WTF: Weekly trivia file

• ‘Russell Brand looks like Dot Cotton in a cat suit.’ Sean Lock

• Jerry Seinfeld has escaped unhurt after rolling one of his classic cars – a 1967 Fiat –when its brakes failed. The comic flipped the two-door car over in the Hamptons, near New York, and came to a halt just yards from the main road, narrowly avoding what police called ‘a very serious accident’.

• Stand-up Andre Vincent reckons the funniest person he knows is agent Addison Cresswell. ‘He looks after the biggest acts in this country and behaves like he is running a car lot,’ he says.

• Richard Herring faced a tougher-than-usual distraction from the audience at a gig in Streatham, South London, on Wednesday. Taking up the story on his excellent Warming Up blog, he wrote: ‘There was a commotion on the table to my right… I turned and saw that the woman nearest to me had leant back against one of the candles and her hair had caught fire. To begin with it didn't look too bad, but then she turned and I saw that her long thick hair, bunched at the back was burning, flames were almost jumping off her head.’ She was ‘almost entirely oblivious’, so Herring helped pat out the blaze. ‘It was quite an astonishing spectacle, he added, ‘and it upstaged my T-shirt based routine. However good a comedian I am, I am not as entertaining as a woman on fire.’ Luckily the woman was unharmed – and later said that when she arrived at the venue, she had wondered about the wisdom of having candles on the tables, saying: ‘Someone could set their hair on fire…’

• Stand-up Nik Coppin has been bragging about all the women he’s slept with to the News Of The World. Claiming 200+ notches on his bedpost, he said: ‘When I’m onstage, lots of women shout “Strip! Strip!” at me, which can be distracting. The other day a woman told me that when she heard my first joke, she said to her friend: “I wouldn’t mind having sex with him”… Lots of my friends are jealous and ask me how I do it.’

• Fast Show star Simon Day is selling his townhouse in London’s swanky Primrose Hill for £1.7million; while Ben Miller’s Highgate home is on the market for £1million.

• Noel Fielding, wearing an extravagant fur hat and carrying a hairdryer, joined Noel Gallagher and Gavin & Stacey star James Corden in a groin-thrusting, air-guitar-playing dance for the benefit of paparazzi outside London’s Groucho Club on Tuesday night.

• Believe the hype? The San Francisco Chronicle reports: ‘In the British Isles, Billy Connolly is monstrously popular, on the scale of Elvis.’

• Ever-classy comedian Paddy McGuinness persuaded Lily Allen to get her tit out for her BBC Three audience. The Max And Paddy star was a guest on Allen’s chat show and started flirting, prompting the LDN singer to expose herself. ‘Paddy was trying to grab her breast and he joked to Lily that she was arousing him,’ said one audience member. ‘That’s when she started playing with her nipple. [Then] she pulled out her right boob. She had her breast out for about three minutes. It was surreal.’

• Orlando Bloom has used an Alan Partridge line to chat a girl up. He claims the pick-up line 'I'm off to a BP garage for a mushroom slice. Want to come?' worked… but then he is Orlando Bloom, not a Norwich local radio DJ.

• Stand-up Craig Hill: ‘My friends are quite horrified when they realise I don't moisturise, but I've inherited my mother's complexion.’

SOURCES: Daily Mail, RichardHerring.com, This Is Hampshire, Press Association, News Of The World, The Mail on Sunday, thelondonpaper, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sun, Hollywood.com, Glasgow Herald

Published: 4 Apr 2008