Twitter is great for disseminating news, trivia and practical instructions on when and where to meet up in order to overthrow the government, but it also doubles as a hothouse in which viral outbreaks of witless bullying can be incubated and unleashed before anyone knows what’s happening. Partly because it forces users to communicate in terse sentences, but mainly because it’s public. Many tweeters end up performing their opinions, theatrically overstating their viewpoint to impress their friends. Just like newspaper columnists – but somehow even worse because there’s no editor to keep their excesses in check or demand a basic level of wit or ability.

Obviously image is paramount. On TV, no matter how eloquent you are, 75% of the audience can’t even hear what you’re saying: they’re too busy making subconscious judgments about the tone of your voice or the angle of your lips. Conventional wisdom would have it that Gordon Brown is clearly at a massive disadvantage here, since he’s slowly come to resemble a lumbering, doomy Mr Snuffaluffagus with all the carefree joie de vivre of the Kursk submarine disaster. But Cameron and Clegg are, if anything, a bit too telegenic, a bit too slick, a bit too clean-cut and heigh-ho. They’ve tried too hard to appeal in soundbite pop-up form: stretched over an hour, they may start to grate, their smooth appearances unexpectedly conspiring against them.

Cameron in particular looks like a boring dot-eyed “nice” neighbour from an underwhelming Christian soap opera. He’s a replicant; an Auton; a humanoid; a piece of adaptive software that’s learned to appeal to your likes and dislikes – “customers who bought Tony Blair also bought the following” – but inadvertently creeped you out in the process. Let’s face it: if you discovered he doesn’t have a belly button or any pubic hair, and spends one night each week lying semi-conscious, face-down, “recharging” inside a giant white laboratory pod filled with amniotic fluid, you wouldn’t be entirely surprised. And voters are likely to sense that eerie unearthliness. He’d better stutter or fluff a few times, just to throw them off the scent.

When did public displays of contrition become the norm? More to the point, who actually appreciates them? Sitting through any public apology is mortifying. It just feels wrong. And ­unless the poor sod in ­question is ­saying sorry for something as ­momentous as a war crime, it’s ­entirely unnecessary. The public don’t need to hear it, because the public isn’t as ­psychotically, self-regardingly deranged as the press. Consequently, these apologies are aimed not at the public, not at the fans or the ­listeners, but the press. The press demands apologies on its own behalf, regardless of the will of the people. And it does this because it is insane, truly Caligula-level insane.

If you want to write something, don’t sit down in front of a blank screen, just, if you want to write something - have a vague think about what you want to write about, start taking notes, get somewhere like either a notebook, or a thing online, or a thing in your computer where you’re collecting every thought you have about the show, and don’t write it for ages. Writing is kind of like having a poo, basically; it’s really hard if you don’t want to go, but there’s a time when you have to go. And that’s what it should be like. There should be a time when you’ve put so much stuff in your subconscious, you’re just so excited about writing it, that you just have to sit down and get going. That’s really the secret, that’s where people falter, because they start writing too soon. They don’t know where to go, they sit down, they don’t know what the characters sound like, they don’t know what the world feels like, they don’t know what the tone should be. They haven’t put enough thought into those things.