It might seem like a little, trivial Twitter spat, but this whole thing feels ridiculously sinister. ITV News brought him on as an expert on trolling because he's done a show about it, except his definition of trolling is 'anyone who dares to agree with me without first being a celeb' and their definition of trolling is 'anyone who questions our impartiality'. ITV's response to criticism is to try and humiliate somebody that they thought was helpless on national television for having the sheer temerity to question them, and David Baddiel gladly leaped in to tell the silly little pleb to know their place.
Obviously it's funny that he then felt the need to backtrack on his deeply held convictions (that people shouldn't disagree with him) when he found out he was talking to a fellow celeb, who has earned the right to express their own beliefs, and the fact that it paints him as a classic bully, flushing the little kid's head down the toilet and then apologising when he finds out that they do judo, is great. Helps that he's basically only famous himself for sitting next to people far funnier than him, like Richard Hammond in Stewart Lee's Top Gear routine.
But what can't be overlooked is that the fact that this all happened in the first place shows that these attitudes have been normalised. Not only do ITV not have to be held to account for their journalism, but they can feel free to label those who question them as 'trolls' and play the victim. David Baddiel is an expert on trolling, even though his bold stance against people who disagree with him only lasts as long as it takes to realise that they wrote Temptation. This humiliating incident is only a brief interlude in his ongoing tour of a show all about how anybody non-famous who dares have an opinion is a troll, and needless to say, David Baddiel had the last laugh. Thanks for buying a ticket, though!
Also, he was shit on Taskmaster.
