In 1993, David Baddiel and Rob Newman became the first comedians to play a sold-out arena show in Britain, performing to 12,500 people. That once unprecedented number is today dwarfed by Baddiel’s following on Twitter, where close to a million people serve as an ever-present audience for his every joke, observation or opinion. Tens of thousands give him daily tacit rounds of applause and howls of laughter with “likes”. But countless others, protected by anonymity, subject him to a torrent of vituperative heckles.
In a new BBC documentary, David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger and Us, the comedian and writer seeks to understand how platforms designed and promoted as egalitarian communities became breeding grounds for indiscriminate discrimination, and to examine why he remains in thrall to something that causes him such distress.
Much of what Baddiel covers over the hour — from how social networks are designed to stimulate addiction to their role in the viral spread of misinformation — will be familiar to anyone who has watched Netflix’s feature-length documentary, The Social Dilemma. But where the latter provided necessary insight into issues and corporate practices surrounding privacy, algorithms, fake accounts and targeted advertising, here the focus is more compellingly on the personal, existential and behavioural matter of Us.
One fascinating scene sees Baddiel undergo an MRI while being bombarded with A Clockwork Orange-style compilation of hateful messages to locate the primal, unconscious effects of exposure to abuse. In another, he speaks with his 20-year-old daughter who bravely describes how social media exacerbated a severe bout of poor mental health.
The idea that’s explored most incisively, however, is that social media acts as a corrosive substance that strips personalities, politics, humour and ethics of nuance and complexity. But there is no histrionic screeching about “cancellation” to be found here. Baddiel’s approach is even-handed as he accepts the case for a “culture of consequences”, and persuasively makes his own about how the internet’s moral arbiters leave little room for sincere attempts at self-betterment.
This is, of course, a particular concern for Baddiel since he serves as a walking example of the flawed individual that the Manichean worldview promoted on social media doesn’t allow for. In one of several moments of revealing self-scrutiny he reflects that though he’s rightly condemned for an unequivocally racist sketch on a TV show in the 1990s, this shouldn’t preclude him from speaking about his own experiences of anti-Semitism, as his many hostile detractors suggest.
No doubt, any posts about this show on his Twitter account will be met with a similarly angry response by some. Inadvertently, they’ll just be helping promote it.
★★★★☆
Available on BBC2 on Monday 9pm
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