An interview with Gary Barlow this week, in which he talked about his children not following him into a showbiz career, meant that X exploded into a blaze of joy that hasn’t been seen on the platform for a long time. Not because users were delighted about the Take That star’s career choices, but because of a photo of the Barlow family together.
In it, 24-year-old Daniel dwarfs the rest of his family. I mean, dwarfs. He’s head and shoulders above his dad, and is thought to be 6’ 2” (1.88m) tall compared to Gary’s more petite 5’ 8” (1.72m), and the height difference really brought out the best in X users, who filled their feeds with photographs of Barlow senior with tremendous captions.
A photo of Gary in front of a red carpet banner with an Argyll print was captioned: “Gary Barlow standing in front of his son’s new cardigan.” One of Gary being showered with golden confetti said: “Gary Barlow standing next to his son eating a croissant.”
The jokes weren’t just visual. One user simply wrote “Gary Barlow and Gary Barhigh”, and it seemed that X had gone back to its origins as Twitter all over again, when it was largely users making stupid jokes, and not telling their political opponents to eff off, or calling them any combination of “rancid”, “thick”, “moron” and other words I’m too polite to mention here.
Dan Barlow has been the socials palate cleanser that we need after the mud-slinging of the US election on X. He is the new Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo in a Taiwan zoo who recently bought joy to the internet with her cute but sassy behaviour. Obviously, they’re not the same in size, but they’ve reminded us that the internet isn’t just for slagging people off; it can also bring a huge amount of pleasure, too.
And I mean huge. Once you’re done looking at pictures of “Gary Barlow’s massive son” – I don’t make up the most popular search terms, people… – there’s Bear Grylls’s giant offspring, 18-year-old Marmaduke. And, if you’ve not had a gutful of Donald Trump this week, there’s always his 6ft 9in son, Barron.
If you ever had a blog, you’ll remember the good old days of t’internet. I loved writing mine about 16 years ago, and somehow it managed to get a small but loyal following, and we would get together and have a blogmeet. Yes, imagine, internet strangers actually getting together in the same room and having some fun. We’d have long, comment conversations on each other’s blogs, and we even had a little blog tour, visiting strangers’ sites and posting complete nonsense in their comments, just to confuse the owners. It was an utter joy, and I am still best friends with several of the people I met through writing about silly things that made me laugh and stupid men who made me cry.
One of the things I wrote about on my blog was going on an internet date with a man who called himself “Giraffe” and told me he was 7’ 7” (2.31m) tall, which at least fast-forwarded the conversation about “how will I recognise you?”. We went on a date to a minimalist Japanese restaurant that had all the ambience of a public lavatory, split the hugely expensive bill and never met again. I’m sure Dan Barlow is much nicer to go to dinner with.
And I think Big Dan could also be the encouragement we all need to be a little bit silly on our socials. Enough of the pouting selfies, cooking videos of things with mashed-up bananas in them and bog-standard insults: more of the type of brilliant jokes and wit that you get on a pub night out with your besties, egging each other on to be funnier and funnier.
Nobody who has a political opinion which is different from yours has ever replied: “Goddamnit, you were RIGHT ALL ALONG!” when you post a link to a news item which shows their views are entirely twisted. But everyone enjoys a picture of a tortoise in a pair of denim jorts, a daft joke or the joy of a pop star’s very tall offspring.