Denial's Not Just A River in Egypt...

Right, yesterday saw under pressure national hate figure Hosny Mubarak pull an audacious switcheroo on the furious public assembled in Tahrir Square. A press conference was called, rumours spread that the 82 year old was about to step down. When the time of the conference arrived, Mubarak kept the world's media waiting while he stood backstage giggling. Eventually he arrived on stage and declared that, actually, the conference was all a big joke and he wasn't stepping down at all. HA! Jokes....

You see? It was all a big prank. He's going to be there for ages yet... at least until September and by then this whole Tahrir Square revolution thing will have blown over, probably and he can cling on for another 30 years...

Or perhaps not. I don't know. I try and avoid big stories like this that lots of people seem to have opinions about, frankly because it takes a lot of time and effort to get oneself to the required level of knowledge and expertise to be able to offer a valid journalistic opinion. Which is actually what today's blog is about...

Journos famously cut it fine when offering their two penn'orth on topics by not actually reading/watching/doing what it is they're writing about. It happens to all of them at one point or another. They'll drop a bollock and say something silly about an episode of The Tudors or cooking Risotto or something. Just you see if they don't. Yesterday this issue reared its inelegantly-coiffured, empty lens glasses-clad head once more after this article by Deborah Orr was printed in the Guardian G2. Now, while I don't necessarily agree with the content - while I don't think 10 o'Clock Live is the perfect vehicle for Lauren Laverne, she is nonetheless a very talented presenter and at no point have I ever heard her touted as our answer to Tina Fey before this piece - there is an obvious boob... well obvious to anyone that saw the episode of 10 o'Clock Live in question, in which a PRE-RECORDED, STAGED PIECE ABOUT CHARLIE BROOKER AND LAVERNE COCKING UP A LINK was aired and then mocked by the presenters themselves.

But hey, it's just a bit of lazy journalism, happens to the best of us, right? Wrong. Twitter went 8 shades of mental about this. First with some quite personal attacks on Deborah Orr, then people defending Orr, then people attacking the people who attacked Orr and then people who attacked Orr attacking the people who defended her on the basis of their defence. Now, aside from a cheap dig at the format which might concern the production staff and presenters, the only person who should really have been 'offended' by the article is Laverne herself. I can sympathise there. I hate reading criticism... and as a writer, that's, well, a bit of a massive pisser. In fact, if you leave a comment, there's a good chance I'll track you down/humiliate you with my lucid prose... or just cry... one of those two...

I'm sure that after reading my spot on dig at Mubarak at the start there you will have realised that I didn't even watch the press conference- I was busy writing something else at the time- but you have to fill the column inches somehow. And that I suspect is what happened to Orr. She wanted a quick piece to demonstrate that she too loved critics' darling 30 Rock (which is very good, to be fair) as well as having a quick pop at the fairly divisive 10 o'Clock Live.

It was Brooker himself who first drew my attention to the article in question via Twitter. Now, I love Brooker, the man is massive influence on my writing and general miserable approach to life, he has magnificent hair and all he did was indicate the mistake, but in doing so he inadvertently created somewhat of a monster (at least on Twitter between about 10 o'clock and sort of late lunchtime-ish) where people got really quite angry about this little journalistic slip-up.

The article was just a clear opportunity to make a cheap snide, which we all love as writers, let's face it. I made a cheap snide about Mubarak, perhaps the week's most obvious target, at the beginning of this very column. Orr, a respected social and political commentator, was just padding out her double-page spread in the G2, it was an honest mistake, she's not an abominable, controversy-hungry, bile-spouting harridan like Melanie Phillips or Jan Moir, she's just an ordinary journo. I honestly think that in a world where the Daily Mail continues to be published there are journalistic issues that people should be more worried about than one columnist cocking up side-piece about Tina Fey/Lauren Laverne.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm defending Orr- she's doing a job for actual real money, that I've been doing free for what seems like an eternity- but some of the things that people Tweeted about it were needlessly offensive. Many of the commenters, I suspect, had not even read Orr's article in the first place and were operating by hearsay. I love Twitter, but we Tweeters are, all of us, guilty of some quite staggering hypocrisy sometimes- whether it's denouncing racism on Question Time and then laughing at some gypsies getting married (which I'll happily admit I've never watched and will never attempt to write a piece about) or attacking a journalist that wrote an article they've not read about a show that she hadn't watched. Not to mention whoever was subbing that day let this mistake slip through the net, but then they might/probably have better things to do on a Thursday night than watch live topical comedy shows, I don't know.

So maybe we can cut people some slack. It must be bad enough being a Guardian journo where every Tom, Dick and Harry can take the phrase 'comment is free' a little too literally and leave a borderline-insane/worthless opinion on your piece for all to see on its website... in fact, my favourites are those like John Harris who go after malicious commenters and keep commenting on their own pieces getting angrier and angrier or Sarah Ditum's games reviews where she isn't afraid to embarrass commenters for being overly dramatic with their sort of half-critical arsey remarks. Because these people only leave these narky, niggling little nuggets of criticism (probably born out of self-hatred in what I believe is known in the trade as 'the Frankie Boyle Method' of being funny) because they think that the authors will somehow not care enough about their work to take issue with them.

I can't speak for the writers I've mentioned, but I certainly take some pride in my pieces (I mean, not all of them, obviously, some of them were bordering on utter shite - as is this one, some would say) and it hurts to see them attacked by angry office workers trying to avoid having to fill in a spreadsheet about the Hamburg files. Writing in the G2 in an extract from her book on the very same day as Orr-gate, screenwriter/director Nora Ephron described the pain of seeing your work flop. It's 'mortifying', 'lonely' and 'sad'. And that's from a triple Oscar nominee, so imagine how shite it is for us downtrodden hacks.

So maybe, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't tweet/leave a comment on the Guardian website... Mkay?