'So, he asked me to kick him in the groin...’

The weekly trivia file

  • ‘I'm more or less retired from nudity, I kind of think beyond a certain age really it's best for everyone.’ Arthur Smith

  • On Desert Island Discs this week, Bill Bailey revealed how he nearly died on a trip to Peru with Sean Lock. They decided to visit the Ciudad Perdida, or lost city, but rather than taking the 45-minute helicopter ride, they decided to trek. Which takes a week. ‘We had no preparation for this,’ he said. ‘We didn’t think we were going on a jungle trip. We had no anti-malarial pills, no anti-bacterial pills, nothing but a pack of Custard Cremes and sports sack we’d bought from the market for three quid. Luckily for us we bumped into a biological field trip form the University of Stuttgart who had all the necessary medical facilities. I got very ill –some sort of amoebic dysentery. I lost two-and-a-half stone. I started to get a bit delirious walking back from the city. The guys could sense I was actually Losing It a bit.’ He asked them how far the walk was, and they told him 20 minutes – so to time it, Bailey started muttering his 20-minute stage act to himself. ‘I was walking along going, “Good evening…”,’ he said. But when he got to ‘thank you very much, goodnight,’ they were still miles away, as his companions had just told him 20 minutes to keep him going. ‘It was quite scary in a way,’ Bailey said. ‘But it was a fantastic experience.’

  • Comics on the Scottish circuit reckon Big Brother housemate Mikey Hughes, who calls himself a stand-up, has done less than half a dozen gigs – and wasn’t very good. Writing on the Scottish Comedy Comedy Forums, Scott Agnew remembers that when he was at the Stand’s Red Raw night for new acts ‘he had terrible hallitosis and a severe BO problem’. As for his material, Agnew says: ‘I can't recall much of his set but I remember thinking the audience were giving him an easy time despite how obvious and basic all the humour was.’ Oh, and the Daily Mirror also reported this week that the blind cross-dressing failed open spot deals in Nazi memorabilia.

  • Harry Hill has gone back to his old school - Staplehurst Primary in Kent - to help their campaign to get their playing field back after it was sold off to developers.

  • Paul Merton met an interesting chap during his forthcoming travel show about India: BB Nayak, who holds the world record for receiving the highest consecutive kicks to his groin. It’s 44, since you ask. What’s more, Merton helped him in his endeavour. ‘He’d picked out five people to kick him 10 times each, but the fifth guy didn’t turn up,’ Merton says. ‘So we went down to see him and he asked me to kick him in the groin which I did with a steady rhythm; he congratulated me for my accuracy.’

  • Last week, we mentioned the Observer getting on its high horse about Marcus Brigstocke’s supposed hypocrisy for slagging off Rupert Murdoch, then glugging his free champagne at a Sky party at the Hay Literary Festival. Only Brigstocke’s been teetotal for 17 years. ‘Glugging water’ just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?

  • There’s been a lot of talk about Blackadder reunions this week, but Tony Robinson says he gets tired of being asked the same two questions about the show: what does he think of turnips, and what is Rowan Atkinson really like? He says his response to both questions is the same: ‘All right, I suppose, but a bit rich for my taste.’

SOURCES: Manchester Evening News, Radio 4, Scottish Comedy Forum/Daily Mirror, Newsround, GetReading, Chortle, Daily Telegraph

Published: 13 Jun 2008

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