A paean to @Fuckingledge and his ground-breaking theatre
At the start of the year @Betfairpoker took Twitter by storm. A corporate account being funny and creative and interacting with us and (a key issue here) not blindly RTing every bit of praise it received. I still follow and I still laugh. They only thing I’ve ever bet on before is the Mercury Prize but I may well put a fiver on Sven Goran Eriksson’s next move since he’s faithfully followed me around the country in recent years. If I do, I’m going to seek out the Betfair odds first because I support their Twitter policy wholeheartedly. It’s a bit like moving to the Co-op bank because they don’t provide accounts to arms dealers. It’s an ethics thing.
So, anyway. Dan Bye wrote a great blog back in January, praising Betfair but also comparing their feed to that of many theatres, their “bland nuggets of fact and instamatic retweetings of praise”. I hoped at the time that at least a couple of theatres would rise to Dan’s challenge. I hoped that marketing departments might see the benefit of passing their login details to the creative team, even just to bring some dramaturgy stuff into the open so we could follow a show’s development. Unless I’ve missed something, this hasn’t happened.
And yet I laugh at Twitter all the time. I am embroiled in the little mishaps and incidences of child-rearing and commuting and waiting for deliveries from all the people I follow. There is an academic case for calling this theatre, in that we’re sharing the parts of our lives that we think would be the most entertaining and interesting to others.
But, even disregarding the everyday comments and conversations we publish online, ‘Twitter theatre’ is happening all the time, via character accounts. This was all the rage for a while (“all the rage” - I sound like my mother) with @CatBinLady and @DianaInHeaven and that Samuel Johnson one, but they seem to’ve died off a bit now they have to save all the best stuff for their book deals. Apart from one. The best one. @FuckingLedge.
Around for a couple of years now, Fucking Ledge is not the fictionalised account of a celebrity or some bit-player in a regional news story, he’s a 20-something sales executive and small-time drug dealer. Today he’s been trying to sort out “15x corporate VIP and parking for 6 Avensis Turbos” for The Stone Roses reunion gigs by tweeting their official account. Yesterday he was trolling the #keepingitpeel hashtag by reminiscing about TFI Friday. Most of the other stuff is about your mum. It’s NSFW, but it’s fucking genius.
I think the point I’m trying to make is that I really don’t give a shit what PR rubbish my local theatre is re-tweeting when I can hear who Damo fingered last week in the accounts team bogs.
