Twitter

There's something that's been bugging me about Twitter, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I realise that it's a full-blown social phenomenon these days, since J showed it me and mere days later Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift. Even Richard Herring's on it now, so it is probably time for me to acknowledge it as lord and master of all.

But something about it was bothering me. First I thought it was because it seemed to be yet another step towards the near-total narcissism that began with blogging and accelerated with social networking sites. I realise I'm utterly compromised by this, but there's always a small part of me that wishes I had some of that English reserve that we used to have back in the fifties. I can only assume it got given out with the ration books, given how far into ourselves we've managed to retreat to today. God I hate us. As a race I mean. I can't wait for Skynet to come online so I can salute our new murderous cyborg masters and get it over and done with.

But that wasn't it. It was something else. Then I remembered Armando Iannucci. In paticular a scene in the Armando Iannucci Shows where a group of TV creatives try and think of a new hit series.

They start with 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' then progress through various versions of the show, like 'the best of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' and 'the making of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' before finally arriving at a whole series comprising entirel of 'The Best Bits of Chris Tarrant Holding a Cheque and Saying "But we Don't Want to Give You That" on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' - which they then begin to congratulate themselves for having thought of, with shouts of "we're so good at television".

And that's what I think microblogging amounts to.

This probably means I'm about a week away from getting an account of my own.

I couldn't find a clip of the sketch I'm referring to, unfortunately, but this is probably my favourite Iannucci sketch so you'll have to make do with it instead.