Why stars should think twice before calling out their critics

In 2018, while working as a freelance writer, I travelled three hours outside of London on a train, and then a coach, to review a music festival. I camped in the cold and the rain, waking up at 8am each morning to make sure I didn’t miss anything. When I got home, I filed what I thought was a generous review. I did not expect the organiser and the founder of the festival to find me on Twitter to tell me that I clearly hadn’t attended, or that my three-star review was full of lies. They were hurt that I hadn’t given it five stars. I was hurt that my hard work – complete with blood blisters, swollen glands and glitter that took two weeks to wash out of my hair – was now seen as a declaration of war.

As an editor and sometime critic specialising in pop culture, differing perceptions are par for the course. I find it skull-crushingly boring to see the same TV show or album receive nearidentical reviews across the board, or read identikit reviews of the same film. I inhale people’s opinions – the good and the bad, the funny and the touching, the flippant and the problematic – and exhale them. I don’t internalise them. I don’t agree with a lot of what I read, but I take something from it: someone else’s views. I go to certain people because I know, nine times out of 10, we think very, very differently (here’s looking at you, Camilla Long). Reviews can serve as a guide but they are also an artform in their own right. They entertain, inform and challenge readers. The writer AO Scott described criticism in his 2016 book Better Living Through Criticism as “art’s late-born twin”.

It was a second strange experience, then, to wake up in a foreign country at the end of 2019, on a parental-death-imposed holiday where work was as good as a million miles away, to find that a Twitter “storm” had started around one of my opinions. At that point in time, my existence was a comforting combination of workaholism, panic attacks and grief. My writing – which had started by blogging online and then writing for the likes of NME in my teens – never took itself too seriously. It came from that place where love, deference, humour and actual journalism coagulate. Yet, the creator of a major BBC crime drama – yes, that one – had taken it another way. Reflecting on a (very) short piece online, he described me as snide, and talentless, and said I shouldn’t be doing my job. Never mind that this was the dance that we had both essentially entered into by doing our jobs – him to create art that was to be judged, me to write and judge said art – I was wrong. I was a horrible person.

I am not one for Twitter beef – and also couldn’t face paying another £200 for data – so I left it. I thought that was it, until the same person resurfaced a year and a half later, just before the new series of thatcrime drama, wanting me