[Crimson Dynamo]

It has now officially all gone wrong for stand-up’s sex god. Ahead of Saturday
night’s Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand, and the newspaper
disclosures in the Sunday Times, there was speculation that the witnesses could
be opportunistic attention-seekers. The first complainant demolished that idea.
On the same day as her alleged encounter with Brand, she visited a rape crisis
centre, according to medical records, and accused him of wrongdoing. If the
case reaches court, her testimony could be hard for Brand – who denies the
allegations against him and has said his relationships have all been consensual
– to explain.

One oddity of the Dispatches documentary was the identity of the chief
accuser: Brand himself. We saw him making gross statements in public that
sounded like throwaway satire. On TV, he told a guest, ‘don’t be afraid of your
own sexuality. Do be a bit afraid of mine though.’ He told an American chat-
show host: ‘You don’t want to be around when the laughter stops.’

Brand was never censured for this banter. His fans laughed along. Why would
a handsome, intelligent, rich and amusing superstar need to prey on women?
His light-hearted attitude to rough sex had to be a joke, right? A spot of
laddish exaggeration to titillate the gallery. He was excused because his
audience regarded themselves as cynical, worldly sophisticates. A BBC clip
showed him unequivocally denying sexual malpractice. ‘Don’t get so worked
up about it,’ he said. ‘It’s only a rhetorical device, my dear.’ The questioner
was Emily Maitlis.

Brand is an anthropological oddity, a mass of contradictions. At first glance,
he’s as sexy as Heathcliff. Those cavernous, tortured eyes, that brooding,
sculpted profile, the dark crown of uncombed hair, and the ripped-open shirts
that reveal a suntanned torso hugged by a silver studded belt. And physically
he’s not intimidating. His vocal pitch is high, girly even, and his mannerisms
suggest the fey and sexually inert Kenneth Williams. He’s a hunk who talks
like a hair-dresser. He affects a dated Dickensian accent and he has a
preference for scholarly vocabulary, and these quirks which place him in the
harmless world of the music hall.

But is there another side to Brand? On stage he mimed having oral sex with a
female who was evidently choking and weeping. He imitated the sound of
her gag-reflex and he celebrated the moment when she started to sob.
During his stint at BBC Radio 2, he made sexual remarks on air about a
journalist. ‘She’s erotic that newsreader,’ drooled Brand in his lascivious, self-
mocking way. ‘We’re going to get under that desk and we’re going to unleash
hell on your thighs.’

Even more troubling was a telephone interview with Jimmy Savile who asked Brand to send over his sister for an assignation.

‘I’ve got a personal assistant,’ said Brand helpfully, ‘and…anyone I demand
that she greet, meet, massages – she has to do it.’
Savile sounded keen, unsurprisingly, and Brand asked him what costume she
should wear. ‘Nothing,’ said Savile.

This locker-room jabber isn’t criminal, of course, but it profoundly damages
Brand’s reputation to be heard joshing with Savile and referring to women like deliveries of meat.

A reckoning will follow across many sections of media. The world of stand-up
comedy needs to straighten out its procedures. The Beeb is in hot water, yet
again. Why did it consider Brand the sort of person fit to hire? Charles Moore,
of this parish, made this point more powerfully than anyone. In 2010, he
criticised the BBC for its handling of a Radio 2 broadcast in which Brand and
Jonathan Ross made obscene and threatening telephone calls to the
answering machine of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. The calls were about
how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. The ‘joke’ wasn’t funny at
the time. It certainly isn’t now.



WRITTEN BY
Lloyd Evans
Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic