Present Tense: Maybe you've heard it. Maybe you've read about it. Maybe you're wearing the T-shirt. A message that the entertainer Twink is purported to have left on her ex-husband's phone has become an internet phenomenon.
It consists of two minutes of the stage stalwart delivering a torrential, but devastatingly precise rant against the musician David Agnew and his new partner on the occasion of the birth of their child. Most of it is utterly unprintable in this newspaper. However, that some enterprising soul is making a few quid selling T-shirts that feature Twink alongside the slogan "Zip up your Mickey" will give you a good hint of her underlying thesis.
The Sunday Tribune last week quoted Twink as saying: "I couldn't give a tuppenny's damn. They can put it on the worldwide web 24/7 for all I care." In true panto tradition her wish shall be granted.
There has been no confirmation of where the phone message came from, or why it was leaked. And through her solicitors Twink told The Irish Times that she wished to make no comment on the issue, except to say that private matters relating to her matrimonial circumstances are being published against her wishes. But the volatile combination of wronged star and thermonuclear rage has proven irresistible to the public. Having started on a couple of websites, the phone message has popped up in thousands of e-mail inboxes, kept internet forums busy and become the top search item on Irish blogs. Someone had the bright idea of turning it into a dance tune. It was meant to be a private phone message, but at weddings all around the country this year people will be doing the Twink.
The newspapers picked up on it, while Today FM's Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show featured it in a sketch and pointed listeners towards the original clip.
Pretty soon, almost every man, woman and quite a few children will have been given a direct line to her wrath. And they too will discover that hell hath no fury like a panto queen scorned.
So, Twink joins the swelling ranks of a most novel type of modern superstar: those who do something they never thought would be seen, heard or read by anyone other than themselves and their closest friends or rivals, but who then fall victim to the internet's disregard for secrets. They could get together in a support group. Except that the home video of them getting drunk over the cold buffet would be leaked to the world.
The most famous examples have been the private tapes of the likes of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and what seems like several thousand other movie stars whose adult home movies have been watched by far more people than ever went to their films.
But they're less interesting than the everyday Joes who become instant superstars. For instance, 2003 saw the sudden fame of Ghyslain Raza - commonly known as the Star Wars Kid - a portly high-school student whose tape of himself acting out the moves of the movie's bad guy Darth Maul, complete with twirls and kicks and a golf-ball scooper doubling as a light sabre, was posted on the web by his schoolmates. For a couple of months he was one of the most famous young men on earth. His act was referenced in chat shows and prime-time sitcoms. Everyone found it hilarious. Except him. His family filed, but later dropped, a $250,000 lawsuit against his chums. "High school," Raza later said, "was a time of torment." And earlier this year, footage of "the Bus Uncle" a Hong Kong man haranguing a passenger for his lack of manners, was similarly downloaded, disseminated and turned into a pop culture favourite. It confirmed that, while it's difficult to pinpoint what makes for a successful viral e-mail, anger seems to be an important ingredient.
Others have been ensnared in a growing fashion for internet vigilantism. The web is (I am told) thronged with nude pictures of ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, but proper revenge requires subtlety. For example, take the case of Amir Massoud Tofangsazan, who sold an allegedly faulty laptop over eBay but hadn't reckoned on the disgruntled buyer hacking into the machine and posting Amir's personal details, and pictures he had allegedly taken of random girls' legs. Amir says his life became a "living hell". The man responsible became known as the eBay Avenger. A modern superhero.
In South Korea a cyber witch-hunt was carried out on a woman photographed on a train refusing to clean up her dog's faeces. She became known as the Dog Poop Woman. A modern super villain.
Twink, who has inadvertently become part of that trend, might also be discovering that this new brand of notoriety can have benefits. Firstly, unfair as it might be to him, you can be sure that her new catchphrase will follow her ex-husband around for many years to come. But secondly, she's now an internet star, a cult hit. There has been disquiet over her injudicious use of the word "bastard", but the T-shirts are affectionate, in a way. She has new-found kudos among the demographic that lies between panto-going school kids and showband lovers. And if nothing else, no one will give a tuppenny's damn about that infamous Fine Gael Ardfheis performance any more.
