The Diminishing Of A Star

A couple of weeks ago I was sat at home rather bored, monitoring Twitter when it occurred to me that Jonathan Ross who tweets under the name @Wossy had been a bit quiet of late. His wife disappeared off the face of Twitter quite some time ago but @Wossy was one of the key people, along with Stephen Fry and later Philip Schofield, in encouraging the rapid take-up amongst the UK showbiz/comedy circuit of Twitter. So I looked at his profile, spotted he had made recent posts I had obviously missed but more strangely it seemed I was not following him. This was most irregular, I must have made a false click of the mouse on a previous tweet, so I clicked the Follow button to return him to normal service. Lo and behold I had been blocked!

This was rather disconcerting. I had been a fan for years. I had praised his Radio 2 Saturday morning show in company on more than one occasion, I had stood up for him throughout the Sachsgate saga, felt his pain and defended, as much as was possible, his actions. Sheer brilliance wouldn't be sheer brilliance if it didn't go off the rails from time to time was the gist of my defence of his behaviour. I was once on the verge of tweeting him about his constant cajoling of 4 Poofs And A Piano with comments bordering on the homophobic but decided it was between consenting adults and I often guffawed at the choicer jokes anyway so that would have been pure hypocrisy.

But what had I done to offend this possible future knight of the British entertainment establishment?

Well there was the moment at Live 8 when he introduced the Italian concert from "Wome" and I immediately shouted out "Wome, where's Wome?" to the obvious enjoyment of 50 or so people around me in the enormous crowd. I could be identified from my inflatable pink pig which had later appeared with me on my TwitPic account but I suspect @Wossy never heard my joke being about a mile away from me on the stage.

I had made a couple of comments on Twitter about the appearance on every series of his Friday night talk show of Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais. Somebody on Popbitch less kind than me had suggested they were linked to the same agent but I kept this to myself.

Today it dawned on me. Back in September @Wossy launched the latest series of his chat show and included an interview with Jamie Oliver. Jamie has good comedy value for his supposed mockney character, despite being a genuine Essex boy, but equally he says some very interesting stuff. Unfortunately @Wossy was obviously suffering from being off our screens for a while and had his worst ever outbreak of interrupting the interviewee to make a gag then changing the subject, @Wossy duly laughed with, rather than allow the interviewee to continue the story that merited the question in the first place. I genuinely wanted to know the answer to a couple of questions so decided to ask Jamie himself.

There was one story he told about his daughter wanting a skateboard, so rather than just give her one he insisted she learn the names of and identify by sight all 25 herbs in a patch in his garden. Just as we were about to find out the outcome @wossy interjected, cracked a joke to further @Wossy and we never knew if Oliver Jr achieved her tough target. So I asked Jamie pointing out that @Wossy had interrupted him and, being a gent on Twitter, he later replied :

@gashead yes daisy did learn all 25 herbs from the garden by look and by smell nd she did get the skate board i have to up the anti now jox

Result, curiosity satisfied and a shiny celebrity reply, much craved by many on Twitter to validate their very existence and make cleaning other people's toilets or whatever their miserable day job entails less of a chore. So I asked another question :

@jamie_oliver What were you going to say about 15 in relation to your 19th century relative who fed the poor? @Wossy interrupted again.

and to the best of my knowledge my timeline hasn't been troubled by a tweet from @Wossy since then. What a sad, petty thing to do. I was using Twitter to enhance the viewer experience of his show by asking an interviewee to finish what @Wossy didn't let him complete. No harm in that, benefits to be derived and it was all said in fun. But maybe the world is only allowed to laugh with him, not at him, unless you're Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Carr of course.