WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• Comedian Will Mars wasn’t happy with his two-star Chortle review this Fringe, he decided he’d just award himself five stars, attribute them to made-up website Chortle.us, and slap them across all his posters. He even bought the domain name.

• It was probably inevitable. A punter fell asleep in Rob Auton’s The Sleep Show.

• Sympathy for the Adam Hess fans who snapped up tickets for his show and were rather baffled by an intense one-man performance about Nazi war crimes. It took them several minutes to realise this was not an avant-garde opening, but that Hess was a deadly serious one-man show about Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, not the silly outpourings of a neurotic man.

• Will Franken has caused upset for calling out comedians he doesn’t like this Fringe. And here’s what happened when a heckler in his show did the same to him…

• Twitter when nuts when Mrs Brown's Boys was voted sitcom of the century by Radio Times readers. Realising many of those now regret their vote, didn't understand what they were voting for, or used it as a protest, Joz Norris has set up a petition to arrange a second Sitcom of the Century referendum here

• Remember the hoo-ha when it was revealed that Channel 4 was considering a sitcom set in the Irish potato famine? Well it seems it’s not an entirely new idea. Sharon Horgan told the Edinburgh International Television Festival that she once wrote a spec script about poor tenant farmers next to English landowners during the Great Hunger. She was going to call it The Good Blight.

• Bit of trumpet-blowing here. The List magazine has been keeping tally of the most prolific reviewers at the Edinburgh Fringe. Chortle’s Steve Bennett tops the list with 108 published so far, with two more days to go, more than 25 per cent more than the next hardest-working critic in comedy, The List’s Brian Donaldson, with 86

Tweets of the week

The bloke who invented the key for the symbols on maps, LEGEND.

— Tony Cowards (@TonyCowards) August 20, 2016

If I had a pound for every time I was told that we have gender equality... wait, actually, I'd only get 82p of it #genderpaygap

— Nathalie Gordon (@awlilnatty) August 23, 2016

In Jeremy Corbyn's defence, when he saw all those empty seats on the train he probably thought it was a Shadow Cabinet meeting.

— Gary Delaney (@GaryDelaney) August 24, 2016

Published: 26 Aug 2016