WTF: Weekly trivia file

• Russell Brand has left the agent whom he credited with creating turning his life around. The comic was a drug addict when John Noel forced him to go to rehab – or ‘winky-nick’ as Brand called it since he wasn’t allowed sex – and financially supported his treatment. But now after 15 years, Brand has jumped ship to Hannah Chambers, whose roster includes Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr, Jack Whitehall and Sarah Millican.

• Chris Rock says he went through a gang initiation when a teenager in Brooklyn. ‘I walked through the gauntlet and got beat up and whatever and you’re in the gang, right?’ he told the music podcast Questlove Supreme. But he says his involvement went no further. ‘I wasn’t a gang follow-up guy,’ he said. ‘A gang is like anything else, you got to follow-up.’

• Seann Walsh has revealed how Prince Charles had some unlikely words of reassurance after he bombed at the 2013 Royal Variety Performance. ‘ I died so badly,’ the stand-up revealed on his on his John Cleese likes to go on stage immediately after being woken from a nap. Russell Howard revealed the bizarre ritual to Mark Radcliffe on 6 Music yesterday. Howard did some shows with Fawlty Towers legend in Australia, and said: ‘He goes to sleep before gigs. He likes to be woken up just before as he’s about to go on. Fascinating! So he’s a bit discombobulated when he wanders on. Everyone goes, “he’s so mad, he’s so unique”. He has his hair all over the shop, he’s adjusting his nethers…’

• Rugby referee Nigel Owens is widely respected for the way he deals with players on the pitch – and he says that could be down to performing stand-up in the past. He told Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs this week: ‘I was on stage at 14 years of age doing stand-up comedy in my local working men’s club because the live entertainment hadn’t turned up.’

• The Queen recuperated from her illness over Christmas by watching old Laurel and Hardy films, and comedy movies starring Sid James and Dora Bryan… at least according to an anonymously-sourced article in Sunday Express.

• Yesterday Metro devoted its front page to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, famous for being a rich girl who took too much coke. Alan Simpson, who changed the face of TV with shows that attracted more than 25 million viewers and still hold up today, got 28 words on page 9.

• A fan once asked Whoopi Goldberg for her autograph – while she was sitting on the loo. ‘I was getting my business done when she asked if I would sign the piece of toilet paper she was pushing under the door,’ the comic tells Graham Norton on his BBC One show tonight. ‘I understand people get excited but the bathroom is not the place!’

• She also spoke of her early job working as a ‘make-up artist for dead people’, which she inevitably found creepy. She said: ‘When I first started my boss asked me to go to the mortuary and wait for him. As I am sitting there one of drawers where they kept the bodies starts opening and I turn round I see a body sit up and say, “Hello there.” I jumped up so fast that I hit the wall and passed out. When I came to my boss said, “The worst thing you could think would happen already has!” It was an extraordinary job.’

• Now you can have your very own version of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. Producers of his hit sitcom have licensed a miniature collectors’ version of the set, featuring 100 individual elements including the furniture, bicycle on the wall and even a working version of Jerry’s front door. And early buyers even get a section of wood from the actual door used on the show. Only 5,000 replicas will be created and they cost $400 (£320) each. But bad news for British fans – it cannot be shipped outside the US and Canada. Here’s more:

• Trainee priests have held a service in the old-fashioned gay slang language Polari, as popularised by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick on 1960s radio sitcom Round The Horne. An Old Testament reading which says ‘rend your heart and not your garments, return to the Lord your God’ in the King James Bible was rendered in Polari as ‘rend your thumping chest and not your frocks - and turn unto the Duchess your Gloria: for she is bona and merciful’. And instead of the traditional prayer: ‘Glory be to the father, and to the son, and the Holy Spirit’ the congregation said: ‘Fabeness be to the Auntie, and to the Homie Chavvie, and to the Fantabulosa Fairy’. Round The Horne’s Jules and Sandy might have been amused, but the Church of England wasn’t, expressing ‘regret’ over the service in the chapel of Westcott House in Cambridge

Tweets of the week

AN UNUSED Nutribullet filled with cherryade and a hard boiled egg makes an excellent lava lamp. (via @CBellUK)

— Twop Twips (@TwopTwips) February 9, 2017

One of the hidden shames of being called a "snowflake" is the quiet knowledge of just how many slurs the Inuit have for you

— Glenn Wool (@GlennWool) February 10, 2017

Are dolphins intelligent or is it cos they blow bubbles out the top of their head it just looks like they're always thinking?

— Steve Williams (@_stevewilliams_) February 10, 2017

Published: 10 Feb 2017