Monday 15 February 2010

FRY-UP, A HETEROPHOBE'S REVENGE

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

THE FILTH-O-GRAPH ON WEB BULLYING

......... the fear of Richard, a quiet blogger, who spends most of his time caring for his elderly parents in Birmingham. An idle message he posted on Twitter one Sunday last year unwittingly set off a explosion of hate.

He dared to suggest that national treasure and major tweeter Stephen Fry was “boring”. The actor,




experiencing a period of depression, replied to this mild (and many thought, fair) comment with the following message: “You’ve convinced me. I’m obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone.”

At this point Fry hopped on a transatlantic plane, leaving tens of thousands of the actor’s followers to bombard Richard with messages, stirred up in part by the actor Alan Davies, a friend of Fry, who called the Birmingham blogger, brumplum, a “moron” and other less polite terms.

At one point, Davies even appeared to condone smashing windows in the cause of “sticking up for your mates”.

Richard, reflecting on the event yesterday, said: “Nobody considered what effect it might have on me, someone who has never been in the public eye. I had thousands of messages pouring in, nearly all of them obscene.”

Fry, to give him credit, felt rather shamefaced about the whole episode when he stepped off a 13-hour flight and realised he had unleashed a mob.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't be the Mrs Fry who is writing the script for the remake of the dambusters could it? Where he is rewriting history as Guy Gibsons dow was called nigger. I believe the mission was also code named nigger but Mrs Fry is calling the dog nigsy not sure what he had codenamed the mission.

call me ishmael said...

It doesn't matter what he does, mr anonymous, an Oxbridger inside the charmed circle of celebrity, he could rewrite it as an episode of the Archers and an orchestrated tumult would cry: Genius!

Anonymous said...

Yeah , your probably right but who the fuck designed those threads, couldn't be the late not so great Alexanders ragtime band could it?

mongoose said...

Famous for being a clever, fat poof. or is a fat, clever poof? Oddly not as fat as all that nor as clever. We live in strange times.

The Twitterati? Machine-gun them down and give it not a second thought.

richard said...

for all his virtues as a military gent, Guy Gibson (whose courage and leadership are beyond reproach) was a very abrasive man who was disliked by many in his the squadron. the story goes that when Nigger was killed his body was urinated upon by the airmen.
no doubt, even if it's true, (i hope it isn't) the new film would do well to leave that bit out.
NB Nigger is now "Trigger"

call me ishmael said...

Don't even know what it is or what it does, mr mongoose, the name is enough for me, people twittering is ruinous shit as far as I'm concerned, happily dumbed-down to a few characters of spleen and bile and narcissism, so very Steven Fry.

I mentioned before, his piggish colonisation of the Wilde identity, I guess, now, with his world-beatng smut programme, his own is the more popular; revolting.

lilith said...

Richard Todd who played Guy Gibson was very handsome. He only died last December at the age of 92. He signed up for service the day after war was declared and kept very quiet about being an actor in case he was put in the Entertainment Corps. In movies he ended up playing opposite actors playing himself; surreal. The reason I know this is because I took an interest in a ship's cat called Simon who won a medal for protecting food stores and taking some shrapnel on the Amethyst. Isn't the internet wonderful?

Anonymous said...

Richard, why leave that bit out? I know the bombing was not as effective as the military would have liked but "there was a war on you know" and why the fuck is the dog now called trigger? When Londons third airport was being built in Port Stanley Falklands early 80's the construction workers were banned from calling the residents "Bennies" apparantly a reference to a Crossroad character who wore a woolen hat and was not the sharpest knife in the box. So they started calling them "stills" as in still Bennies. Am I entitled to my opinion? If so I will now call niggers triggers from now on don't want to upset anyone what would Mrs Fry have us call the 20 million or so triggers who were shipped out to be sold in the new world, holiday makers?

richard said...

lilith, Richard Todd made a great Guy Gibson who was himself a handsome man. His book "enemy coast ahead" is well worth a read. Written during wartime, it reveals his no-nonsense approach. As his own work hints (and Paul Brickhill allows in The Dambusters) the real Gibson was not quite as affable as Todd's version, to put it mildly.
As far as Nigger is concerned they should keep his name as it was, because it was Nigger. He has a plaque on his grave which says so. The historical fact is that that was the dog's name. Maybe the pilots will be portrayed as non-smoking, sober, and refraining from the utterance of Service epithets?