Robin Brown

There’s a lot of absolute bollocks written about Twitter, usually by self-styled social media evangelists, clueless hacks on rubbish newspapers or self-important ‘communicators’.

In addition, I’ve noticed a lot of friends I’ve recommended Twitter to use it for a few days and then drift away, clearly non-plussed.

I don’t blame them, it took me a couple of goes to get Twitter, and I’ve lost interest in a few other social media sites before getting to grips with them, but Twitter really is worthwhile.

So, I thought I’d compose my own guide to Twitter that isn’t filled with self-promoting nonsense. It won’t make you rich, get you a better job or guarantee you 1,000 followers, but you’ll gain a valuable and interesting tool to play with when you’re supposed to be working.

I’m sure there are other, much better guides out there, but hopefully any old dunce can understand this one.

• Decide why you want to use Twitter. If you only want to post about your breakfast, your trip to work, your dislike of work, your vague feelings of alienation, your illness, your tea and your bath I’d suggest you try Facebook instead.

If you want to make contact with people in a particular profession or interest, Twitter is definitely for you.

If you just want to promote yourself, that could work too, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

• Create your profile, and bear in mind the kind of the image you want to project with your handle, picture, bio and website link. This is how you’ll be judged when people decide whether to follow you in return.

If people don’t follow you, you can’t interact with people, which is the whole point of Twitter.

• Do not, under any circumstances, protect your updates. What’s the point? This is social media. No-one will follow you.

• Search for 50-100 or so people in the area you’re interested in. I followed people in journalism, motoring, Liverpool, sci-fi and music.

• Watch what happens for a few days. Get to grips with the rhythm of things, and particularly the etiquette. Work out how direct messages, @ messages and retweets (RTs) work.

• Post a few introductory tweets explaining what you’re doing on Twitter and why you’re there. Post a few interesting links, RT those of others and offer some comments.

• Start to interact with people: asking questions, praising links, offering comments.

• Don’t ask for more followers or for others to retweet your links. It just makes you look like a bit of a twat.

• Celebrities: Don’t expect them to follow back or reply.

Where you take it from there is up to you. I use Twitter to promote links, to build networks, to tout myself around for freelance work and make connections, but in the main I use it because it’s fun and informative. It helps me in my job, and it amuses me in equal measure.

If you take the same approach, I reckon that’s more than half the battle.

I don’t claim that this is the be-all-and-end-all, and if you disagree that’s fine. But I reckon it’s a good primer for the social-media novice.

If you want to follow me I’m @robinbrown78 and @motortorque.

Other posts of mine on Twitter:

#welovethenhs

Who is behind Twitter denial-of-service attack?

Is blogging dead? Why do I blog?

Americans confused by Mrs Slocombe’s pussy

Twitter bums Daily Mail Online

What would my Twitter page look like if I were a social media evangelist?

In the good old days any crime spree, natural disaster, assassination or horrific disease outbreak (remember ebola?) would result in a media frenzy.

These days, as well as the media climax, there’s a collective social media jizzing over such events, so desperate is everyone to be the one to break the news, or offer their inevitably dull and/or self-important musings. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony).

There’s a faintly obsessive need on Twitter, in particular, to report on the slightest aspect of any new detail of what can actually be a stultifying unimportant or irrelevant event.

There are a number of watershed events of late that have broken Twitter to wider masses, and the G20 protest earlier this month showed how social media can change the game, but I suspect what looks like a forthcoming flu pandemic may be the first ongoing global event that has covered so comprehensively by the web and so-called ‘citizen journalists’.

Whether welcoming the zombie apocalypse, the inevitable ‘I have swine flu’ post, posting endless links to FAQs around the web, collecting conspiracy theories, posting Google Maps mash-ups, creating unfunny LOLpigs images, or just spewing out pointless jabber on it, Twitter is awash with swine flu.

This raises fascinating possibilities for the media scholar, but it also prompts the horrific possibility of a never-before-seen insight into what it’s like for huge numbers of people to die while struggling gamely to complete their latest tweet.

Depending on your point of view, or the severity of the outbreak of swine flu, this is either something out of a horror film or potentially rather amusing.

Already on Twitter there’s a kind of unofficial punology on swine flu, with Guardian technology bod Charles Arthur collecting bad puns, and Liverpool music type Jonathan Deamer suggesting songs that reflect the latest global apocalypse (here’s mine).

Meanwhile an old friend of mine on Facebook suggests:

If you’re ACTUALLY worried about contracting swine flu, I’m sorry to tell you, you’re an idiot

On a geeky forum I frequent I read this from someone who works in public health and has ‘contacts’ in the World Health Organisation:

I’m involved in a couple of projects that would help to stockpile vaccines within two weeks or so of an outbreak of a new strain of flu, but the lag time is several months using current manufacturing systems.

The traditional media has gone into its usual Four Horsemen mode, with exactly the kind of OTT graphics, music and doom-laden voiceovers so lambasted by the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Charlie Brooker. Dave Quinn notes that reporters have now absurdly taken to wearing masks.

Meanwhile PRs everywhere – oblivious to the absurdity of their activities at the best of times – have started putting out press releases on the back of swine flu that don’t bear the vaguest relevance to their core businesses.

A press release from the Road Haulage Association winged its way to me today, assuring me that everything the freight group could do was being done. Phew.

Ragan, PR experts who I generally admire, sent me no less than four emails today on how to talk to my staff about swine flu.

And another journalist friend of mine put other hacks on notice that the next few days could be a good time to bury bad news, a la Jo Moore.

So, the whole world, media, Web 2.0 and the bloke next door has gone swine flu mad, even though the calmer reports I’ve read seem to suggest that it’s probably nothing to worry about.

Of course, this could all turn out to be a huge joke at our expense. I don’t sense the panic that these things used to bring, I remember being chilled to the bone by the prospect of ebola and its horrifying symptoms, because everyone on the web is so inured that being vaguely diffident and jaded is de rigeur.

Let’s just hope that the optimists and the calmer voices are correct, and the human race isn’t wiped off the face of the earth. All those smug tweets are going to start looking pretty stupid if so, and I’ve no desire to read the first tweet consisting solely of a death rattle.

And I didn’t even make a swine fever joke.

• Picture by Dave Quinn

It may sound like an unsuccessful pitch to the BBC from Alan Partridge, but against all expectations Extreme Fishing with Robson Green is one of the most addictive programme on TV at the moment.

I have no interest in fishing and my prior knowledge of Green stemmed from his assault on the charts with Badger, and his appearances in many tedious and/or earnest TV dramas.

Judging from these previous sources, one could fairly expect Green to be one of the most boring men in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What emerges from Extreme Fishing is an image of Green as an excitable, garrulous and rather childish ball of geordie energy. It makes him utterly loveable.

He leaps all over the screen with the unstoppable enthusiasm of a toddler, shouting and yelping to himself in excitement and keeping up a running commentary that you suspect he’d maintain if a camera crew were not in evidence.

Green’s monologue is peppered with ‘Why aye!’s and ‘Bonnie lad!’s, and he often makes an ‘extreme fishing’ mime to indicate his pleasure when noise precludes further speech.

“Yes! Get in! I friggin’ love fishing!” he shouts in one episode. That is beyond doubt.

When TV personalities comprise the anodyne or the self-aware, Green’s enthusiasm is magnetic and infectious.

His ingenuity and lack of side make for a rare sight on TV these days and he has enough natural charm and humour to make it obvious that he knows he’s an utterly ridiculous character. It makes him even more likeable.

In these miserable times, and on uninspired TV schedules, Extreme Fishing is a pleasing, and hugely unlikely, hit.

Another daft ‘What if…?’ mock up.

Chamillionaire about to donate £5,000 to a youth club in Swansea

“…the mystery of multi-storey car parks…the poetry of abandoned hotels”

“In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom”

Ballard exhibition

I was sad to hear of the death of JG Ballard, certainly one of my favourite authors, if not the favourite. In fact, oddly, I’d only just dusted down a previously-lost copy of High Rise when I heard of the rumours of his death on Twitter.

Since Ballard himself described his early life – framed by hardship and tragedy – in Empire of the Sun and his dalliances with booze and drugs, odd fascinations and exotic lifestyle are well documented, there doesn’t seem to be any point in repeating them here.

Suffice to say the one thing I found most fascinating about Ballard was that he lived most of his adult life in Shepperton.

Despite the fact that the London suburb seems like the apotheosis of suburban boredom, Ballard was well-travelled, well-versed and seemingly experienced in all aspects of life.

His devotion to, and fascination with, Shepperton seems to me to be indicative of Ballard’s peculiar talent to see the everyday in a way completely at odds to others.

The dull descriptions of Ballard’s work as science-fiction or ‘cult’, which the BBC has bafflingly decided to label Ballard’s canon, don’t really get to the nub of what made Ballard tick.

Environmental and apocalyptic disaster, surrealistic dreamscapes and societal collapse certainly form the basis of much of Ballard’s early work, but he increasingly turned towards thrillers that were really concerned with psychopathology and society through a prism of uniquely Ballardian murder mysteries.

His latter realist works, including Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come concentrate on people struggling to come to terms with technology, architecture and a civilised society that counterpoint unconscious base desires and instincts.

All of Ballard’s work is intriguing, challenging and unsettling. His worldview has given rise to the adjective Ballardian, generally used to describe dystopia and recently used by myself to refer to Liverpool One, the city’s new inner-city retail and leisure complex.

With Ballard gone, I wonder who else there is to describe our everyday lives and society with the same weird, unsettling insight as that of JGB.

• There’s an entire website devoted to Ballard, his work and that inspired by the man at Ballardian.com and another at JG Ballard.

• Image by conde_erlette via Creative Commons from the exhibition JG Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium.

Well. Who’d've thunk it. In the end Red Dwarf – Back to Earth came up with the goods in the third and final episode, finally giving some meaning to the resurrected Red Dwarf.

In a twist that I’d suspected since about half way through the first episode, but turned out to welcome, it all turned out to be a dream. Normally this would count as a massive cop-out, and indeed it was here.

But I’ll be surprised if there’s a RD fan out there who didn’t welcome it, so far had the new episodes gone beyond anything that was recognisably Dwarf-esque.

Still, what we’re let with is, frankly, a sprawling mess of new episodes that feel at least two rewrites away from being a serviceable TV script. While the last episode of Back To Earth rescued the series from a terrible and bizarre end, it didn’t excuse the previous two episodes of utter dross.

Many of the faults still remain. The lack of a laughter track saps the programme of it soul; Doug Naylor’s leaden and amateurish direction is a distraction and annoyance; the lack of laughs is an obvious and debilitating problem; and the sheer post-modern meta-ism of it all is confusing and discombobulating.

But what works brilliantly, in the end, is all of the famous Red Dwarf touches. In the last ten minutes of the 90-odd that made up Back To Earth there’s humour, pathos and self-awareness.

Anyone who has followed the series cares about the characters and the series’ legacy, and the conclusion of the episode delivers everything a fanboy could want.

So, the gibberish and laugh-free first episodes finally make some sort of sense, albeit massively qualified. Was it worth it?

No doubt Dave thinks so, viewing figures for the pilot were through the roof – although they fell off a cliff the next day, no doubt a reflection of the terrible critical reception the first episode received – and will have delivered the biggest audience by far the digital channel has ever received, having been spun out over a Bank Holiday weekend.

I think that decision will have made commercial sense, but it absolutely crippled Back To Earth from a qualitative point of view. Even if you factor in the Dwarf-affirming climax, its return was not a success overall. There are still too many factors to bear in mind about what went wrong – and its problems are legion.

Back To Earth is, I think, a bit of a trailblazer in how digital television will start to encroach on typical providers for original programming. It will deliver content not driven by quality, but by commercial considerations.

It makes one wonder how a resurrected Doctor Who would have fared under a channel like Dave if the BBC had never come to its senses. Badly, is the inevitable answer – whatever you think of Who under Russell T Davies.

Does all of this matter at the end of the day? I dunno. I thought Red Dwarf was past it at series seven in the mid-90′s. Having plumbed the depths in the first four fifths, Back To Earth just about pulled it out of the fire.

But though I’d lap up another series as good as any of the first six, I’d abhor another effort like Back To Earth that risks everything for one last shot. I love those characters as I loved the series. I’d rather remember them in their pomp: heroic, hilarious, human.

Better dead than smeg.

• Edit: I wrote this, appalled, after seeing the first episode. For a more thorough and balanced analysis check out Back to Earth: In retrospect.

All my fears confirmed – the new Red Dwarf is as incoherent, not remotely funny and totally unfamiliar in tone as I suspected it would be.

It was like watching a particularly amateurish fan film that has somehow managed to reassemble the old cast, who just about managed to get through their lines while stumbling to rediscover their old characters.

Clearly under-rehearsed, the cast do their best but there was one single line in the whole 25 minutes that raised a snigger.

Whether understandably rushed, or whether the direction received was insufficient or confusing, Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn looked sadly out-of-sorts.

Without a live audience to riff off, the performances seem stiff and awkward, but the woeful direction is the worst culprit. For some reason – cost-cutting at a guess – Doug Naylor has taken the helm and proved to be one of the worst directors of all time.

Edits are rough, camera angles odd and the actors ill-at-ease. Worst of all, though, Back to Earth just doesn’t seem remotely like Red Dwarf. It’s utterly unfamiliar, so there’s not even the nostalgia factor there.

This is a common problem with TV remakes, now that everything is high-def or at least shot digitally. The Beeb’s Dwarf was traditionally filmed in the old BBC four-camera studios on videotape.

Dave’s Dwarf has multi-panning fast-editing unconvincing CGI shots that move it so far away from what we know and love, it may as well be a different programme.

Holly is gone, the sets don’t look remotely similar, the characters seem once-removed from the foursome they were in the original series.

Everything that was lovable and recognisable about it has gone as a result. In all honesty Red Dwarf lost it the second Rob Grant departed, and never looked to me to get anywhere close to the highs of the first six series.

As if to illustrate the seachange in quality and tone, Dave screened Gunmen of the Apocalypse straight after Back to Earth. It was a serious error that only served to highlight just how poor Back to Earth was.

It’s gratifying, albeit grimly, to see the Metropolitan Police being brought to account over the death of Ian Tomlinson, a blameless newspaper seller whose only fault was to wander in front of some trigger-happy policemen during the G20 protests last week.

In a series of moves that will be depressingly familiar, the Met has gone through a number of versions of its story concerning what interaction its officers had with Tomlinson. I’m not going to go through the sequence of events, as they have been exhaustively covered in the press and wider media.

What is clear is that, even accounting for some likely confusion about what originally happened, the Met has been lying again in an attempt to cover up the over-zealous violence of its officers, and been embarrassingly caught in act of lying once again.

Those who witnessed the squirming that went on during the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry will have a weary sense of deja vu alongside justified anger that the Met is ultimately responsible for the death of another innocent civilian.

What is heartening about this case, though, is how the explosion in civilian media has brought the police to account and, frankly, will be an increasingly significant threat to police cover-ups in the future.

By all accounts Tomlinson was attacked twice, with several witness accounts corralled by The Guardian and amalgamated into a step-by-step account of the minutes leading up to Tomlinson’s death and the brutality of the police.

The clinching evidence is a video showing a masked, shield-bearing Met police officer shoving Tomlinson hard in the back as he is walking away from a group of policemen. Minutes later he died.

The Guardian’s case is watertight. Having located a dozen witnesses, most of whom took photos showing the sequence of events, as well as a businessman with the key video footage, it has been able to construct a timeline with a previously-unthinkable level of detail.

I’m not immediately aware of such a game-changing development in media in recent years.

Whereas previously press photographers and cameramen from news organisations would be the only chance of capturing something like this, the number of people using media tools will have possibly the most radical effect on police accountability ever.

It’s tragic that this incredible development has been highlighted by the death of Ian Tomlinson, but this event could be a watershed in the way the media, and the public, are able to hold police forces to account.

The Guardian is rightly proud of its scoop and investigative work, but at one point today it had at least four stories that were slight permutations on the same report and the video, in what was an obvious attempt to capitalise on traffic and stuff the website, via url strings and headers, full of keywords.

A distasteful facet of a sad story.

• Image by zongo69 via Creative Commons.

I’ve recently been working my way through the boxset of Inspector Morse, a series I’ve always been vaguely obsessed by and one of the key series in British TV of recent years, as far as I’m concerned.

I got a recommendation from a friend that spin-off Lewis was worth a try, despite my scepticism, so I’ve caught a couple of episodes recently, which inspired me to jot down some thoughts on it.

Inspector Morse, it seems to me, was primarily a mood piece – the mysteries as a framing device to concentrate on the character of Morse. They occasionally seem incidental. Some of the plots are wrapped up in an alarmingly ad hoc manner, often depending on an unlikely coincidence or hard-to-fathom revelation on Morse’s part.

The focal point is always Morse himself. Portrayed by John Thaw this was a wise move – despite his range, Thaw looked like he was born to play Morse.

He’s not obviously likeable, vaguely misanthropic (or possibly a misogynist), a borderline alcoholic in all its boring and unglamourous reality, a man perennially without luck with the opposite sex and, at heart, rather miserable and lonely. He’s the centre of his own very personal and ongoing tragedy.

He’s an obviously rather hyper-real character though, with his Mark II Jag and vast intelligence that drips with classical, often obscure, knowledge. Sidekick Lewis is straight-forward as Morse is not, shows uncomplicated taste and common sense and often appears exasperated by Morse’s pretensions or high tastes.

As such he’s an obvious everyman and jumping-on point for the viewer. He seems almost deliberately underwritten in the TV series, as opposed to Dexter’s slightly hyper-real print Lewis – an ageing Welsh boxer who’s not even a policeman.

All of which makes it more impressive that Kevin Whately was able to imbue the on-screen Lewis with any charisma at all. He’s utterly believable without being boring, but it seemed to me that without Thaw playing opposite there wouldn’t be a lot to the character.

This made me pretty sceptical about the prospect of the TV series Lewis, as it was hard to imagine a less promising centre character for a flagship show. Still, as we saw with Taggart after the death of Mark McManus, these decisions often seem to be about the strength of a TV brand rather than anything in it.

Lewis sheds John Thaw, James Grout and Colin Dexter – three massive reasons behind the success of Inspector Morse – while retaining Whately, Ted Childs, Oxford and Barrington Pheloung, four equally significant ones.

The absence of Morse and Thaw weighs heavily on the programme, and seemingly on Kevin Whately. Ever the trusty sergeant ready with a quip of a ‘Cheer up, Sir’ in the original series, it’s quite shocking to see how old and depressed Whately looks in Lewis.

Without Morse as a potential misery centre, the character of Lewis has been beefed up to make him more tragic. His wife has been killed off in a road accident.

As if to emphasise Lewis’ misery he’s been given sidekick Hathaway (Lawrence Fox), who seems coolly nonplussed by everything and whose sole character traits seem to be his classical education, love of fags and his gangling walk. Replacing Grout’s Chief Super Strange is Rebecca Front as some utterly forgettable token female boss. Neither is a particular success.

Kevin Whately as Lewis and Laurence Fox as Hathaway in Lewis

Many of the old Morse staples are there: the academic settings and characters, the sometimes-convoluted plots and Pheloung’s sadly beautiful music. But I don’t think Inspector Morse was ever really about those things, music aside.

Certainly Morse sees himself as battling elements of evil – ‘There may not be a devil, but there’s devilry all right,’ he says in Masonic Mysteries – and the underlying themes in the series are grand and dark. Murders stem from the antagonists’ pride, envy, vanity, guilt, lust. It’s tempting to attempt to draw some classical parallels; Greek tragedies most obviously. At the centre is the weary, tragic, slightly ambiguous Morse.

Shorn of Thaw, and Morse, we’re left with the slightly sad sight of Lewis, and Whately, without his mentor and friend. In tonight’s episode Lewis urged Hathaway to visit an old flame to ‘lay the ghost to rest’. It seemed an extraordinary exhortation under the circumstances that brought about the series.

But while it would be easy to make a glib comment on this, Lewis still has merit. Its tone, both in fiction and in reality, is shot through with a melancholy that stems from the absence of Morse and the sadly premature death of John Thaw.

Where Morse is the framing device for Inspector Morse, his absence is the framing device for Lewis. All of which makes it an oddly compelling watch, again with the actual plot seemingly incidental.

The steadying hands of Whately, Childs and Pheloung connect with the ghost of Morse and make the series more than the sum of its parts. Replace any of those elements with other individuals and you suspect Lewis would be just another TV cop show.

Perhaps surprisingly, Whately aside, Pheloung’s incidental music is the key link between the two series. It’s a subtle one, but without it you suspect Lewis would be cut too far adrift from the things that inspired it for it to have any resonance.

So, Lewis is another mood piece, albeit one with an odd duality between fiction and real life. The essence of Morse remains, as does the memory of John Thaw. The whole thing is like an elaborate tribute to both men. It’s a unique television experience.

Any guesses?