And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #137: Piers Morgan v One Direction

By | Published on Friday 23 November 2012

One Direction

Twitter’s a weird place. One of its key plus points is that it gives fans direct access to their favourite celebs. This is also its main downside.

Let’s say back in the dark days before mass internet use, Mark Owen had heard on the grapevine that I didn’t really rate his favourite tennis player. Even in the unlikely event that Mark had decided to call me to say he thought I was wrong, it’s highly unlikely that his fans would have got wind of it. And even if they did, it would have been very difficult for them to organise a global media campaign to inform the world at large that they felt that my personal hygiene was somewhat lacking.

That’s the world we live in now though, as Piers Morgan found out this week.

Going about his usual routine of firing off unsolicited opinions and trolling other celebrities, Morgan tweeted: “No serious top flight team would sign Beckham for football reasons any more – he should retire gracefully”.

TV producer Ben Winston took issue with this, resulting in a brief argument over Beckham’s current skill as a footballer, which, for some reason, One Direction’s Harry Styles chose to jump into, tweeting: “Beckham is my hero. Winston is second in line”. The band’s Louis Tomlinson then followed, adding: “I LOVE David Beckham”.

So that’s all nice. And there it could have ended, but Piers thought of some jokes. In response to Styles, he wrote, “Is that because he always runs in one direction?” Not a great comeback, but he had a second chance, retweeting Tomlinson’s message with the comment, “Well sign him up for the group – bet he sings better than he plays now”.

Just in case no one had noticed he was talking to famous people, Morgan fired off another tweet, informing his followers: “Can’t believe I’m currently being sledged about Beckham by TWO members of One Direction. Boyband types clearly stick together”.

I think “sledged” is putting it a bit strongly, but whatever. The battle had begun, and Styles immediately brought out the big guns, tweeting: “Hiiii @SimonCowell, can you tell @piersmorgan to leave us alone please? He’s being nasty”.

Cowell didn’t respond, but One Directions fans did – 25 million of them, according to Morgan. And while that’s a bit of an over estimation, there were enough of them on the case to get the hashtag #PiersMorganIsSmelly trending worldwide.

Luckily for Morgan, he seems to love this sort of attention, so spent the rest of the afternoon stoking the fire. This prompted another 1Der to chip in, Niall Horan asking: “Do you just live on Twitter? What else do you do in the day?”

But the winner of the show was a late entrant, Liam Payne, with the simple but perfectly formed: “No hard feelings stinky”. He also added: “The world now thinks you smell – be sure to announce today’s news on CNN”.



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