“Cullum deserves special mention, because he’s particularly odious – an oily sickening worm-boy, presumably grown in a Petri dish specifically for appearances on middle-of-the-road chat shows like this.
Swear to God, if I have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode ever again…I’m going to rise up myself and kill everybody in the world. Starting with him and ending with me…” – Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, May 2004
In 2010, Charlie Brooker stopped writing his Screen Burn column after over a decade of verbally flaying presenters, actors and plain old boorish boobs who’d bounced onto reality TV. He wrote a lengthy mea culpa that simultaneously rescinded all those insults and revelled in them. Why did he switch off the tap of 100% proof bile that had propelled him to fame? Ultimately because he is on telly now and frequently bumps into the very people he used to pick on. Hell, he’s married to a TV presenter.
I wonder if Brooker would ever have developed that hyper-aggressive style if the targets of his rage had been able to reply instantaneously from the start. Twitter didn’t exist when Brooker was penning TV Go Home, the caustic parody TV listings that help lift him to the high table at The Guardian, becoming that paper’s devil-eyed sayer of the unsayable. An angry letter or email is a far cry from a tweet fired off minutes after your column has gone live.
The quote at the top of this post is from a piece Brooker wrote about Parkinson. The very presence of Jamie Cullum on the show led him to penning a murderous fantasy where his killing spree ends with the jazz man “sealed in a barrel and kicked into the ocean”. Six years later, after his damascene conversion to the joys of a well-stocked green room and a nice fruit platter, Brooker said: “Jamie Cullum strikes me as a harmless, twinkly-eyed, happy sort of chap”.
In that same piece, atoning for his decade long imaginary killing spree through the ranks of light entrainment and reality TV fodder, Brooker recalls reading an interview with Jamie Cullum “in which he seemed cheerily bemused as to what he’d done to provoke such fury”. I have an interest to declare at this point: I wrote the press biography for Jamie Cullum’s record The Pursuit. In the process of doing that I interviewed him twice and was struck by just how goddamn nice he is. Before that, I like Brooker (though less aggressively), had joked about the friendly jazz hobbit.
But once I got to know the human being, the idea of making cheap cracks about him became difficult to imagine doing. For a start, he doesn’t deserve them. He’s a talented bloke who’s worked hard to do a job he enjoys. Seeing him heckled at Glastonbury when he appeared with Spinal Tap at the request of Harry Shearer was an unpleasant experience. Why did certain sections of the crowd seem to believe that his brief appearance playing keyboards was some kind of tolerated stage invasion?
Perhaps because columnists like Charlie Brooker have long delighted in saying unpleasant things about Jamie Cullum. Those statements might seem like passing slights but the sentiment lingers and comes together over time, feeds a certain sort of troll that likes to take those harsh words a little bit further. They’re the ones that forward tweets to people just to stir the pot and turn up at gigs to heckle.
Since he sloshed salve on the Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker has discovered a rather high horse to dispense his wisdom on the horror of crowds and the insults they peddle. A notable example was his column on the response to Rebecca Black’s Friday. He was right about how horrific some of the comments directed at a 13-year-old girl were but two paragraphs of that piece showed a startling lack of self-awareness:
“Many tweeters end up performing their opinions, theatrically overstating their viewpoint to impress their friends. Just like newspaper – but somehow even worse because there’s no editor to keep their excesses in check or demand a basic level of wit or ability.
And unlike columnists, they often aim their comments at an individual by addressing their username directly: the equivalent of texting hate mail straight to their phone. I’ve never understood the mentality behind this, but then I write to entertain crowds, not harass individuals.”
Charlie Brooker made his career from performing his opinions, theatrically overstating his viewpoint to entertain his readers. Unlike many tweeters who have extremely small audiences, his funny but brutal critiques of people’s physiques (Saskia from Big Brother had a “face that could advertise war”) were published to an audience of hundreds of thousands.
Brooker addressed the individuals he joked about directly, he simply did it in print and on a massively popular website. The difference was that The Guardian name gave his words legitimacy and offered a kind of barrier from subjects. There are lots of people on Twitter who are as funny as Charlie Brooker, they’re just publishing their thoughts at the wrong point in history to benefit from the platform he had.
I use Twitter to make jokes about people on TV and in public life all the time. Some people think they’re funny. Others don’t. The crucial difference from the halcyon days of Screen Burn, when Charlie Brooker could fantasise about brutally murdering popular recording artists or imagine reality TV contestants as foul animals, is that the subjects of my scorn can reply to me immediately and directly. On Twitter, we are all stood in the same massive room and my whispers in the corner can easily reach the ear of someone sat at the top table.
@-ing someone into a joke about them is the web equivalent of knocking on their door and shouting “twat” in their face. I’ve never done that and I never will. But plenty of people do and they’ll also take something you’ve written about someone on TV and forward it to them, either as a way of being cruel to that person or as an attempt to get you in “trouble”, a snitchy kid giving a note your were passing to the teacher.
I enjoy writing jokes on Twitter. I don’t do it to hurt anyone’s feelings. But when someone I have written about suddenly pops up in my replies column it stops me short. It’s quite easy to write about television and the people on it as if it is a magic box peopled by pixies that sits in the corner. When the box is off the pixies cease to exist and whatever you’ve said about them can’t hurt them, they’re off in pixie land.
My latest experience with the mental dissonance of suddenly speaking to someone I’d tweeted happened today. Dawn Porter, the self-described “face of clean bum holes”, replied to this tweet: “Dawn Porter is in Dublin. I assume that means the Washlets Tardis is here too.” “Wanna have a coffee? I’ll bring you a free pack of Washlets x” she said and so began a back-and-forth in which I swiftly expressed contrition about my string of earlier tweets joking about the bum wipes ad campaign.
Dawn has the right attitude to the whole Twitter jokes thing – in response to my apology: “Oh don’t be silly. I am the face of clean bum holes. It is to be expected x” – but it’s obvious that anyone who appears that frequently on TV and has 87,000+ followers must get their fair share of abuse. With my paltry 4000 odd, I get slagged off enough that my feelings get hurt every now and then.
The risk of coming virtually face-to-face with someone I’ve made jokes about doesn’t mean I’m going to stop tweeting about celebrities. But it does make me think carefully about what I choose to say and why. Ego surfing is as irresistible for prominent people as it is for Joe Schmos like me. Why is it surprising that Victoria Derbyshire might scan Twitter for instances of her name and pop up to tell me my opinion on her show is wrong? Or that it’s possible for me to pitch my idea for an egg timer shaped like his head to Gregg Wallace?
While there are plenty of prominent tweeters who act as if the service is an extension of a private member’s club where they need only converse with other celebs, there are plenty who listen to what the rest of us are saying. Sometimes they might not like what they hear. Other times, like me today chatting with Dawn Porter, we’ll realise our preconceptions might be a little skewed or as I said to my new celebrity friend (jokes!): opinions are like arseholes, they can easily be wiped away by a Washlet.
