Craig David and the rest of the week's comedy trivia

• Jim Davidson says: ‘I've got lots of gay friends but I don't really want to go around with a banner saying, “Some of my best friends are gay”.’ Don’t you just wish he would…

• Craig David admits Leigh Francis’s Bo’ Selecta! caricature really got to him. ‘The whole Bo’ Selecta! thing was killing me for a while because this idiot had a cult following and I was the main caricature,’ he fumes. ‘It never really got as far as legal proceedings. All I knew was that people were associating me with this guy with a massive head, a northern accent and a bird on his arm. Inside it was absolutely pissing me off and hurtful beyond belief. There were times when I thought, “I just want to knock this guy out”.’ David agreed to go on the show to try to show what a good sport he was, but cornered Francis in a corridor and told him: ‘You’re an idiot.’ This is probably just the sort of clip he got riled by, so it would be utterly wrong to rerun it:
  

• Alexei Sayle says he’s good at shooting, adding: ‘I can handle a semi-automatic firearm’.

• David Walliams says he’s long entertained camp thoughts. ‘I embraced my feminine side and wanted to be Wonder Woman in the playground,’ he says. ‘I might be a transvestite if I wasn’t dressing up on the show. A friend has invited me to a transvestite club – and I’ll go, in darkness. I’d like to do it properly with good make-up and a nice dress. I don’t do anything by halves.’

• Another Walliams quote: ‘I used to write for Ant and Dec. Before they were good.’

• Comedy super-producer Michael Hurll was on typically mischievous form at the announcement of the British Comedy Award nominations on Wednesday. ‘We’re very lucky not to have a writers’ strike here, as they do in the States,’ he told assembled hacks. ‘Though if you watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland, you might have thought we had.’

• Hurll also revealed he was once sent a turd in the post – but it was meant as a compliment. A woman used to collect the mess from the Queen’s horse at Trooping The Colour, spray paint it gold, and then reward people with a ‘golden turd’ award of her own making. Still, it’s more valuable than a TV Quick award…

• Is there anything touched by celebrity that won’t be auctioned on eBay? A ‘well-used Velcro-covered suit with a small rip in the crotch area’ is currently being auctioned off – because Dom Joly wore it. Currently the bidding, here, stands at a dizzying £6.02. And it comes with a warning: ‘Please note this suit is not suitable for attaching a person to the front of a vehicle.’ Why? Because this strange film shows how Joly used it:

• Matt Lucas is still upset that his family didn’t nurture his talent as a child. He said: ‘I used to record audio tapes of myself performing when I was five or six and I listened to one recently. It was me doing bits of comedy and impressions and singing daft songs. I remember thinking at the time how witty and talented I was. Then you hear a relative saying. “He's just showing off!” That really deflated me, even now as an adult."

• Ricky Gervais this week said he felt ‘guilty’ over his wealth. ‘Apart from being able to afford more things, I haven’t changed my habits,’ said the comic, who is currently spending £1million tunnelling beneath his £3.5million Hampshire property to install an underground swimming pool, gym, games room and golf simulator.

SOURCES: ITV1’s This Morning, Sunday Times, The Independent, Radio Times, Popbitch, Chortle, Chortle, Ebay, Digital Spy, Tesco magazine

Published: 9 Nov 2007