I hate acronyms and everything they stand for.
 Ian Power (@IHPower): Confuse Yazz by going down on her.
Gary Cordery  (@gaz_cordery): I refuse to give up in my quest to read just over half of the dictionary, in fact I'll stop at nothing...

Published: 6 Mar 2015