Charlie Brooker and the trolls

The 42-year-old Screenwipe star was responding to a Private Eye story which claimed he demanded that editor Alan Rusbridger give his columns special treatment after growing tired of abusive comments from trolls.

After the Private Eye story appeared, Daily Telegraph columnist Damian Thompson went on the attack, berating Brooker for being able to “dish it out but not take it” and being “brave only when he’s doing the slagging off; when others are doing it, not so much.”

Writing in the Guardian, Brooker insisted that he made no such demand – and by publishing his rebuttal, Rusbridger appears to have endorsed his version of events.

In actual fact, Brooker was talking about cutting back on his Guardian work two months ago. Speaking to our man Olaf Tyaransen at the Sky Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny in June, in an interview that was embargoed until now, he said the twin demands of TV screenwriting and fatherhood would mean that he’d be scaling back his journalistic work.

In 2010 Brooker married former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq (whom he met while filming an episode ofScreenwipe). He told Olaf that the birth of their son, Covey, last year has totally changed his perspective on things.

“It changes your personal experience of life. It changed how I was writing the weekly [Guardian] column…it’s going monthly. I just couldn’t be fucking arsed to be that opinionated about things on a weekly basis.”

Read the full interview – in which he discusses the forthcoming crime thriller parody A Touch Of Cloth 2 – in the next issue of Hot Press.