Has Little Britain merchandising gone too far? It's not official, but now you can buy ‘the only map in the village’ – an 1824 map of Llandewi Brefi, printed on paper made out of recycled sheep crap. On sale, here and snip at £15.99. Also someone’s bothered to make a ‘computer says no’ search engine, possibly the most pointless page on the web. It's here.
From the hopelessly naive press release heralding ITV2’s new showcase Comedy Cuts: ‘Highly intelligent, Brendon [Burns] continually challenges his audience (and himself) on subjects most comedians would shy away from. Tonight he speaks of the differences between men and women.’ Groundbreaking stuff. Next week: Just how fat is his mother-in-law?
For Christmas, Ricky Gervais’s TV producer girlfriend Jane Fallon got him a ‘lovely carving, a 17th-century Russian box’. He got her a laptop.
Lenny Henry admits he had a ‘rough’ gig trying out new material in Reading. Later he confessed: ‘I watched Jerry Seinfeld's film Comedian again the other day. He was very funny about trying out new material - you mustn't make the rookie mistake of going straight into the new stuff, thinking it's hilarious, because you are bound to be disappointed. I wish I'd watched him before I'd done the Reading try-outs.’ How could he possibly have known this trick otherwise? After all, he’s only been in the business 30 years…
Al Murray says that when he was on the circuit he was doing ‘between 400 and 450 gigs per year’.
Stephen Merchant complains that comedy has not boosted his sex life, as he might have expected. ‘If I was a rock star I think people would find me more attractive,’ he says.
Matt Lucas regrets he couldn’t find room for even one Abba track among his eight Desert Island Discs. ‘For weeks, I was flapping around, thinking, “Oh my God, I've got no Abba!',” he says of his recent Radio 4 appearance. ‘But I'm sure Benny and Bjorn will get over it.’
