Comedian Stephen Fry has said he is “prepared to go to prison” over the “Twitter joke” trial.

Fry was at a benefit gig for a man who is appealing against his conviction for sending a menacing communication. Paul Chambers had tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Fry argued that Chambers’ tweet was an example of Britain’s tradition of self-deprecating humour and banter.

Chambers’ case has become a cause celebre on Twitter, with hundreds of people reposting his original comments in protest at the conviction.

“This [verdict] must not be allowed to stand in law,” Fry said, adding that he would continue to repeat Chambers’ message and face prison “if that’s what it takes”.

Read More: BBC News

Grant Morrison, ComiCon 2006. Photo: pinguino, CC

Despite his unbelieveable success as a writer, Grant Morrison has yet to have one of his comics translated onto the screen. Now he’s going to be writing for TV and personally, I can’t wait! Via MTV News:

Comic book scribe Grant Morrison is teaming up with “Push” director Paul McGuigan for a currently untitled television series to be filmed in Scotland, according to McGuigan himself.

In an interview with Live For Films, McGuigan revealed that he’s developing a seven episode television thriller alongside Morrison and actor Stephen Fry, who comic book fans will remember as talk show host Gordon Deitrich in “V for Vendetta.”

“It takes place over seven days around an event that happens in Scotland,” said the “Push” filmmaker. “It’s a modern take on an old fable or fairy story. If you know [Grant's] work you might have an idea of what it will be like. It’s like Twin Peaks meets Brigadoon! It’s off the wall and smart but in a watchable commercial way. It’s still in the early stages but I’m very excited about it.”

According to McGuigan, the project stems from his longtime friendship with Morrison. He revealed: “Me and Grant have been friends for a while and we wanted to do something together and Grant went off and wrote a treatment, so it’s at the treatment stage at the moment.”…

[continues at MTV News

LONDON — In the realm of Twitter insults, it was at the far end of mild. “Much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit … boring,” a Twitter user called brumplum wrote Saturday, speaking of the tweets of Stephen Fry, the British writer, actor and television personality.

But that little tweet set off a frenzy of vitriolic attacks and counterattacks on Twitter, drawing an untold number of people into an increasingly charged debate and thrusting brumplum — in reality a man from Birmingham, England, named Richard — unhappily into the public’s angry glare. It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter to distribute information and to sway the opinions of vast groups of people in tiny amounts of time.

It was also an example of how Twitter reinforces the tendency of adults to behave like high school students, passing rude notes, spreading exaggerated rumors and obsessing endlessly — and pointlessly — about who said what mean thing about whom.

In any case, after brumplum sent his mildly critical tweet, Mr. Fry somehow found out about it, and it made him feel terrible. It made him feel so terrible, he tweeted, that he was considering quitting Twitter altogether on account of all the “aggression and unkindness around.”

And the matter would have rested there, probably, if not for the fact that Mr. Fry, a much-loved figure who has spoken openly about his crippling depression and about being bipolar, has more than 934,000 followers and is one of the most widely read Twitter users in Britain. His much-publicized tweets in February, about being stuck in an elevator for 45 minutes, did as much to raise Twitter’s profile here as the photograph Ashton Kutcher posted on Twitter of the rear end of his wife, Demi Moore, did two months later…