NI@K<I :FD<;@8E
TRAWLING through his Twitter feed most days, David Baddiel is greeted by a lot of what he calls “mad s***”.
Barmy ranting, toxic twaddle, vile abuse, etc.
“What’s weird about social media,” he tells me, “is that you can be talking about something else entirely and then suddenly you’re in a very dark place you didn’t ask to be in, because someone’s decided to send you messages saying the Holocaust never happened, or whatever.”
But aren’t these idiots best ignored? “It’s dangerous to do that, Mike, and to assume they’ll go away. “They won’t.”
David, it seems, has a smarter tactic. “Comedy is my primary weapon,” he reminds me.
“So I’ve always thought the best way to deal with these people is make fun of them.
“Apart from anything, they take themselves so seriously.”
To David it’s like ridiculing a heckler at a stand-up gig, only here his putdowns entertain an online following of more than half a million. They also serve a more serious purpose.
“Making trolls look stupid is good,” he says.
“People enjoy it. And it interacts with the negative in a way that forces it above ground.”
Social media’s dark side is something of a preoccupation for David Baddiel right now.
This interaction with online cranks is the subject of a new stand-up show he’s working on, Trolls: Not The Dolls. And the way the medium can be exploited by unscrupulous attentionseekers is the theme of a new film he pops up in, To Trend On Twitter, launched this weekend.
A darkly satirical comedy short, raising funds for kids’ cancer charity CLIC Sargent, To Trend On Twitter finds David narrating the tale of single mum Susie (Keeley-Jo Jupp), who gains online fame and fortune by shamelessly exploiting her baby’s terminal illness.
David says writer/director Andy Wooding, who also secured contributions from Inside No. 9 creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and actors Helen Lederer, Josh Whitehouse and Jason Flemyng, was “ahead of the game” when creating this storyline.
“Getting yourself noticed by creating a storm on social media has definitely become a thing now,” he says.
But he’s keen to stress that his own online life has plenty of plus points.
He recently published his fifth hugely successful book for children, the teacher/pupil body swap adventure Head Kid, and loves the upbeat feedback from his readers and parents.
Proud
That book, I notice, contains a cheeky reference to Three Lions, the classic England football anthem David cowrote and sang with comedy pal Frank Skinner and Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie.
“Yes, it had that huge resurgence this summer, and I noticed lots of kids singing it, so I thought: ‘Why not have it in the story?’”
But for David himself, isn’t Three Lions ancient history?
“No, no, it’s very much part of me.