Surface Unsigned hire Lionel Hutz, and David Baddiel answers his critics

Dear Surface Unsigned,

Does your lawyer look a bit like this?

Yes, Surface Unsigned’s PR team have been busy. I do love stuff like this. I won’t add to the wise words of those better qualified than I to unpick this one, but the bare bones are that a company sent a fairly nonsensical legal threat to a blogger, and obviously it’s always funny to see a larger organization attempt to use heavy-handed tactics and subsequently get egg on their face.

Of course, you’ve got to sympathise with anyone working for Surface Unsigned who genuinely cares about music and has nothing to do with the approach their “lawyers” have taken here, as the brand is likely to be associated with this for a long time to come. It is not, after all, quite the same as the Nicholas Hellen bun fight, where it’s the name of the chap responsible for the bullying tactics employed which is now mud. It would be good to know specifically who was responsible for the letter sent to Danny.

I’d also be interested to know the thoughts of bands with experience of working with Surface Unsigned.

* * * * *

This is the second internet smackdown I’ve been avidly following in the last week or so. Alex Larman, a university chum with whom I edited the culture section of the uni magazine in the heady days of my wasted youth, has been fighting with David Baddiel. It’s fairly polite man-of-letters stuff, with Alex blogging unfavourably on the Guardian about BBC4’s The Book Quiz, which used to be fronted by Baddiel. Said presenter has popped up to answer the criticism in person, on the Times Online blog, though spends most of the article being amusing about some other chap in a review of the show Alex linked to.

Baddiel gets Alex’s name wrong throughout, conceivably a veiled comment on the fact that this internettual Alex Larman/Larmar character, IF HE EVEN EXISTS, OMG, is not important enough to spell correctly, but hopefully more a case of slapdash fact-checking. Or perhaps we sniff conspiracy, and Larman/r is a pseudonym for a gloating Mark Lamarr, who of course fronted the rather more successful arts-meets-larfs quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks. And according to my mate Fayed, Prince Philip rigged the Book Quiz’s ratings as well. Get me the Daily Express “news” desk, and fast.

I wonder how much BBC4 spent on two series of the Book Quiz? I would rather see a two-part, hour a-piece adaptation of Baddiel’s novel Whatever Love Means, which is actually rather excellent. Of course, digital channels need “content”, requiring them to spread those commissioning budgets as thinly as possible. Out with the expensive one-off dramas, in with the cheerily cheap panel series.

At least none of Baddiel’s representatives wrote to Alex to inform him they would shut down the whole of the Guardian forever and ever to infinity times a million if he didn’t retract his libelous, defamatory, copyright-infringing and downright naughty comments, but then if you’re as crap a lawyer as Surface Unsigned apparently employ, you’re probably not going to get much work from David Baddiel, The Times Online, or indeed full stop.

To end inelegantly on a mostly unconnected note, I’ve been blogging on the Guardian myself about Barack Obama’s speeches.