WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘Nick Clegg has the air of a man who would leave a stag do early because he wouldn't want to miss Holby City’ Frankie Boyle.

• James Corden went into a Soho clip joint minutes before the meeting which gave him his big break – and had in a run-in with heavies who demanded £500 for a Coke. The comic reveals in his autobiography that he was an hour early for a meeting with Fat Friends creator Kay Mellor at the Groucho Club. Passing one doorway, a woman offered: ‘Live show? Fully nude girls? Only £5.’ He handed over his fiver, and  was ushered past a black velvet curtain into a dimly lit room with three or four girls sitting in their underwear smoking and two ‘angry-looking guys wearing tracksuits’. One of them asked him if he wanted a drink, and when Corden declined, insisted: ‘You've got to have a drink. Corden asked for a Coke, then spotted the price list – so made his move to leave. It was then one of the men grabbed him by the lapels and threatened: ‘You owe me 500 quid, you cheeky bastard!’ He pulled Corden’s wallet out of  his jacket, and on learning he only had £20 on him, slammed him back into the wall. ‘I thought I was about to cry,’ Corden recalls. ‘He emptied out my wallet and put all the cash I had, coins and everything.’ Corden promised to get the £500, whereupon the heavy took out a Blockbuster video card  and said ‘If you don't come back with the money, I'm gonna find you and kill you. Get out of here. Now!’ He then ran to his meeting... where he was offered the role on Fat Friends.

• Tom Cruise’s wife Katie Holmes is to cameo in the Halloween special of the US sitcom How I Met Your Mother as a ‘slutty pumpkin’.

• Among those touched by the death of Red Rum trainer Ginger McCain this week was Lee Mack – as his first job after being kicked out of college was at those stables. ‘I wanted to be a jockey,’ he said. ‘I knew Ginger McCain worked in Southport, so I rang him and I told him that I wanted to race horses. He told me to come down and it went from there. I was basically the YTS boy – cleaning up Red Rum’s mess. I couldn’t have been any further down the hierarchy. It was just great to be in his presence.’

• John Finnemore referenced Stewart Lee in a sketch from his current Radio 4 series... but sadly it never made it into the show, Never fear, the dropped sketch has been released online here.

• For most people in comedy the ‘women aren’t funny’ idea has long been nailed as a myth... but not all. Darren Cook, who runs the Jokers comedy club in Ipswich told his local paper that female comics don’t go down with his crowd. ‘I think it’s perhaps because of their content,’ he said. ‘A lot choose to talk about sexual organs, and go down a path that’s not for the Sunday evening crowd.’

• Alan Carr took singer Adele back to his hotel room... and was remonstrated for making too much noise in the bedroom. Guests complained to staff at Manchester’s swanky Lowry hotel that they were making too much din in the early hours. They had spent the evening drinking expensive champagne in the bar then continued the party in one of the rooms. ‘That’s got to be a first,’ Carr said. ‘Me and a female making too much noise in the bedroom.’

• What must they think of us? Jim Davidson’s touring Australia, where he’s being billed as ‘Britain’s greatest stand-up comedian’. For no other reason that that, here he is singing a ballad to John Malkovick in the film Colour Me Kubrick?
  

• Sometimes it takes real ingenuity to be an entertainer. Mr Methane, the world’s only professional performing flatulist, has creating a new type of dart which he can fart at a target. He said the stunt came to him when he was touring with Bobby Davro in the Nineties. ‘Bobby used to tell me that any show needs a good start, an at-least average middle and a memorable finish,’ he told blogger John Fleming. ‘I figured that farting a dart into a large balloon attached on top of someone’s head in a William Tell manner would provide that finish. But, at first, I could not figure out the correct type of dart, in terms of weight and velocity. I was using 2.2 air rifle darts and they were too heavy so, they were too slow and did not straighten up enough to impact the balloon properly. Then, one day, a Japanese TV show wanted me to fart the dart into a balloon, so they studied my equipment and a videos of me farting a dart. Then they did what the Japanese do best – they improved the design and solved the problem. When I arrived in Tokyo, I was ceremonially presented with a custom-made, MK2 balloon-piercing darts kit... On taking the darts home to the UK, I ‘back engineered’ the product so I could construct them myself.’ His new design improves on the Japanese model by being more visible to the audience.

• ‘It’s funny the different reactions you get when you show people pictures of yourself dressed as a Thai ladyboy.’ Karl Pilkington

• Last week we reported how the Glee comedy clubs were suing Fox over the musical comedy series that bears the same name, claiming trademark infringement. But it’s not the first time club owner Mark Tughan has had trouble over names. When he started planning his first venue in Birmingham in the early Nineties, he was going to call it The Gag Club. But he was beaten to it by another comedy night around the corner. Reg Nice, who ran that club, instructed solicitors to take action against ‘passing off’. ‘After lengthy and expensive discussions, we reached an agreement whereby Mark agreed to change the name,’ he tells us from New Zealand, where he now lives and works as a stage hypnotist. Tughan, however, insists that Nice stole his Gag Club name, opening just a couple of weeks earlier than him. In the end, Tughan went for the Glee, and the rest is history. Not that Nice has any sour grapes, saying: ‘I wish Mark Tughan and his team all the best with his current legal battle.’

• Paul Sinha’s appearances on ITV quiz show The Chase has brought him new fans... and detractors. One of them thinks he looks like Benny from Crossroads, and made this video to make his point:
  

• Tweets of the week.
  NickMotown (@NickMotown): Seems my knowledge of Welsh towns is like my knowledge of the Bee Gees & the Chuckle Brothers. I'm fairly sure one of them's called Barry.
  jacques_aih(@jacques_aih): It's a good job we don't have the death penalty in England. We're rubbish at penalties.
  Bill Dare (@Bill_Dare): Scientists tried their experiment 15000 times and still aren't sure. Tomorrow I make ONE pilot show and that's all I get.

SOURCES: Twitter, The Sun, Press Association, Liverpool Echo, BBC, East Anglia Daily Times, Daily Star, Chortle/YouTube, thejohnfleming.wordpress.com, Shortlist, Chortle, YouTube, Twitter

Published: 23 Sep 2011