Mumsnet and Twitter – the two big buzzwords for the 2010 General Election. Both come from the same sentiment: that this year’s election contest will be dominated by the power of social media, its spreading of memes and messages and spider web ability to trap and feast on gaffes.

But the Mumsnet election is a myth. The media likes the idea of Mumsnet holding great power in the election. It’s an exciting and erratic element just like trade union conferences where nurses would boo and barrack politicians. Mumsnet q+a sessions with party leaders throw up the prospect of discovering that they don’t have a favourite biscuit or are baffled by Eastenders.

It’s said the political machines see Mumsnet as a bellweather for the state of the women’s vote and it’s fast become a vital stop on the modern party leader’s media merry-go-round. It’s up there with This Morning and the probing political inquisitions offered by Fern Britton.

Mumsnet’s founders, Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton, are incredibly smart media operators. They’re running a business and they understand that inflating the power of their site is good for it. Politicians and political commentators have touted Mumsnet’s relevance, why should its creators disagree.

But Mumsnet is not some super-representative bi-partisan collection of mothers. Look at the stats: 50% of Mumsnet members have an income of over £50,000, 75% are in full time or part time employment. 70% are degree educated. Crucially, nearly half of them live in London or the South East.

Most articles on Mumsnet say vaguely that it has “a million or so members”. Its monthly unique visitor numbers are around 1 million. As someone noted on Twitter the other day, there are specialist technology sites with similar numbers. Mumsnet’s reach is dwarfed by the Daily Mail and Guardian websites.

And while Mumsnet has hosted q+a sessions with all of the party leaders, it has also run Labour Party advertising and harnessed Sarah Brown, ferocious social networker, former PR woman and wife of the Prime Minister, as one of its most energetic cheerleaders.

Mumsnet is an effective community for some mothers to share their experiences, make a connection with others in similar situations to them and to debate and solve issues. But like any forum it has its bullies and its zealots. To boil it down to some homogenous political force is reductive – the idea that there is some universal woman’s vote is like lumping Margaret Thatcher and Germaine Greer into the same category.

There’s a vast swathe of women that Mumsnet doesn’t represent and plenty of Mumsnet users who don’t necessarily agree with the political outlook or positions of the majority or the site’s founders.

While the shock troop hardcore of Mumsnet descend on any article that dares criticise the site, they are surely just a subset of the wider membership. Women’s voices matter hugely in the next election but let’s not allow Mumsnet be the media’s proxy for a real conversation.

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Duncan Bannatyne has a magic lawyer. This invisible creature has the power to turn an slightly ill-advised Twitter joke into the grounds for a legal action that would make the Iraq Inquiry look like a bunfight. Thankfully Duncey Wunky (as I like to call him) chose not to deploy his pinstriped dogs of war and instead encourage his army of spelling-mistake-scattering, ignorance-embracing followers on @sharongooner.

Gooner (not her real surname) has a good line in clever and not so clever puns which she sprinkles through her timeline. She’s like Bob Monkhouse with boobs, a cheesy joke machine – entirely harmless and often pretty hilarious. But she made the fatal mistake of mentioning the beast of Bannatyne and the wrath came down upon her from Dragon Mountain where Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis play table football with adult male footballers kebabbed onto skewers (Legal note: this is a surreal image for effect. They actually use dwarves).

Sharon Gooner’s joke was innocuous and wasn’t directly addressed to Bannantyne (there’s was no pointed @duncanbannatyne there to goad him into action). Her joke, a pun predicated on knowledge of tedious pre-antisemitism-and-wife-beating Mel Gibson vehicle Brave Heart and Bannatyne’s fellow Dragon’s Den judge Deborah Meaden:

“Duncan Bannatyne’s wife is having an affair. He bellowed at reporters: “You may take my wife but YOU’LL NEVER TAKE MY MEADEN.”

It’s neither hilarious nor harmful, it’s just a clever little quip in a string of puns. There’s context all around it. It’s clear from the construction that it’s a joke rather than a factual description of marital relations. Well, to any sane human it is. But not to big DB. He stormed in to Sharon Gooner’s timeline with firing off threats like a drunken sheriff in a low-budget western:

“Just so you know, if anyone believes your silly tweet & if it hurts my family I will sue you for as much as I can.”

And so the war of the retweets began after Bannatyne claimed Sharon Gooner refused to delete her tweet or apologise (which seems not to be the case). Beleaguered by attacks from Bannatyne’s vastly larger army of followers (he has 17,000+ compared to her 3000+ pun loving friends) Gooner began to retweet both the support and abuse she was receiving. 



Meanwhile over at the Bannantyne Cave, Duncan threw a spotlight on Sharon Gooner, nabbing her a nice collection of new followers but also an almost unstoppable torrent of bullshit and a fair smattering of death threats from knuckleheads.

The war is over now but the shouting still echoes in my head. How did Bannatyne come across the tweet, which was not directed at him? There’s two options: either someone who follows him and Sharon Gooner squealed (unlikely) or he has an ego search set up to tell him whenever someone mentions him on Twitter. The latter is more likely and it’s more common than you might realise.

I’m constantly nattering on Twitter and a big part of what I talk about is TV shows and radio. I’m not always that complimentary about the stars. I make what I like to consider light-hearted quips but some might characterise as caustic attacks. I’m like a TV critic with the tap turned on constantly, a stream of commentary, catcalls and occasional praise. That’s fine when you think the targets of your ire are trapped in the talky box but on Twitter, they tend to talk back.

Nicky Campbell seems capable of both wrangling the fundamentalists and borderline mental health cases that call into his morning show and responding to tweets that mention him (with @ or without). Either the 5Live presenter has the fastest fingers in show business (a potentially frightening thought) or he has someone monitoring all references to him and operating an instant rebuttal unit that would put New Labour in its propaganda prime to shame.

A few weeks back when Campbell was discussing Chris Moyles’s giant baby temper tantrum over pay, I commented on Nicky’s approach to the issue. Without referencing him with that pointed @ sign, I got a message within minutes from @nickyaacampbell challenging my points and then bounced back and forth in a conversation while the human Campbell batted away the most severe maniacs live on air.

Another incident happened a few days later when bemoaning the presence of corkscrew-haired restaurant critic Jay Rayner on two channels simultaneously and challenging him (in a tweet not addressed to him) to actually cook something himself, I swiftly received a retort from the man himself. Once again, a celeb’s Twitter ego radar had caught me in its beam. In fairness to Rayner he took my jibes in good humour and seems to have a tendency to engage with people on Twitter in a way a lot of well known tweeters don’t.

But these incidents – from the severe abuse suffered by Sharon Gooner to my vaguely embarrassing run in with Jay Rayner – show celebrities are actively scanning Twitter to see how they’re coming over. If the analogy of Twitter as one vast cocktail party holds true, these celebrities have installed vast ear trumpets which they can point towards your conversation and if they disagree, a megaphone to tell everyone what a tit you are. Beware: the Twitter ego radar is operational and you become the next victim.

Stephen Fry has returned to Twitter. It was like that time Ringo walked out during the recording of Let It Be, he was not pleased with the direction the material was going in and felt dejected there weren’t more song about Octopi and groovy underwater worlds (I may be a little confused here).

With Stephen Fry back on Twitter, all is right with the world isn’t it? No. Nope. It’s not. Because his return brings with it 2287 words by the man himself explaining why he was just kidding with those controversial comments on female sexuality. That’s fair, he probably was just messing around (however wrong the sentiments were) but the issue for me with his self-justifying blog ejaculation is yet another hysterical attack on journalists.

To sum it up (and I wouldn’t want to misquote him so read the original blog post here), Stephen Fry does as little publicity as he can on projects. He really hates doing it. Again, fair enough – junkets are just a form of slow torture for celebrities, forced to sit in clammy rooms being asked tedious questions by the amassed ranks of the press pack. If I had to do that I’d end up trying to chew off my own leg.

The point at which I start to lose my sympathy for dear old Stephen Fry (who I have enjoyed in many great bits of TV and even bumbling on about technology), is the analogies he chooses to describe the process of being interviewed:

“For reasons that should be obvious now if they weren’t before, I don’t give print interviews. I never consent to them any more than you, dear reader, would voluntarily consent to being mugged, raped or burgled.”

Yep, Stephen Fry is comparing the slightly irritating experience of being asked questions about his work and, on occasions when the PR handlers aren’t tough enough, his private life to being physically assaulted and raped. That is not playing with language, that is taking hyperbole to the extreme.

If Stephen Fry genuinely believes he has been abused by the media more than he has been indulged and doted upon he’s dead wrong. A clever, witty man when he wants to be, right now he’s being an insufferable, self-regarding bore. If he hates journalists so much, they should to a man and woman simply refuse to cover his utterances, deflating the overblown balloon of his ego in a vacuum of disinterest.

Read more on this story: A letter to Stephen Fry from the sewage factory

One day, Quentin Letts, Daily Mail sketch writer and all round unpleasant individual, woke up and thought to himself: “I’d really like to get someone sacked today.” So scouring Twitter he discovered @baskers, a civil servant tweeting about her life with a nice big disclaimer stating that her tweets are her “personal views, not the Depts.” 

That little sentence didn’t bother Quentin though. He blithely skipped off to file his copy, taking with his a nice bit stack of @baskers’ tweets with him. He opened his unpleasant and unnecessary attack with a nice distancing statement: 

“Social network site Twitter [Ed: for it is necessary to describe it thus to the General Melchett types that splutter toast crumbs over their copy of the Daily Mail on a Saturday morning], which is increasingly landing its users in legal difficulties for posting foolish remarks, may soon claim another victim…” 

Clever old Quentin, pretending that’s not exactly the aim of the paragraphs that follow. He’s like Machiavelli in slacks this one. So Quentin continues, painting a picture of a vile drunkard [this remember coming from a hack, the most drunken, morally debased creatures known to man besides MPs – I should know I am one]: 

“A Whitehall official has been Tweeting about her drunkenness , boasting about how pointless she thinks some of her work is and how much she dislike the Government’s deficit reduction.” 

That sounds to me like a fair description of the average daily conversations of about 85% of British workers. But in the fairy tale world of Quentin Letts, it’s a bally disgrace. So Quentin did what any snot-nosed, prefect snitch would do in hope of another merit badge, he called @baskers bosses: 

“I rang her department yesterday to tell them, there was a cold pause before someone promised to ‘get back’ to me. He never did.” 

Possibly because he had to go to his boss and share the news that some prick from The Daily Mail had just rung up about an entirely pointless topic but was desperately hoping to spin it into a genuine furore. 

Dear old Quentin, then goes on to castigate Sarah Baskerville for daring to tweet that she has a hangover and the horrendous crime of being friends with Sally Bercow, the speakers’ wife. At no point does he prove that either of these horrific abuses of power have actually affected her ability to do her job. 

Quentin Letts, like a pigeon that feeds on bullshit swooped down on @baskers and has deposited the full force of The Daily Mail’s crap on her doorstep. She has done nothing to deserve his opprobrium and, as usual, he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

See the full Quentin Letts piece here without having to give The Daily Mail any hits. 

The makers of Smartr have given me early access to the iPhone app (note to developers – I bloody love when people do that) and it is brilliant. I know that’s not quite the thorough review you’re looking for, so here’s the rest of my thoughts on it… 

Flipboard on iPad got a lot of tech commentators (particularly Scobleizer) frothing at the mouth. Smartr could do exactly the same for iPhone. in Smartr, you add your Twitter details to the app and it pulls in all tweets that include links or photos, displaying an inline image and a nice preview of the content on the other side. 

Select an interesting link in Smartr and you’ll get the info in an Instapaper style clean view with a link at the top to make it easy to jump to the original source. It’s also simple to favourite stories you’re interested in to pull them into your favourites list and keep things for later. It also makes it very easy to tweet stories you’re reading straight from the app. 

Smartr isn’t a new Twitter client, it’s a brilliant way of reading all the words that your Twitter timeline throws at you. If it (and I sense it will) adds other services too, Smartr could be the killer app for people with busy Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr timelines with an appetite for consuming tonnes of links. 

I started @cakeriot on a whim last week and since then it’s gone pretty crazy with groups started across Britain from London to Cambridge to Swansea to Glasgow. Over in Ireland, @dannifromdublin is leading the Dublin Cake Riot like a sexy Joan of Arc without the whole bonfire unpleasantness. 

If you’re not au fait with what #cakeriot is all about check out this page and head to the Facebook. The whole point of Cake Riot is to organise a fun event which is purely about people connecting.

Inevitably there have been griefers who’ve attacked the idea and suggested that I’m somehow anti-students or ultra-pro-police. I’m neither. I’m anti-violence as I don’t believe it is an effective way to make your point. Violence gives those in power a reason to ignore your arguments and focus on the violent actions. 

We need to keep the promotion for #cakeriot going. The event takes place on December 5 and in the meantime we need more cities and countries to join the movement. We also need to get tea vans at the events and to find out if anyone fancies donating cakes. Know a cafe owner or a PR for a big cake or confectionary company? Email me and let me know or hit Facebook and share the knowledge. 

Thanks again to everyone who has got involved with Cake Riot. It’s so encouraging to see people taking up a funny and fun idea and running with it. A lot of the news right now is miserable and there are serious issues we all need to address but for a few hours on December 5 we can all rally around a standard emblazoned with the image of delicious cake. Buns not bombs. Cake not kettling. We are Cake Riot! Hear us munch! 

A tweet by @buddhamagnet got me thinking yesterday. He said: “The Wikileaks situation is now firmly centred in personalities rather than issues like everything else in our inch-deep culture.” I know where he’s coming from but that tweet itself is indicative of a lazy, soundbite culture that’s encouraged by our amphetamine-brain Internet culture that’s desperately jonesing for a new bit of cool looking info to feast on.

ALL political stories are about personalities. That has nothing to do with our X-Factor obsession or the growth of other forms of insidious reality TV. The Cuban missille crisis and its solution was about personality (Kruschev vs Kennedy), the battle to introduce health care reform in the US is about personality (Obama vs those republicans who want to fiercely cast him as un-American and other).

Like those Electoral Commission adverts that forcefully made the point that almost every issue in life is political, I don’t think you can cut the personalities out of politics. To speak specifically to the Wikileaks issue, the Messiah complex exhibited by Julian Assange is a big element in the scandal and furore around the site’s disclosures. Assange perpetrated a knock-and-run on the US government like a naughty school boy. He stole their dirty knickers from the washing line.

If you follow politics and you bang on about wanting people to “focus on the issues” and not the personalities, you don’t understand politics. The personalities are the issue.

There are many things it is inadvisable to confess on Twitter – murders, an admiration for Nick Clegg, that time you picked a carton of takeaway rice out of the bin while hungover – but today I discovered another. Do not, under any circumstances, confess to even vaguely liking Love Actually. Bad things will happen. 

I was spurred to mention the most saccharine of Richard Curtis confections by a press release sent by that other Twitter bête noire, John Lewis. I castigated the upmarket department store and purveyor of dog’s heads in decorative boxes for this line: “The crescendo moment in Love Actually when Emma Thompson receives a Joni Mitchell compilation album is every woman’s worst fear.” 

Poor old Joni Mitchell. See, Emma Thompson’s character is actually pretty fond of Joni, it’s the fact that she spotted her husband, Severus Snape, buying some expensive jewellery which did not make its way to her but ended up instead with his secretary. This being a Richard Curtis flick, Snape doesn’t actually diddle the devilish floozy by the franking machine but the damage is done anyway. 

No one had an issue with my unprompted plot point picking but then I went too far and confessed: “I quite like Love Actually. You may lose all respect for me now.” A stream of responses chiding me followed including Danni’s rather brilliant eight word review: “It’s like watching 90 minutes of Iceland ads.”

And there is lots to hate about it. There’s the bit where Egg off of This Life, before he went American and started nixing zombies, does a Bob Dylan and reels off his love for his best friend’s wife using sneakily written cue cards. Then there’s the syrupy opening monologue in which Hugh Grant references 9/11 to support the premise of a lightweight romantic comedy. In fact, there’s so many bits that are brain-achingly awful, I could use up this entire post listing them.  

But somehow I can overlook the awkward plot lines and the irritating bits. Bill Nighy is brilliant, Martine McCutcheon does some actual acting rather than simply hawking yoghurt and Hugh Grant is more fun as a charming Prime Minister than getting red-faced about red tops at the Levenson enquiry. 

Nothing truly terrible is allowed to happen in Richard Curtis land. That’s probably why I actually like Love Actually. It’s the most idealised Christmas imaginable. It snows but public transport still works and the Prime Minister knocking on doors in search of a woman he loves isn’t greeted with an outbreak of public disorder or a tabloid expose. 

Still, I realise that there’s little point in pleading the case for an 8-year-old rom/com. You either like it or you don’t. Instead, let me end with a piece of news that may unite us all in festive good cheer: a Christmas Pudding milkshake is now on sale. Surely that’s a Christmas development we can all get behind. 

If arguing with people on the internet was an Olympic sport, I might make the b-team of a regional side made of slightly aggrieved John Lewis customers complaining on Facebook and a man who once got upset about a misplaced apostrophe (long before the whole Waterstones/Waterstone’s thing made it fashionable). 

I’m pretty terrible at arguing with people on the internet because my feelings get hurt fast. It’s a throwback to school days where, for quite a number of years, bullies could turn me into a human sprinkler of tears and snot with a well-aimed barb about my mum/my haircut/my devotion to Judge Dredd and his no-nonsense approach to crime prevention. 

Over time I honed my ability to throw back a sarcastic comment or barbed insult but if face-to-face rows are sword fights, online spats are lobbing mortars across no-man’s land: there’s a good chance you’ll miss entirely but the direct hits do more damage. It’s also easier to find yourself facing an ‘enemy’ with far more resources at their disposal. There now follows a Twitter case study…

THE BATTLE OF FREETOWN 

This week, film-maker and screenwriting tutor Jon Spira responded to some tweets from actor and writer Emma Kennedy about whether young writers should ever work for anyone who does not pay. Little did he know that he was about to find himself facing accusations of harassment and be painted as a nasty, green-skinned troll man. You can read his take on what happened here and here. 

To be fair, Emma Kennedy says three of her tweets that preceded the conversation with Jon Spira were not included in his account. But what he did replicate was a screenshot of their entire back and forth. It quickly moves from a disagreement over when and if writing for free for organisations with a budget is ever reasonable into something bitter.

Neither party was entirely innocent but it certainly seems like Kennedy got aggressive first and was more ferocious throughout. So what? The content of the disagreement isn’t what I’m interested in. It’s what came next. 

THE BLOCK VOTE 

From the public tweets, it’s clear that Kennedy engaged in a running debate with Spira when she could have stopped at any point. In the end she blocked him, which she obviously has every right to do, and publicly accused him of harassing and tracking down her details when he sent an email to the address on her website.

She didn’t ignore the email but instead wrote a reply and engaged in another dialogue which concluded with a threat to report him to his employers for harassment. Others on Twitter claim this isn’t the first time she’s made that kind threat. 

Once Spira’s blog post began to be shared, it prompted more tweets from Kennedy continuing to paint him as a crazy harasser who had dug up her email address. She attacked him as a horrific troll and a “mentalist” who had bombarded her with endless tweets rather than someone who had a marginally different opinion to her on one topic. The emails he sent to her and published on his blog were, as described by her, “vile”. 

In one of her own emails to Spira, Kennedy refers to a chapter in Grace Dent’s book How To Leave Twitter called “The terrible unfollowed me email of doom” telling him: “There’s a whole section on people who send essay length emails to people who have blocked them. Go away. You are no better than a troll.” Spira’s initial email ran to nine short paragraphs and was clearly intended to clear up what had become a needlessly aggressive encounter. Ironically, Grace Dent no longer follows Emma Kennedy. 

IF YOU FOLLOW ME… 

It might seem faintly ridiculous that I am even taking the time to detail this minor skirmish in the endless Arguing With People On The Internet tournament. But there is something quite unsettling about witnessing prominent tweeters who seem to have gone light headed at the summit of their mountain of followers. 

Emma Kennedy’s online persona and the one that she presents in her Guardian travel columns and books is a kind of whimsical adult Enid Blyton adventurer act. She addresses Twitter as if it were a big gang bounding around an idealised boarding school where she moons over more popular girls (Caitlin Moran and Grace Dent) and larks about with other famous folk. Good on her if that’s what she enjoys. But based on quite a few anecdotes it seems she’s has a rep for lashing out when people don’t see things her way.

The lesson that Jon Spira learned was that it doesn’t do to disagree with Emma Kennedy. I am now summarily blocked, not for directly contradicting her words but for sharing Spira’s blog posts. Highlighting a rather pointed amendment someone had made to her Wikipedia page probably didn’t help either. 

I can understand how someone with tens of thousands of Twitter followers can end up feeling miserable and under attack when people descend to criticise them. While that’s what the block button is there for, Twitter can be like stumbling into a room full of people who want to kick you in the shins and spit on your best work as much as it can be an amazing party packed with brilliant people telling you astounding stories.

I have a fraction of the followers Emma Kennedy has and I’ve definitely received replies that have made me feel like I did back when I was picked on school boy. But sometimes people won’t agree with what you have to say and they’ll try to debate with you. That’s what happens if you share your thoughts and opinions in public. 

If there was a spotter’s guide to internet creatures, it would note that people who disagree are not necessarily trolls. They could just be people who think differently. Giana Trapani who has even more followers than Emma Kennedy, 200,000 in fact, posted a good piece on the challenges of dealing with a large following just today.

As a minor league Arguing With People On The Internet player, I prefer that non-contact version where you play the ball and not the man. I don’t always succeed. I’ve certainly been guilty of foul play in my time but when someone like Emma Kennedy who has an army of followers plays dirty against someone who has a far smaller platform to defend themselves, it’s an unedifying spectacle. She was arrogant and unpleasant. 

I’m sure if Emma Kennedy read this blog she’d conclude that I’m just another horrible troll man attacking her for no reason and failing to appreciate the subtle nuance of her finely-honed arguments. But I’m not. She’s just an example of the way things can go a little bit wrong on Twitter when big egos are further swelled by a big platform. 

There’s a class of prominent Twitterers in the UK who really do believe that they make the rules and that, by and large, the people that follow them are there to listen and pay homage to their charming banter with the important people (anyone who has a book/TV series/film to point to). Dare to disagree with them, even in friendly way, and you’re running the risk of being shoved under the bridge with the trolls. 

Emma Kennedy has now written about her view on Twitter spats on her blog and Jon Spira has responded noting that he didn’t know she’d blocked him when he emailed her. If you disagree with me, let’s have a game of Arguing With People On The Internet on Twitter.

“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.