Elsewhere in today’s news, it has been revealed that Charlie Brooker (who clearly regularly mines by blog and Twitter stream for inspiration) intends to marry former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. Brooker’s involvement in this C-list celebrity story brought out the worst in users of the allegedly popular social networking tool. He maintains massive cuddleability among that certain brand of free-thinking, straight-talking, pathetic, greying liberal comedy wannabes who populate Twitter, meaning Huq’s name quickly started to trend. But might I offer the following tip to Brooker fans: If you want him to like you, and you obviously do, it’s probably best not to do what I saw someone do earlier, which is to call his wife-to-be a whore. Especially if you mention @charltonbrooker in the tweet.

And James Corden. Something to do with James Corden. You’ll have to Google it.

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.

Share / Save]]> http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/02/09/nicky-campbell-lol/feed/ 2 http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/18/adrian-chiles-beard-and-the-psychological-observations-of-graham-taylor/ http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/18/adrian-chiles-beard-and-the-psychological-observations-of-graham-taylor/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:34:35 +0000 David Quinn http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/?p=576 The growth of a beard obviously signifies a psychological problem within the wearer. Not my words, you understand, but those of former England football manager and beard expert Graham Taylor, who thinks people who “grow beards for no reason” are undergoing some kind of ongoing, possibly catastrophic, mood change.

Taylor was talking about Roy Keane, who grew a chinful of obscenely Santa-ish facial hair immediately before quitting as manager of Sunderland at the end of 2008. But it might be worth pondering his analysis in relation to poor Adrian Chiles (42), who looks more and more fed up by the day on BBC1’s The One Show. Nobody exactly knows what’s going on but he appears to have become moderately repulsed by co-host Christine Bleakley (30), who is said to be engaged in some kind of personal bedroom arrangement with pie-eating Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard (32). (The ages in brackets signify my pathetic nod towards celebrity journalism.)

As Marple Leaf summed up on Twitter last night:

That scruffy yam on #motd can’t mention Lampard. Just knicked his bird.

Meanwhile Robin Brown has meticulously compiled an entertaining list of descriptions of Chiles’ beard, including my own observation that it makes him look like

the violent alcoholic captain of a Victorian steamship.

I strongly advise you to go and look at it right now.

“For 50% off home insurance call us now!” – Stephen Fry

Wonderfully engaging stuff from the Direct Line home insurance ad.

“Plus, a thousand pounds’ worth of pet food to be won every week!” – Stephen Fry

A remarkable, seminal line from the deeply influential Direct Line pet insurance ad.

“You’re never sure of the best deal until you come to us direct!” – Stephen Fry

Another terifically entertaining line from the Direct Line pet insurance ad. Here, Fry illustrates clearly his Renaissance man credentials.

“You won’t find our deals on price comparison sites so we can give you savings!” – Stephen Fry

Powerful, sublime work, from the much admired Direct Line “Car Insurance Calendar” ad

“Right now, you can get twelve months’ cover for the price of ten!”  – Stephen Fry

A wonderful piece of delivery from the extraordinary Direct Line car insurance ad. One reviewer, YouTube user Clubby231, said of this: “My 7-year-old loves this advert.” I think this is something with which we can all agree.

I may have missed some off but I think this give’s a flavour of Fry’s unique contribution to British public life.

Next week: Celebrated quotes from Aleksandr, founder of ComparetheMeerkat.com

Within each of these categories, you can assume that the individual Twitterer is between 25 and 49 years old and has a full time job. As such, it’s unclear how they have the time to permanently frequent what is basically a chat room for old farts.

1. The famous person

Most famous people have several thousand followers but only follow a handful back. The reason for this is ostensibly because they fear stalkers but is really because they think they are better than “normals” like us. The exception is Stephen Fry, who tries to follow all his followers back. He even follows me, despite the fact that I stopped following him some time ago after I got bored with his tweets about African wildlife and being stuck in a lift.

2. The “social media specialist”

As many as 91% of all people on Twitter talk about nothing except Twitter*. These people, who are often men with trendy beards, are bafflingly popular on Twitter. This is mainly because they were among the first people to “get” it. As such, when everyone else finally “got” it between October 2008 and March 2009, these people already had 900 followers and, like the popular kids at secondary school, were able to attract more. They apply hashtags to everything and often say “haz” instead of “have” because this is how people on the internet speak. LOL!

3. The weird semi-stalker/spammer

Beware of people who have 46 followers but are following 1,289. The sort of people who live in places like “Sacramento, CA” and mention “Zen” or “life-coaching” in their profile. There is no explanation for what these semi-stalkers want. (Most people don’t block them because even though they say they don’t care about their own follower numbers, secretly they are happy to have lots of apparently harmless people bumping up their stats.) Spammers are similar to the semi-stalkers, in that nobody knows what they want. The difference is they use a grainy avatar that looks like Britney Spears doing something unusual with a carrot.

4. The PR consultant

Twitter is a godsend for PRs because it allows them to bolt half-arsed “web strategies” on to otherwise lacklustre campaigns, which they (correctly) assume will impress their clients. Many PR people pretend they are being conversational about something new they have discovered (a “funky new ironing board!”, a “revolutionary new tampon!”, etc) when in fact they are “creating online conversations” about something they are being paid to “create online conversations” about.

5. The relentless cross-poster

Since most people have nothing interesting to say in their daily lives, it’s understandable that most people on Twitter can’t think of much interesting to say either. Consequently, they set up some kind of automated service that aggregates lots of other stuff (blog posts, bookmarks and general web waffle) and churns it out incomprehensibly, with odd sets of brackets, dots and bit.ly addresses to the annoyance of the entire world. It’s the equivalent of walking into a room and yelling “Page 41 of the Guardian G2 section!”, then reading out the first sixteen words from the headline and intro before walking off. Then doing the same thing again five minutes later with page 42.

6. The person who thinks you give a toss about their record collection

We’ve all been to a house party where someone hogs the record player and plays dreary music, failing to notice that everyone else in the room lost interest in the Bluetones after that one single they did that was quite good in about 1994. The online equivalent is the Twitter link to the Spotify/Blip FM playlist.

7. Some lunatic at a conference

There’s always someone on Twitter who’s at a conference that’s demarcated purely by a hashtag, an apparently random series of lower-case letters and “09″. In fact, up to 97% of these conferences* are about social media and/or “online engagement”, presumably because these are the only types of conference where the chairman considers it acceptable for delegates to sit typing stuff into a mobile phone like a pig-ignorant teenager while somebody important is on stage doing a carefully crafted presentation. They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.

Considering all of the above, is it any surprise that 15-year-olds have found much better things to do with their time?

*All figures are made up

According to Fry, MPs doing things like claiming £2,000 of public money to have the moats of their manor houses cleaned (Douglas Hogg), or £35,000 for a “second home” in London that’s five minutes’ walk from the first, or £1,700 in a year on televisions and video recorders (Hazel Blears) is OK.

I’ve cheated expenses, you have.

he tells Michael Crick. Erm, actually Stephen, I haven’t. And most people I know haven’t either because in many cases they don’t have an expense account (let alone one running to thousands of pounds) and, unlike MPs, they know that if they get caught they’ll get fired.

He attacks journalists, claiming they are

a venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances.

Well, perhaps twenty years ago that rather lame cliché might have rung true but in fact being a journalist these days often doesn’t entail many perks. (I recently had a claim for a £2.50 train ticket turned down because I forgot to staple the receipt to the form.) Even if we accept the argument that unscrupulous journalists are an evil bunch of expense account abusers, the crucial difference is that unless they work for the BBC, the money they are wasting doesn’t come from the public purse.

Stephen is a man with a wonderful vocabulary. But he also strikes me as someone who loves the sound of his own plummy voice. Thus he goes on:

Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong like wars, things where people die, with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important, it really isn’t… it’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.

He really does say this. Honestly, he does. So perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves about the MPs who claimed for a £2,000 repair to his tennis court (Oliver Letwin) and £510 to stay in a hotel for one night (Michael Gove). Presumably Fry thinks none of this matters – and anyone who does is simply being “bourgeois”.

The argument that MPs’ expenses are irrelevant in the context of wars and other more serious stuff makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t care if someone dumps an empty fridge and a dustbin full of raw sewage (or “poo and widdle”, in Fryspeak) on our front lawn because, hey, global warming is much more of a concern.

Allison Pearson: The Mail on Sunday columnist commanded that we should all “look away now” in a piece on January 21, which was illustrated with a disturbing image that, in Pearson’s words, caused Jade, a mother of two young children, to resemble “a human sacrifice”. Unfortunately for the entire world, the columnist didn’t follow her own advice. Returning to the subject of Jade on 18 February, Pearson filled a few hundred more words on the subject, hypocritically thanking Jade for reminding her to get a cervical smear and “fighting like a tigress”.

Choice quote:

With her head covered with bald patches, her eyes full of fear and her arms wrapped protectively around her naked shoulders, Jade Goody looks like a human sacrifice… At what point do the cameras look away out of common decency? After years of gawping at inmates of the Big Brother house as they bitch, flirt, fight and have sex, does the concept of common decency even exist any more?

Martin Samuel: Writing in the Daily Mail on 5 March, Samuel made an irrelevant and utterly confusing link between Jade and the miners’ strike of 25 years ago (no, really), using the tale of “Bob” – a union organiser who joined a picket line at News International, lost his job and died of a brain tumour. Samuel reasons that because Jade has merely appeared on television and has never gone on strike in support of miners or newspaper workers, this makes her death “different” from Bob’s. He even invokes the ghost of Princess Diana in a column that, even by the Mail’s standards, is bizarre, cruel, nonsensical and stupidly pointless.

Choice quote:

The miners’ strike began 25 years ago yesterday. Few called the miners brave back then, whether working underground or gathered in anger around a doomed pit. These days, we have different notions of bravery. A 27-year-old mother-of-two from reality television dying of cancer in public, while her new husband contemplates his latest assault conviction and her publicist provides sound-bite updates of the latest setback, is one definition. How strange to destroy the principles of working-class Britain, and replace them with morbid sideshows, tragic little turns imbued with false significance. Bravery is about choice, and cancer forbids that. Jade Goody will leave a legacy of awareness, for as long as her story dominates news bulletins, but there was no design. She did not become ill to teach the world to have a smear test, any more than Princess Diana died to make sure we belt up in the back.

Carole Malone: The former Mirror columnist takes the award for Jade-related hypocrisy. As the Guardian recently noted, Malone has previously been vicious in her criticism of Jade, having variously described Goody as fat, talentless and thick. She even predicted that Jade’s kid would turn out to be stupid and hoped he would be “good at sport” because he had no chance of getting to university. However, Malone swallowed her words in order to churn out a simpering tribute in the News of the World on 22 February. If the money’s good, why worry about consistency, eh Carole?

Choice quote:

The truth is, I’m in awe of Jade Goody. I have been since I was in the Big Brother house with her and saw that for all her faults, her unfettered anger, her lack of education, this was a kind girl, a loyal girl, a strong girl… I don’t know why this young woman has touched me, touched us all, so profoundly — but she has. For me, it’s because I recognise I’m a coward and I know I couldn’t have fought this illness the way she has — with laughter, tears, optimism and always, till now, with the unerring belief that she’d be OK.

Rod Liddle: The Twatosphere’s founding father used Jade as a platform for his unique brand of comedy-free satire last August. In a monumentally distasteful article for the Spectator just days after Goody had been diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer, Liddle wrote that the “coarse, thick Bermonsdey chav” might have specified the need for a diagnosis of terminal illness as part of a contractual arrangement.

Choice quote:

I daresay we will be told very quickly indeed if it has not been caught early and there will be cut-out-and-keep diagrams of Jade’s cervix to help us all understand what is going on inside her. There may well be sidebar articles on the possible causes of cervical cancer and, in the rightwing tabloids, warnings about recreational sex to the nation’s young women — exposure to semen is suspected of causing pre-cancerous changes in the cervix and Ms Goody has had plenty of exposure to semen over the years, apparently.

In case you haven’t noticed, the bearded libertarian tossbag (I use these terms in the most respectful way possible) has a new-ish show on Sky 1 called Noel’s HQ. It’s essentially a forum for a baying audience of reactionaries to boo and hiss at bureaucratic meddling, political correctness and the overall “bonkers” nature of modern Britain. It’s like a living, moving version of Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail column.

In the most recent episode, screened over the weekend, Noel got a bit “heartfelt” over an incident involving a badly injured soldier, who’d had his plans to build a bungalow thrown out by local planners.

Following a helpful intervention by Keith Chegwin (the natural choice for reading out a dully-worded statement from a local council), Noel’s reaction was to blurt out (even though it was clearly scripted) that he doesn’t actually get paid for the show (the classic Smashie and Nicey “I do a lot of work for charidee” line, in other words) and to name a press officer who had foreseen the boorish tone of proceedings and advised his employer, Wealdon District Council, not to get involved. Then he began to yell at the camera in a most disturbing fashion.

Noel:

I think you’re at the heart of what is wrong with this country!

Cheggers:

Yeah!

It was at this point I was reminded of Alan Partridge and his infamous breakdown, which caused him to stuff his face with chocolate and drive barefoot to Dundee. For Noel, it can surely only be a matter of time.

Watch:

ITV’s timely attempt to tackle to hard-hitting subject, part of the Tonight strand, was on earlier and was called Is TV Too Rude? This hard-hitting and timely investigation exposed a brave “viewers’ jury” to a series of shocking TV and radio clips containing Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Jordan, each of whom vocalised a smorgasbord of popular expletives.

The jurors were made to hold up cheap cardboard signs with red crosses on them if they thought the programme in question shouldn’t have been broadcast. In some cases the clips were so rude that we – the viewers at home – weren’t actually allowed to watch them, while all were bleeped to the point of incomprehensibility. As you can probably imagine, it was deeply hard-hitting, not to mention spectacularly timely.

Predictably, the tie-wearing middle-aged bloke in the grey suit and neatly-combed hair thought virtually all television should be banned and that people who swear have got under-developed language skills (y’know, like monkeys). Whereas the slurry-voiced student with the lop-sided fringe and half-opened brown cardigan was more inclined towards the view that Fern and Phil should be permitted to clog ITV’s morning airwaves with loudly articulated swear-talk, so long as “freedom of speech” is maintained. (I exaggerate, natch.)

They also had some celebrity talking heads on, in order to tackle the hard-hitting issue. Jon “Gaunty” Gaunt (Sun columnist and former TalkSport presenter who was fired in November for calling a local councillor a “Nazi” and an “ignorant pig” live on air) represented the side of the right wing reactionary gobshite fat-heads, while Janet “Street” Porter mouthed off in favour of the greasy-faced sandal-wearing Hampstead-dwelling media village liberal elite who wouldn’t understand the normal, hard-working, family values-loving “British Public” if it phoned them up and boasted about fucking their grand-daughter.

And so half an hour of my life was wasted, reducing my use of the adjectives “timely” and “hard-hitting” to the level of pure sarcasm. Unluckily, Panorama’s no doubt timely and hard-hitting investigation into the issue, fronted by Frank Skinner and subtitled Have I Got Bad Language For You?, screens on Monday night. I’ve got my cheap cardboard sign with a red cross on it at the ready. The c**ts.

Firstly, what the hell is a “king prawn spoon”? It looks like a plastic black teaspoon with a thick maggot on it. You can see why they call it party food. It inspires that famous Christmas parlour game known as Bet You Can’t Eat One Without Sicking Up On To The Axminster.

Then there’s some unspecified deep fried thing that could possibly be a witchetty grub in batter. The mini gateaux look like bloodsucking jellyfish and the quiche slices bear a striking resemblance to emu vomit. “Bitesize mini hotdogs”? Kangaroo bollocks in pastry. UPDATE: All the idents can be seen here.

Part of the problem is the lighting, which bathes everything in a flourescent striplight glow. It’s like when you to go a nighclub and they switch the lights on at the end. Everything suddenly looks sweat-covered and hideous.

And why is Kerry Katona still considered a viable brand ambassador? She’s an alcoholic with a history of cocaine abuse who recently spent £19,000 on plastic surgery, for Christ’s sake! Does anyone look at this woman and think: “If that food’s good enough for Kerry Katona, it’s good enough for me!” The fact that she’s flirting with Christopher Biggins adds a whole other horrifying dimension. In one of the idents she seems to lunge in to kiss him full on the mouth but luckily the screen fades to black at the last moment.

And as for the advert featuring Kerry singing with Jason Donovan and Coleen Nolan… there’s just no need, is there?