The weekly trivia file

• ‘I’m not about to launch my own range of evening gowns for the fuller-figured person.’’ Dylan Moran on sticking at what he’s good at.

• Ricky Gervais says he has only visited the fourth floor of his North London house twice - because he can't be bothered to walk up the stairs.

• Jimmy Carr once thought he was going to be bitten by a shark. He said: ‘I was snorkelling off Key West, in Florida, among some very small sharks when suddenly a large grey, black-tipped shark came at us. It flipped around on a sixpence and came right at us through clear water. It was absolutely petrifying, maybe 10 feet from head to tail, and I had this terrifying feeling of swimming, feeling my legs kicking, knowing that something could be about to bite us. We were right out in the ocean and couldn't see land, so we climbed up on to coral, which you're not meant to step on, and shouted to the boat crew. The skipper said: "What's your problem? These are brown sharks." To which we said: "No, it was grey with a black-tipped fin!"’

• Johnny Vegas plans to take up his favourite schoolboy sport of rugby league after shedding more than four stone.

• Know your audience. This racist material didn’t go down too well in front of 200 black people. This week’s stand-up-gone-bad video come from Inglewood, California:
  

• Dom Joly made more than £200,000 selling his flat in All Saints Road in Notting Hill, West London, to Salman Rushdie. He bought it in 1992 for £95,000 and says: ‘I ended up selling it to Salman Rushdie 12 years later for a huge profit. I'm not saying how much I sold it for; suffice to say it was a lot and yes, I trebled my money at least.’

• In case you missed it, Russell Brand is said to have yelled "Qué?" while he was in bed with Andrew Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie. In separate news, HMV has reported that sales of Fawlty Towers DVD have soared 30 per cent since the phone-call affair put the classic sitcom back in the spotlight.

• When filming the second series of League Of Gentlemen, the cast and crew stayed in a hotel in Hyde directly opposite Harold Shipman’s surgery.

• John Cleese, 68, is bitter about having to take on work he hates to pay an expected £1million-a-year alimony to his third wife Alyce Faye, who he is currently divorcing, when he should be looking to retirement. He said: ‘In my 70th year I will still be spending two months a year doing work that is of no interest to me and which is probably slightly spiritually depleting, in order to feed the beast.’ In entirely unrelated news, Cleese is now hosting a programme about gadgets on Dave.

• Sarah Silverman’s sister Susan is a rabbi living on a kibbutz in the Negev, Israel.

SOURCES: Croydon Guardian thelondonpaper, Daily Telegraph, The People, YouTube, Daily Mail, The Sun/Mirror, Nottingham Evening Post, The Times, TheJC.com

Published: 3 Nov 2008