'I want to strip him naked and tie him up'

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

  • ‘When you're a comedian, you never feel that anything you do is successful.' Lee Mack

  • Mat Horne is planning mischief at former comedy partner James Corden’s stag do. ‘I want to strip him naked and tie him up – but he’ll probably do that himself,’ he said dryly. ‘And I’d like to steal all his trainers and set fire to them, just like to see his little face.’

  • Meanwhile, Horne has been hit by an imposter on Twitter. Someone set up an account @MathewHorne, claiming to be ‘Official Twitter of Mathew from TV Comedy Programme Gavin and Stacey’. The real Horne (who’s @mfhorne) has just short of 100,000 followers. The imposter has just 22. But the comic actor today felt he had to expose the fake: ‘This is NOT me. I don't know who this is and am dealing with it.’

  • How many complaints did the BBC get over Frankie Boyle hosting Never Mind The Buzzcocks this week? Ten. Out of 1.4million. Despite the tabloid outrage, that’s 99.9993967 per cent of the audience who didn’t feel the need to get out the green ink…

  • 30 Rock has been named the most unethical show on television. Though the honour is slightly dubious… it’s not that they employ child slave labour to craft the zingy one-liners, but that the fictional conduct of the fictional characters breaks so many employment rules. Global Compliance said the show averaged 11 ethical violations per episode. If that tops the league, clearly no one’s shown them tapes of Tramadol Nights…

  • Jimmy Carr wears £425 Alexander McQueen pyjamas.

  • The Daily Mail has been banging on again about those immigrants who come over here and steal all our jobs. The offender this time is Dara O Briain, with the paper pointing out that the Irishman has been on five BBC shows of late: Mock The Week, Three Men Go to Scotland, Have I Got News For You, The Apprentice: You’re Fired! and Stargazing Live, when they claimed he ‘annoyingly talked over’ Dr Brian Cox… O'Briain tweeted back that it was just a coincidence: ‘Happy to say that the recent confluence of telly shows featuring me is now finished. Not on again (bar repeats) until at least March.’

  • Where did the Royal Family get their idea to have a buffet for William and Kate’s wedding? Micky Flanagan reckons it could be something he said on the Royal Variety Performance last month…

  • Malcolm Hardee would have been 61 this week, had he not fallen in the Thames. It prompts memories of his 49th birthday in 1999 in his beloved Up The Creek club when he vanished without trace. ‘It turned out he had collapsed by the toilets,’ pal John Fleming recalls. ‘I met his mother who said she had thought he was dead: his face had been grey and they had almost called an ambulance. Both she and I were surprised because he hadn’t really been drunk.’ The suspicion was someone had spiked his drink, but Fleming said: ‘He took it in his stride – as he takes any unique, bizarre event – as if it’s a perfectly normal thing to happen. If they built a Malcolm Hardee theme park it would be in the style of Magritte and/or Salvador Dali.’

  • Has Ricky Gervais got a slightly inflated opinion of how much people really concern themselves about his career? ‘Some people hate me so much they don't sleep, they make themselves ill,’ he says

  • Here’s one terrible stand-up whose hoping the purge of the n-word from Huckleberry Finn doesn’t extend to comedy, as he’d have no act left:

  • Wallace And Gromit creator Nick Park has chosen God Bless The Fleece by John Shuttleworth as one of his Desert Island Discs.

  • Phill Jupitus must think he’s jinxed. He’s performed just three low-key gigs with his comedy ‘supergroup’ the Idiot Bastard Band – alongside Ade Edmondson, Neil Innes, Rowland Rivron and Simon Brint (aka Raw Sex) – and three times he’s been hit by driving-related misfortune. The first, he pranged his car, causing a couple of thousand pounds' worth of damage; the second he forgot to pay Central London’s Congestion Charge, prompting a £60 fine, and at this week’s gig at the Wilmington Arms, he told the audience he’d been given a parking ticket. Fellow motorists be warned: he’s back at the Wilmo this coming Tuesday…

  • Could stand-up Jo Enright be starring in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s new sitcom Life’s Too Short? She’s just filmed the pilot, when she stars as the wife of lead character Warwick Davis. ‘I don't know yet whether I'll be in the series, but I have been told to pencil in the dates,’ she says hopefully. At 4ft 11in, Enright will tower over Davis, who’s just 3ft 6in.

  • Tweets of the week:
    @jacques_aih:Government cuts mean a huge reduction in NHS dental surgery this year. Brace yourselves.
    Marcus Brigstocke (@marcusbrig): Even if water could "remember" the medicine, my circulatory system would forget it; blood being thicker than water.
    @NickMotown: Went to butchers. Asked for bacon. He said 'lean back?' & at that exact point a deadly poison dart whistled past my nose. I owe him my life.


SOURCES: Digital Spy, Daily Mirror, Twitter, Chortle, CNN, The Sun, Daily Mail/Twitter, Chortle, thejohnfleming.wordpress.com, Los Angeles Times, YouTube, Radio Four, Chortle, The Scotsman, Twitter

Published: 7 Jan 2011

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