Words Dept.: entry

It all started on Sunday morning, when I began one of my usual rants on Twitter about the terribleness of deathly Tim Lovejoy vehicle Something for the Weekend, which culminated in this tweet:

Unpredictably, this comment led to direct contact from Nicky Campbell and, since I’m not one to pass up the chance of wringing a blog post from the most meagre of material, I shall now analyse his tweets in order to make an assertion about his state of mind, personality, etc.

First contact was established by Nicky in the following tweet:

There are a couple of things to note here, the most obvious of which is Nicky’s use of “lol”. Since he’s a 48-year-old, often quite cantankerous Scotchman, I never thought he’d have used this kind of webspeak, which I tend to associate with floppy-brained twenty-somethings who rely on Facebook for their current affairs intake. I suspect he’s been taught it by a teenage family member. Or maybe he’s secretly a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger. The other thing to notice is that I never used the @NickyAACampbell username, so he must have some kind of alert set up for mentions of his own name. Perhaps all celebrities do this. Or maybe they don’t.

Obviously I wasn’t going to be deterred by Nicky’s lol-ing, so I followed up with another tweet:

On reflection, I can see why it might look as though I was pretty much begging for a follow-up response from the erstwhile Watchdog host, and the big man didn’t disappoint:

Fortunately, this is where the dumb, lolcatty Nicky takes a backseat and the frightening, sarcastic Nicky we all know and love makes a welcome return. Witness the heavy irony apparent in the “hugely relieved and grateful” part, followed by the possibly menacing “nice website” – which suggests he has looked at my website, knows where I (metaphorically) “live” and will be watching me carefully for future signs of insolence. (There is, admittedly, another “lol” in there but we’ll let that pass.) Others have interpreted this second tweet as a piece of reputation management, which is designed to disarm me and make me think he’s a nice guy.

I can’t make my mind up if Nicky Campbell is a nice guy, or if he’s essentially a madman who stays up at night scanning Twitter for signs of anti-Nicky Campbell sentiment. I kind of hope it’s the second one but unfortunately it probably isn’t.

Next Sunday: Watch in astonishment as  Tim Lovejoy launches a foul-mouthed attack against me on live television after I take the piss out of his tight sweater.