Twitter suffering chronic banality, diagnoses Dr House

'I don't understand the purpose of it', admits Hugh Laurie

By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Entertainment, 27th May 2009 12:35 GMT

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Brit thesp and House star Hugh Laurie has told the BBC he's not that impressed with microblogging Web 0.2 phenomenon Twitter, even though he maintains a profile there.

Speaking to Radio 4's Front Row programme, Laurie described himself as "bothered by the social cost of every tweet", explaining: "As I look around my friends' tweets I see banality on all sides. I don't understand the purpose of it."

He added: "I think if people were able to take these 140 characters and develop a poetic Western form - a haiku of our own in which all human existence could be compressed into those 140 characters - that would be a satisfying thing, but that's not what I see when I read them."

Laurie did, though, reserve some praise for his chum and former comedy partner Stephen Fry's tweets, describing them as "the absolute best - the cream of the crop".

Asked if he and Fry, who shared TV screen space in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster, might hook up again, Laurie concluded: "We love to do things together, but we're just hopeless planners."

You can enjoy the full interview on Front Row tomorrow at 19:15 BST. ®

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