Times Online
STEPHEN FRY has said he is going to quit Twitter after a fellow user of the popular internet site described him as “boring”.
The television presenter has been one of Britain’s biggest champions of the social networking site. Last month he used it to announce the end of his television series Kingdom. He also used Twitter to spearhead a campaign against a newspaper columnist who had described the death of Stephen Gately, the gay pop star, as “sleazy”, describing the article as “loathsome”.
Yesterday Fry said he was ready to silence his fingers and thumbs and stop providing his 925,000 followers with near-hourly updates on his thoughts and activities, known as “tweets”.
At 2.18pm he posted: “Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it’s been fun.”
Fry has battled with depression in the past and his comments sparked concern among fans and fellow celebrities, who instantly started a Save Stephen campaign on the site. His decision to quit came shortly after getting into a war of words with another user.
BrumPlum, a 47-year-old blogger called Richard from Birmingham, had posted a tweet that said: “I understand Stephen Fry’s tweets but, much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit . . . boring . . . (sorry Stephen).”
Fry responded: “BrumPlum you’ve convinced me. I’m obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone.”
BrumPlum later apologised to the television star but said that Fry had overreacted to his comments. BrumPlum’s feed has now been bombarded by comments from angry Fry fans.
After a flurry of messages from other members of the “Twitterati” calling for him to stay on the site, Fry appeared to backtrack slightly and posted: “Well maybe I’ll see how I feel in a few days. Very low and depressed at the moment and any drop of meanness makes it so much worse. Sorry.”
The presenter of the quiz show QI hit the headlines recently when he used his Twitter account to rail against an article by the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir on the death of Gately.
His tweets were credited with prompting the record 21,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission over the opinion piece, which he described as “a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with”.
However, some of his other tweets might justly be described as falling into the “boring” category. Last week he was moaning about the backlog of e-mails on his mobile phone and the fact that his PC’s printer would not work. Another tweet said simply “Hurrah for curry”.
Baffling. Why doesn’t Stephen Fry just grow up a bit? If you’re on twitter to massage your ego by interacting with thousands of lick-arse fans, don’t throw all your toys out of the pram when someone says something unkind. Stephen Fry, like most celebrities on Twitter, enjoys the neverending compliments and adulation from members of the public. His ego seems to have inflated to such an extent that a relatively mild criticism excites a petulant and adolescent display. Fry’s obsessive fans are citing his bipolar disorder as the reason for his sulk; in reality it was simply a lack of common sense. He could have easily chosen to ignore the remark; instead his reply resulted in the stirring of an angry, dimwitted mob. If Fry is that easily offended then perhaps he should not be on Twitter in the first place. The dramatic threat to leave the Twitter realm appears to be little more than fishing for compliments; Fry is acting like a child threatening to take away his affection from a scolding mother. As for Stephen’s star pupil Alan Davies, he clearly has anger management issues.
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