Russell Brand dials a priestly ghostbuster in this week's WTF...

• ‘Every time I ask [my kids] if I'm funny, they tell me, “Not really”.’ Will Ferrell

• Russell Brand once organised an exorcism by phone after becoming convinced the place he was working was haunted. It happened when he was a labourer in a chateau in southern France in his youth. He says: ‘Everyone working there was convinced there was poltergeist activity. The bloke I was working with kept a pick-axe in his room. I said, “If there is a poltergeist, mate, that’s making it worse. It’ll use that axe against you.” In the end we got a priest to ring up and bless some holy water over the phone. Yeah, a phone exorcism. We invented it.’

• Isy Suttie says she's attracted some weird fans from her role as Dobby on Peep Show. 'There was this guy who messaged me on MySpace saying he wanted a photo of my hands but in gloves immersed in water,' she said. 'I was going to reply, "I haven't got a camera", but then I thought he'll probably offer to come around and take it so decided I'd better not say anything.'

• So Sacha Baron Cohen is to pretend to be Freddie Mercury? But it’s not for the first time While hosting 2005's MTV Europe Awards, a leotard-clad Cohen, as Borat, introduced Coldplay with the words: ‘Hello it is me, Freddie Mercury. I joking, he die of AIDS ... The only sex disease I ever have is gonorrhea. Fifteen times! The ladies like Borat! Now please welcome Coldplay.’

• ‘Stephen Fry, along with many of the other celebrities who have criticised the Pope's visit, has a book to promote.’ The Daily Mail thinks having an opinion on the Catholic Church is a publicity stunt….

• Here’s a follow-up to a previous animation bemoaning the comedian’s lot on the US circuit. Now from the promoter’s point of view:
  

• ‘As a drunk, people will tell me stories about me and things we did together and I'm just as excited as everybody at the table as to how it ends.’ Doug Stanhope.

• Stewart Lee had a unusual way of cheering up his friends, Richard Herring has revealed. On his new Go Faster Stripe CD: As It Occurs To Me Secret Stand-up, Herring recalls the time they first went to the Edinburgh Fringe together, back in 1987 when they were just 19, and having quite a tough time of it. ‘One night I was quite depressed about something,’ Herring recalls. ‘I wasn't getting on with one of the guys in the sketch show and I was actually crying. And Stew decided to try to cheer me up. At the time I had a 100-year-old ventriloquist's dummy that I was using in the set that my great-grandfather had made. He got that out to try to make me laugh and it wasn't working. So he decided the best way to cheer me up was to get the hand of that ventriloquist's dummy and that to attempt to masturbate my penis. It’s not a story Stew tends to tell.’

• Herring told that story at a recent gig when he was introducing Lee to the stage. Stewart immediately told the audience: ‘Now he can ONLY get sexually aroused by a puppet’

• Tweets of the week:
  @DaveGorman: C5 commentator just referred to his quiz question as "something to get the brown matter working." Just bc he's got shit for brains...
  @thesimonevans:Poached eggs, toasted English muffin, Hollandaise sauce, concealment of paedophiles, ham. #EggsBenedict
  @carlmaxim: The Labour leadership could be resolved by a game of Twister. Everyone bending over backwards to avoid a lurch to the left

SOURCES: Daily Record, Q magazine, BBC News, Daily Mail, YouTube, GQ, As It Occurs To Me: Secret Stand-Up, Twitter

Published: 17 Sep 2010