The week's trivia round-up

• 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.’

  Published: 5 Jan 2007