The above line is my first ever tweet, which I posted on February 3rd 2009. Twitter recently introduced the opportunity to download your entire tweeting history, so I logged into my dormant old account to do just that. The downside is that the tweets are delivered in a Microsoft Excel file, so you can't embed them or retweet them. The upside is a trip to my not too distant past. What annoys me is that if you can do this, why do Twitter only display your last 3,200 tweets?
With my old account, I was close to the one thousand mark, although most are now gone due to a mass clear out that I had when I opened the new account due to hacking. I had also gone past the eleven thousand tweet mark. When I found out that you could only see the last three thousand and twenty, I had a big cleanse and got down to just over nine thousand. I thought that by deleting from the more recent tweets, I would be able to eventually gain access to the older ones. Sadly that wasn't the case, and I just got to a brick wall and couldn't get any further. There were vague recollections of various tweets; when it was announced in November 2010 that The Queen had joined Facebook, I tweeted several zingers that now cannot ever be seen again. The same happened when Michael Jackson died, when I tweeted the theory that he had in fact faked his death, something I still believe.
Since I started my new Twitter account, I have had a very slow climb of followers, and seem a long way off from being awarded the verification blue tick that proves it is really me. Surely a minor Z-list celebrity who nobody outside of Nottingham has ever heard of should get blue-ticked?
I'm not sure if anyone takes the trouble to scroll down an individual's tweets, but if they do, then I want to provide a strong timeline. This is the reason, (and I have been asked a few times why I do this), that I delete a lot of superfluous tweets. I'd rather only keep two or three of my relevant musings than twenty tweets that only really show my side of a conversation, (unless you click on the recently added button that allows you to see who the other person is responding to, but I doubt anyone ever does that). The other reason I delete tweets, is because it is a shame when the really good ones get lost into the Internet black hole. By the same logic, I suppose I should delete every blog after twenty four hours because nobody is going to want to see what happened to me one afternoon in 2008, but blogs are a bit different. When I discover a new blog, I take the time to read them all from the beginning, that way you get a flavour of the author and their world, and part of me hopes that the same thing happens to me. My stats show me that since I've been writing every single day since November 2011, I've averaged two hundred reads a day. The top one, just over a thousand, is the one I recently wrote about HMV, if I linked to it now it would of course look like a cynical ploy to add to that number, so I'm not going to. My stats also show me that at least one oldie gets read every week, sometimes I wonder how they got there, but it is normally by Googling something and I happened to mention it. When they get to my blog, it probably doesn't contain anything to do with why they were searching the Internet at all. When I find someone on Twitter that I like the look of, I probably only go down the first couple of pages.
Although I haven't read every single one of my tweets from my old account, I can see where I went wrong. There's a lot of things that I should have deleted. When I was on Sherwood Radio, I overdid the #nowplaying hashtag every Tuesday night, whereas now I delete radio related stuff when the show has finished, as they don't need to be there anymore. There are also a lot of YouTube links, Blip.FM links, and other chaff that I should really have separated from the wheat.
I am enjoying going through them, it's weird seeing old tweets relating to The X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent, and I haven't got the faintest idea who I'm writing about. What's really embarrassing is seeing the fact that we all have forgotten how much we liked Jedward in the beginning. At the time, they were subversive, they pissed off the judges, and we all got behind them to win. I wrote this at the time, which was published by Night Flight, which I can't believe I ever allowed to see the light of day.
I'm getting ahead of myself though, most of my tweets were mundane, but I have found my first topical gag. Tweeted on April 17th 2009 during a run of Hell's Kitchen, (celebrity cooking challenge type show), I made reference to one of the contestants, former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobblar:
"Will Bruce Grobblar almost win and then throw it away at the last minute?"
Satire! I didn't tweet another joke until May 8th 2009, what happened in between was basically a day to day ramble about what I'd had to eat, along with complaints about how busy I was with work projects. Ironically, I am far busier now than I was then, and I can't even remember what half of the things I was busy with were supposed to be. I make a lot of references to writing, but I wasn't specific enough.
The next joke came along on May 16th 2009: "Azerbaijan isn't even a real country, Eddie Izzard invented it in the 1990s". From the tweets that surround it, I gather that this was in reference to that year's Eurovision Song Contest. A hell of a lot of tweets that I should have deleted follow, mainly regarding that year's Britain's Got Talent, especially the young singing girl called Holly who had the pushy showbiz mother who beat her with a belt until she got her act right, (that might not be strictly true, but she gave that impression). Topical wise, on 26th June 2009 I commented how Farrah Fawcett's dying wish was for all of the children of the world to be safe, which was granted in sorts due to the death of Michael Jackson. Maybe it was too soon, but what the hell? On the 23rd September, the day that Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time, I tweeted that he should agree to do Celebrity Wife Swap with Andi Peters in order to maybe cure him of two of his prejudices. It wasn't meant as a laugh out loud gag, more a statement.
I can now also pinpoint the day I was given the Sherwood Radio show, which was something of a turning point in my career. That same morning, I was interviewed on BBC Radio Nottingham, but I'm not sure why. Weird how I didn't tweet a lot of detail, I could go back through my blog but I really can't be arsed.
"The ex-boss of Royal Mail is now the head of ITV. This Morning will now start at 2pm". Brilliant!
On June 26th 2010 I predicted, a year after he 'died', that Michael Jackson would make a surprise appearance at Glastonbury. I predicted the same thing a year later, along with mentioning that Stevie Wonder made it back after refereeing the England match that same afternoon. On the Monday after Glastonbury, I tweeted how Florence Machine hadn't duetted 'You Got The Love' with anyone that day, and that she must be getting withdrawals. Interestingly, on the 23rd of June the following year, I tweeted "how many duets of 'You Got The Love' will Florence Machine do this year?"
"After the high ratings for the pilot, when does Rauol Moat get his full series?" That series never did get made, stupid television commissioners.
"The Social Network, the Facebook film, is worth seeing just for Heath Ledger's final scene stealing performance as The Poker", 23rd October 2010.
"The Queen is on Facebook, will she throw sheep or will she upgrade to pheasant?"
"Playing Farmville, The Queen has just claimed every swan in the country"
8th November 2010
Something I didn't realise, is that I have done the same joke twice on occasion, and both times it was during a run of The X-Factor On November 20th 2010, I tweeted that the only way Mary (?) would sell albums would be to keep her job at Tesco. At the last series, I said that I predicted that Jarmaine would go on to sell thousands of albums, but only if Asda put him in the music aisle.
2010 was not by any stretch of the imagination a golden year for my tweeting. If I had thought of it, then the vast majority of them would have been deleted. During the 2011 Red Nose Day, I tweeted a lot about how the televised Friday event wasn't as good as it used to be, and posted YouTube links of classic Comic Relief moments. I managed only one joke during the whole thing; "Lenny Henry in the slums. It must have been a breeze after Premier Inn".
Most people start their Twitter life with dozens of quite inane posts, the most common first tweet being along the lines of "I've joined Twitter, don't know what to do with it". 2011 was when I first started to find my Twitter sea legs, although I do regret not doing what I now refer to as my weekly tweet cleanse. Although I was still using my personal Twitter account for radio promotion, the quality of my timeline improved.
"Jeremy Beadle could have fooled people into thinking he had an ipad by holding his iphone in the wrong hand".
"Jeremy Beadle could have fooled people into thinking he had an iphone by holding his ipad in the wrong hand". 25th May 2011
On the 17th June 2011, just before four o'clock in the afternoon, I posted the tweet that would temporarily make me world famous; "I spotted Adam West having a pub lunch in Wollaton #Batman #Nottingham". I don't need to go into detail about that again, if you go down the side links to this blog, you can read all about it in detail.
I'm interested to see how many times I repeat myself, sometimes a key phrase or sometimes a joke. Every time I am watching something music related, I manage to tweet a handful of jokes that I wrote way before we even had Twitter. Or Facebook for that matter. Or Myspace, that's how old they are:
"I used to be in an Elbow tribute band. We were called Arse, so good you couldn't tell..."
"I was in a Placebo tribute band, you really couldn't tell that we weren't the real thing".
"When the pub has an expensive jukebox, select 'All Right Now'. Free'.
By the middle of the year, I had hit my comedy stride, creating the 'That's Two Songs' and 'Song and Film' hashtags, (another time, this blog is long enough already), and posting jokes, some topical. An example being these gems from July 7th 2011:
"Nottingham taxi drivers are on a 'go slow' protest, so far nobody has noticed".
"I asked where the taxi driver protest was taking place, I was told literally two minutes away, just round the corner".
When a famous person dies, it doesn't take long for the jokes to begin circulating. On October 29th 2011, Jimmy Savile died, and Twitter was awash with tributes, mainly from people who remember Jim'll Fix It from their childhood. It wasn't something I got on board with, one the day he died I tweeted the following:
"I'm not a hypocrite, Jimmy Savile gave me the creeps".
"Police confirm there was nothing suspicious about Savile's death. His life on the other hand..."
"On his way home from work, Savile used to pass a morgue. He always popped in for a cold one".
People were very quick to tell me how disrespectful I was being, making scurrilous accusations about a man who had only just passed away. I had already written in 2008 when he was still alive that I thought he might be a paedophile, but only really used the word 'might' to protect myself. I need not have bothered. It wasn't until the following year that the ITV documentary about Jimmy Savile was aired, revealing Jim'll to have been a paedophile. It clashed with my documentary that revealed that bears shit in the woods, which was disappointing. I like to think I was proved right in the end.
Another big Twitter event, if that's the right word, was in January 2012, when it appeared that Gary Glitter, (there's a link there, you can tell I work in radio) had joined Twitter to connect with his fans and announce a comeback tour. I tweeted on that day that if he does go on tour, it's a shame that that Jimmy Savile is no longer available to compere. I then went on to question why a convicted paedophile was on Twitter, when they have their own social networking site, bebo.
Another vague link, and now to Children In Need. On November 17th 2011, David Tennant hosted a Children In Need concert which was shown on television. This was my first ever airing of a joke that I still use to this day whenever I see David Tennant on television:
"Children In Need concert hosted by David Tennant. Next year's will be hosted by Matt Smith and be crap in comparison". That joke continues to serve me well, and now I throw in how overly confusing everything will be once Smith takes over. This of course refers to the disastrous casting of Matt Smith in Doctor Who, which has ruined the franchise.
So that hopefully explains why I delete tweets. Have a look at my timeline, it looks nice and clean, and contains all killer no filler. There is also the issue of my follower count, simply that it isn't high enough. I know it might sound like I'm blowing smoke up my arse, but I should be higher up the ladder than I am. There's no point me keeping hundreds of tweets with nobody to appreciate them, so that's why I keep it down.
If you use Twitter, then you can follow me here.
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