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Entertainment

Some Monster Wants to Turn the 'Very British Problems' Twitter Account into a TV Show

The twee Twitter-fication of Britain is complete. Throw me in the sea and burn the land I come from.

Evening plans: 1. Make tea 2. Get in bed 3. Biscuits

— VeryBritishProblems (@SoVeryBritish) November 4, 2014

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

I recently learned that a production company has optioned the Twitter account ​@SoVeryB​ritish with the view to turning it into a TV series. Throw me in the sea and burn the land I come from. The twee Twitter-fication of Britain is complete. Death to the West.

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​As the Guardian rep​orts, Alaska TV (renowned for producing a couple of abortive Jo Whiley vehicles and Gangs of Britain with Gary and Martin Kemp) optioned the Twitter account—which has already spawned a book, because the publishing industry is determined to die, not with dignity, but with a bout of fatal diarrhea and a deathbed confession of an affair in the 1950s—which is run by freelance journalist Rob Temple. Apparently the TV company were baffled that nobody had decided to turn tweets like the above into a TV show already. "When I got in touch with Rob, I was 99 percent sure he'd already be making a show," Alaska TV's Ian Lamarra said, sharing a sentiment that literally nobody on earth has ever had.

I mean, what next? If—and I hesitate to use his name, in case I accidentally say it three times and he jumps out from behind my laptop screen spraying Joop!—but if ​Dapper ​Laughs can secure an ITV2 show, even ​briefly, and an innocuous Twitter icon of an umbrella can get one, too, then what next? "This biscuit sort of looks like it's got the face of Mary, Mother of God on it. Can we get it on Loose Women?" Face it: There's never going to be a British Wire.

"Right, whose turn is it to make the tea?" - Translation: It's certainly not my turn to make the tea

— VeryBritishProblems (@SoVeryBritish) October 10, 2014

If you're wondering how to turn the tweet: "Opening a window to let out a fly and ending up with 30 midges, three wasps, two bees and an owl" into a 30-minute TV show, get ready for a Venn diagram of hellish TV formats: producers are nominally planning to read out the tweets (the nadir of modern television is watching ​David Dimbleby trying to ​say "use the hashtag"), having talking head-style comedians comment on them, and then—for good measure—hidden camera TV, presumably of people apologizing at an umbrella or something.

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Who is this for? Who hates their brain so much they want to expose it to this? The account is billed as "having 892,000 followers, including celebrities such as Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry." At its core, @SoVeryBritish is a concise and useless extension of Michael McIntyre's drawer-full-of-old-cables schtick: noticing something so simple, so basic, and then saying it and squinting wryly as people howl themselves wet with laughter. It's so inoffensive it's offensive, because it's just nothing: a cheap saccharine sugar-hit of vague recognition. Do you call your winter coat your "big coat"? Fucking hell, man. So do I. Let's hold hands as we put pencils up our noses and slam our heads in unison into a desk, eh? Let us seek oblivion together, because that's all there is left for us to do.

But in a way, we get what we deserve. In recent months there has been a definite grassroots campaign of censorship in comedy, in pearl-clutching newspaper headlines humorlessly picking apart a single off-color joke and presenting its splayed remains as evidence of our crumbling social order. Jimmy Carr was the latest target of this: his car crash too-soon ​Oscar Pistorius j​oke at the Q Awards being met with the dreaded seal of disapproval from the redtops, and he got shredded like a duck. I'm not defending Jimmy Carr—​the h​onk-like laugh he's been working on-stage since about 2011 means I will never punch for his team, because that sound chills me to the bone—but there's a definite danger in holding comedians accountable for telling jokes; for telling them to operate within invisible lines of good taste, and blasting them with tabloid gunfire when they deviate outside of them. "Oh, you don't want comedy any more? Well, here's a TV show based on a Twitter feed. Choke on that, fuckshows." Seen another way, turning @SoVeryBritish into a TV show might be the greatest middle finger ever popped.

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In reality, @SoVeryBritish feels like the weightless high point in the arc of TV's jump from a bridge into the sea—the graceful moment of peace before the plummet. If history has proved anything, it's that the Internet does not translate to TV: Shatner's folly Shit My Dad Says was dead on arrival, and lasted one series in the US; Dapper's moment in the sun has turned into a cancellation squabble about sexism and homelessness; E4's YouTube-but-worse-somehow show RudeTube lumbers on like driftwood somewhere in the Freeview backwaters. But TV's own ideas aren't much better: this summer the BBC shot itself in the head with Tumble, a show that took barely C-list celebrities and taught them some base gymnastic dance routines, eliminating them when they are bad. When people ask me in the pub what my favorite TV show is, I don't yam on about The Wire or Breaking Bad any more: instead I just say Tumble, the bullet that finally fatally wounded TV forever. TV so bad it feels like a tax dodge.

The overwhelming sorrow of finding a cup of tea you forgot about

— VeryBritishProblems (@SoVeryBritish) Septemb​er 22, 2013

Obviously, being optioned by an indie production company isn't actually "getting on" TV—as far as I can tell, from a number of half-remembered conversations with TV people, taking a show from "horrendously bad idea" to "horrendously bad actual TV show" is a complicated lottery that swivels on a thousand tiny decisions going in your favor and a certain amount of grace from the gods—but there seems something grimly inevitable about it, an executive with a ponytail saying, "Yeah, fuck it. Twitter will watch the first episode just to bitch about it. Can we get Robert Webb in to do a voiceover?"

All I'm saying is this: if this triggers a tidal wave of Twitter-to-TV transitions, if @ScouseBirdProblems gets a Two Pints of Lager…-esque BBC Three sitcom, then I'm shitting in a Jiffy and sending it to Ofcom. This has to stop now.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter