Probably shouldn't. Will though.

Here's the tweet:

'Piers Morgan: Breaking News- I'm now a twit! Official!'

Here's the joke we did about it, as broadcast:

'Just a 'twit', Piers? I think you're being a little gentle on yourself there'

Here's something I saw when I was daft enough to google the show:

'Cynical, useless, stupid, lazy dog-shit. Piers Morgan said he was "a twit", and you seriously think it's acceptable to make a joke out of how closely that word resembles "twat"? Write some material! '

Thing is, I don't think we did do the 'it sounds like twat' joke. Do you? I can see a joke about the mildness of the word 'twit'. I can see an implication that Morgan might use a more insulting word to describe himself. It's not a woofer- there have been better jokes in history- but I quite like the way it leaves the audience to join the dots. It's undoubtedly a 'fill in your own punchline' joke, an ellipsis.

What I can't see is a joke about how closely 'twit' resembles 'twat'. That's pure projection.

Of course, it could be said that I'm overreacting to one misinterpretation of one joke in one episode of one show. But it's actually a spot-on example of one of the ways this wonderful, horrific internet works. People who don't like the things you say, for whatever reason, will happily ascribe to you all kinds of motives and motivations which they may utterly believe, but will nonetheless be light years from the truth- so that, for example, a gag which scrupulously avoids a particular word ends up being accused of the precise opposite.

I didn't write the gag in question, in case you think I'm being personal and precious, but the horrid thing about doing stuff on the telly is that sometimes people will think your work is 'useless', and 'stupid', and 'dog-shit', and they'll be entitled to their opinion. As an adult you have to deal with that, even though it makes you want to wail like a kid.

I love the show I'm working on at the moment, I think it's really rather good- but I have to be grown-up enough to accept that some people will love it and some will hate it. Indeed, I *know* that some people love it and some hate it. And that's fine.

But it's not fine to be called lazy and cynical, because I'm not, and nor are any of the people I'm working with. So, you know, say it's not funny if you like. Say it's useless dogshit. But I think you have to stop there. You can't call us corrupt. And if you do, make sure that the gag you find so unacceptable is the gag that was actually being made.

Slight Return

Well, not slight I hope, but as a son of Britpop I couldn't resist a bit of a Bluetones quote. Hello! Anyone still here?

I didn't mean for the post about Jerome to be the last for nearly three months- it's just that it was very tricky to think what to say next. I wasn't maintaining a respectful silence or anything pi like that, but at the same time I didn't want to follow my tribute to my pal by posting, oh I don't know, something about getting annoyed by a Haribo ad the following week. That's not to say that Haribo ads aren't intensely annoying; they are.

Anyway, I've also been hella busy. People in North West London are now no doubt beginning to get used to the sight of the red faced panting man in the too-small vest pounding the streets of Cricklewood and West Hampstead. When Jer was ill, my pal Julia and I decided that- whatever happened to him- we'd raise some money for cancer research by running the London Marathon. It was one of those grand gestures that's easy to make but which sends your stomach doing flipflops when it comes to fruition. I think part of me didn't believe we'd get a place- that honour would be satisfied by having made the offer.

But. A place was forthcoming, and now I have to run a fucking marathon. I don't know if anyone's told you, but it's TWENTY SIX AND A BIT MILES. All the way from Greenwich to Buck House, and not even the direct way. Just so IMPRACTICAL. Apparently short cuts are frowned upon though, so I've had to start training.

My initial, still-a-bit-in-denial plan was to start training in the New Year and live high on the hog until Christmas. However, the quizzical reactions of some friends (where 'quizzical reactions' means 'saying don't be so bloody stupid' and 'some friends' means 'literally everyone') convinced me that I'd better start taking it all a bit more seriously. Yes, Jade Goody managed 21 miles on no training and having had a curry the night before; however, this is not useful knowledge and can people please stop telling me it.

So, the Virgin Marathon Official Beginner's Plan it was. My first reaction on reading it was 'Oh, the first run is only ten minutes, that should be fine'. My second was OH MY GOD THEY EXPECT ME TO RUN SIX DAYS A WEEK FOR TWENTY FOUR WEEKS ARE THEY MAD?

I'm five weeks in now and although I haven't managed all thirty training runs (I make it *counts on fingers* twenty-five)it's getting marginally easier. What made it much, much easier was running in proper running shoes. For the first four weeks of training I was banging around in an old pair of Evisu plimsolls- pretty, but not really up to the job where things like one's ankles and shins are concerned. When I finally shelled out proper money for some proper shoes (after the exquisitely embarrassing torture that is 'gait analysis') the difference was extraordinary- like lying on a featherbed after having previously slept on something made of sandpaper and vinegar. Distressing thigh/underpant interface, leading to inner thighs the colour of pepto-bismol and a proper John Wayne swagger, was dealt with by the purchase of some lycra running tights. These have the added bonus of making me feel a bit like a pervert every time I put them on.

And I'm getting to know the 'hood I've lived in for ten years. I had literally no idea that just past the gym and off the main road was a magic little pathway through a gorgeous cemetery (I like cemeteries) which suddenly, magically opens out onto Fortune Green. Sadly, I have to do a lot of my running after work, which means after dark. The pretty pathway becomes a little more sinister at night, when I become acutely aware that I'm running through an unlit cemetery wearing a brand new ipod. For any muggers, murderers or rapists who may be reading, I'd just like to point out that I'm over six foot and gradually getting fitter, so there's only a 90 per cent chance that you'd get away scot free with your mugging or whatever.

All courting of danger aside, I couldn't yet say I'm enjoying the training. But I'm doing it. I even did it when I was away working in Spain sans running kit- there I was, running on the spot in my jamas in a Spanish hotel room. It was actually one of my more enjoyable 'runs'- I was able to read a modern novel and listen to Das Lied Von Der Erde. I'd like you all to picture that, if you will. And, of course, it's nice that there's, ever so slowly. less of me than usual. Apparently it's the 'core weight' that is last to go, so I'm slimming down nicely (I have HIPS! and RIBS!) everywhere on my body bar my stomach, which is now hanging off my newly lithe frame like an obscene water balloon. I'm told even that will eventually diminish (and that the fat will turn to muscle quicker if I eat protein within 20 mins of running; I'm getting through a lot of boiled eggs) so there are plenty of consolations.

At the moment, though, it's pure solipsism. I'm doing it because of my dad, and because of Jer; but when I'm slogging through a cemetery in freezing rain, hoping I'm not about to be mugged, with my every muscle screaming 'Why are you doing this to me? I am for wine and sofas!' it's not, embarrassing to say, the thought of my lost loved ones that keeps me going. It's the thought of that day in April, specifically mid-afternoon onwards, when I will be taking as many tube journeys as I can so that everyone sees me wrapped in tinfoil sporting a medal. And it's the thought that for ever after I will be able to drop, ever so casually, into conversation the thrilling phrase 'when I ran the marathon...'

If, that is, I succeed in running the marathon. Watch this space.

Oh, and point any extra pennies in the direction of www.justgiving.com/sodcancer

You'll Follow Me Back With The Sun In Your Eyes.

I've watched the World Cup in some strange places. In Scottish pubs, full of people proudly wearing the team colours of anyone-but-England; backstage in theatres, desperately hoping that the penalty shootout will be completed before I actually have to go on stage; even in Kingston-Upon-Thames. This year I watched the scrappy, ill-tempered affair between Holland and Spain on a tiny bedside screen in the Royal Marsden Hospital, and it's this year's final which I will remember more vividly than any that has gone before or that is to come.

As I left the Marsden that night, an unwanted thought crept into my brain. Would my dear friend, the man who I'd been visiting, be around for the next World Cup final? I dismissed it as a craven, weedy, disloyal thought. It didn't for a second cross my mind that I had just seen him for the last time, but I had. The magnificent Jerome O'Donohoe died on Friday morning, at the obscene, devastating, laughable age of 37.

I first met Jerome a few days after my 30th birthday, which is to say a couple of months after his own. It wasn't a good time for me. My father was already ill with the disease which was to take his life; the same bastard that has snatched Jer's as well. I remember in particular a night at a little Sam Smith's pub in St Giles', which has a small conservatory running alongside it. My phone rang, which in those days only meant bad news. My mother told me of dad's latest symptoms, treatments, ailments. We were both becoming aware of the fact that this was a battle dad was not going to win, and I strode up and down the conservatory becoming more and more agitated and scared. I had no idea how to return to the pub table and behave normally once the call was over; fortunately I didn't need to. The moment I hung up the phone, Jerome came to where I was standing, gave me a wordless but infinitely comforting hug, and gently led me back to where the others were sitting. He didn't try and say anything, didn't feign concern; he just helped, supported and understood. What will give you the measure of the man is that this was just the second time we had met. Essentially, he didn't know me from Adam. But he recognised exactly what was needed and quietly, unflashily, generously and selflessly provided it.

The problem with writing about the death of someone wonderful (apart from the practical problem of typing through the mist) is that all the things one wants to say have become obituary clichés. Everything that made Jerome so special sounds like something from a Hallmark sympathy card. But it's all true. He DID have the biggest, warmest heart. When I conjure his image, he IS always smiling or laughing. He DID possess, to an extraordinary degree, that elusive quality, the gift of friendship. He really HAS left behind him a gap so vast that nobody who knew and loved him will ever adequately be able to find ways of filling it.

And, so you know I'm not just mouthing platitudes, I can give you chapter and verse for everything. His big heart and extraordinary generosity, for example. I eventually learned not to express enthusiasm for anything he owned, because he'd be as likely as not to give it to you. My house is full of bits of kit, books, even a five disc Eddie Izzard box set, which Jerome just handed over and said 'it's yours. I didn't need it anyway'. As for the smile and the laughter, one of the incidental pleasure/pain aspects of his passing is that whenever the sound of his voice pops unbidden into my head, it's never morose or grumpy sounding. Try it, if you knew him- listen out in your head for his voice. See? A cheerful inflection, a sense of mischief. Only ever seconds away from a joke. And as for the gift of friendship, well. Jerome knew everyone, and to meet him was pretty much to become his friend. So many of my friends became his; so many of his became mine. Because he was interested in people, because he loved people, because he was truly a social animal, he was also the most cohesive kind of social glue. He is utterly irreplaceable; I can only imagine how that irreplaceability must feel to his adored and adoring wife Geri, and to his close and loving family.

In the last dazed few days since he left us, one image comes again and again into my brain. It is Jerome and me dancing around a chintzy living room with two other friends and my housemate of the time. I'd been doing a rep season at the theatre in Pitlochry, miles and miles from home. Jerome came to visit, sharing the long drive with our friend Julia. He saw the show I was in (bellowing out a standing ovation amid a crowd of politely clapping highland pensioners) and then joined me and some of the cast in the after-hours bar near the theatre. There was a song out at the time, an anthemic little number by one of those bands that shifts units by the bucketload but which nobody ever actually confesses to liking. One by one, my housemate, my colleague Fran (who was subsequently to become a close friend of the O'Donohoes- that gift again) Jerome, Julia and I all confessed to having a soft spot for the song. Come chucking-out time we were yelling it antisocially in the quiet streets. When we got back to my digs, Jerome did some business with a mac and some wires and the telly and there was the song, playing through the TV speakers. It took him seconds, and in 2004 the idea that we could talk about a song one minute and have it playing through the TV the next seemed like the most thrilling magic. But that was Jerome, and that is how I will always remember him. On holiday, at parties, at the pub, at weddings, in conversation- he'd come in to the room and suddenly, from somewhere, there'd be music.

Ten Things About The Edinburgh Fringe 2010.

1: A capella groups get quite old quite quickly. The all-female groups are drippy. The all-male groups are smug. Get a piano.

2: There is no competition between a twenty-minute walk and a five quid cab ride.

3: The EUSA shop needs to order more Double Cheese and Onion Ginster sandwiches.

4: My flatmate is not after all the most obsessive kitchen-tidier alive.

5: Acrylic wigs smell if you sweat in them.

6: You're pretty much guaranteed a good show at the Trav, but innit pricey?

7: Not everyone who you think is a lesbian is a lesbian.

8: One of this year's Footlights is a way more committed flyerer than any of the others.

9: A wooden platform will bear a combined weight of around 25 stone for just over a month. After that it's touch and go.

10: Even at the advanced age of 37, it's still the best fun it's possible to have in August.

Bad internet. Naughty internet.

During a break in rehearsals (www.jumpthemusical, you know you want to) yesterday, I embarked on my customary five minute tour of internet inspection. It goes something like this: email,to find out who's been spamming me and to receive countless facebook notifications; facebook, to re-read the notifications my email has just shown me; and then, just for the hell of it, twitter.

Yesterday two names seemed to appear more often than is usual. One, you will probably be unsurprised to hear, was Clare Balding. The other, less predictably, was Gethin Jones. Let's take the latter first.

Initially I wondered why several tweets on my feed seemed to be making reference to the easy-on-the-eye, otherwise uncontroversial Blue Petering health-shop pusher. You might be, too- it was, as it turned out, a minor twitstorm- but it illustrated rather perfectly how the flawless wonder that is the internet can sometimes be so depressingly abused by the flawed wonder that is people.

Here's how the mini-kerfuffle happened. Someone tweeted that Jones was 'no Alastair Stewart', a reference to the former presenter of a programme he now fronts. Jones was somehow made aware of this- perhaps he searched his own name, perhaps someone told him about the tweet- and decided to reply. His reply was 'No shit, sherlock. YOU get the degree for stating the obvious, well done "numbnuts"'

As a reply it isn't Wildean, and I'm bothered by the inverted commas, but it seems like a fairly commonplace exchange. Someone unfavourably compared Jones to his predecessor, Jones responded with mild irritation.

But in doing so he broke one of the internet's most unpleasant unwritten rules. The potshots, you see, only work one way. His flash of anodyne annoyance became a 'hissy fit'. People started tweeting him to say how 'pathetic','Z list' or 'self important' he was, or to affect to mistake him for Steve Jones of T4. In other words, an unremarkable exchange between two people who annoyed each other became, for some, an excuse to hurl abuse at a man who had dared to commit the double offence of (a) being on television and (b) responding in kind to someone who had slagged him off.

People who aren't in the public eye- 'real' people, if we're being tabloidy about it- get to stand behind a wall and say BUM to whoever they like. But if anyone even a smidge famous says 'Don't you say BUM to me! Bum YOU, more like!' that is a pathetic 'hissy fit'. I'm fairly sure, by which I mean certain, that there's a stinking double standard going on there.

I think it would have been wiser of Jones not to reply, and nobody ever claimed the moral high ground with the word 'numbnuts'. But I also think it was understandable- human- that he did reply. And the pearl-clutching over the fact that he may have found the tweet through 'self-searching' is particularly, hypocritically, daft. Have you never put your name into google? I know I have, and so has pretty much everyone I know. Twitter, of course, has a link to search for '@' replies so people can see what tweeters they don't follow have said to or about them. It's human nature occasionally to get curious about what might be being said about oneself, and it doesn't make Jones a preening idiot for wanting to know.

The way twitter reacts to behaviour its users consider unacceptable is now an established social media phenomenon. Stories such as AA Gill's vile playground sneering at Clare Balding (see, you thought I'd forgotten), the man who was prosecuted for making a terrorism joke on the site, the horrid article in the Express about the survivors of Dunblane or (ahem) Jan Moir on Stephen Gately, develop a momentum of their own and quickly reach a tipping point (or twipping point, as someone will doubtless one day christen it). As a way of gently reminding more established forms of media that we won't necessarily accept what we might be fed, it's invaluable. It would be a shame if that precious right-to-reply were allowed to degenerate into throwing random snowballs at people, and running to teacher when they throw one back.

Hello, blog.

And hello anyone who's reading. I'm busy doing acting at the moment which is why I've been so scandalously lax in updating this. I presume you're all watching That Mitchell And Webb Look, are you? Good good. If you're not, there are still four more episodes to go. Phew.

I'll be back with something more interesting when I'm less tired and, indeed, more interesting.

I couldn't help but wonder...

I've never been a 'Sex And The City' fan. I don't know if you're surprised by this, although I do know that if you're a film critic you're likely to be. The fact that 'Sex And The City 2' is apparently not a great film (and, let's face it, it sounds AWFUL) has given scribblers everywhere the opportunity for a good old bit of gaybashing-by-proxy.

It's something that started back in the days of the TV series. Someone noticed that the man who brought Candace Bushnell's book to the screen, Darren Starr, was gay, as was the exec producer, Michael Patrick King. At that point, someone made the not-unreasonable observation that the female characters in 'Sex And The City' sometimes talked and behaved in a way more usually seen in gay men. So far so tame.

But that tame little theory grew and grew. People- and not just people, columnists too- started to say things like 'Of course, the series is actually about gay men' which developed into 'Those characters aren't really women' and soon it became pretty much accepted that SJP and co were nothing but powerless pawns in a twisted gay game of 'hate the woman'. That opinion reached a very queasy nadir in the reviews of the film this week.

Several friends have posted a review from a Seattle newspaper on facebook; it's one of those things that has gone viral. And yes, it makes the case against the film quite brilliantly. But sitting right in the middle, there it is- the irrelevant mention of the sexual orientation of some of the producers. The film, says Lindy West, is 'a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls'. It's not an offensive remark, per se- but it is an unnecessary swipe, isn't it? I wonder how far I'd get if I described, say, the film 2012 as 'Jews playing with Action Men'?

Leave it to the good old Evening Standard, however, to go from the allusive to the flat-out offensive. Andrew O'Hagan starts by referring to 'Carrie Bradshaw and her gaggle of gay impersonators', thus reaffirming the idea that these characters, created by Candace Bushnell and exec produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, are nothing but projection on the part of some benders. Am I being oversensitive? Well, how about the description of Kim Cattrall's character, Samantha? As a preface to discussing her venality, vulgarity, and narcissism, O'Hagan chooses to sum her up as 'Stonewall on Ice'. Never mind that this is a meaningless piece of phrasemaking ('on ice', Andrew? Talk me through that) its implications are stinking; she's a deeply unpleasant character, as can be summed up by the word 'Stonewall'. You tell me if that is in any way acceptable. You explain to me how that isn't the rankest prejudice.

I'm sure that 'Sex in the City 2' is an egregious piece of film making (the scene where burqa'd women reveal they're wearing designer clobber underneath sounds particularly jawdropping) and of course many gay men have been involved in its creation. Millions more will go to see it. But I still don't think that justifies the journey our tame little theory has taken from 'it's by gays' to 'they're all gays' to 'oh, she's just vile. You know, pure Stonewall'.

Anyway, you'll have to excuse me. I'm off to dress dolls up in Louboutins for reasons hidden in my woman-hating pysche.