Twitter suffering chronic banality, diagnoses Dr House

'I don't understand the purpose of it', admits Hugh Laurie

Brit thesp and House star Hugh Laurie has told the BBC he's not that impressed with microblogging Web 0.2 phenomenon Twitter, even though he maintains a profile there.

Speaking to Radio 4's Front Row programme, Laurie described himself as "bothered by the social cost of every tweet", explaining: "As I look around my friends' tweets I see banality on all sides. I don't understand the purpose of it."

He added: "I think if people were able to take these 140 characters and develop a poetic Western form - a haiku of our own in which all human existence could be compressed into those 140 characters - that would be a satisfying thing, but that's not what I see when I read them."

Laurie did, though, reserve some praise for his chum and former comedy partner Stephen Fry's tweets, describing them as "the absolute best - the cream of the crop".

Asked if he and Fry, who shared TV screen space in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster, might hook up again, Laurie concluded: "We love to do things together, but we're just hopeless planners."

You can enjoy the full interview on Front Row tomorrow at 19:15 BST. ®