CityLife

Russel Brand

SUCH is the furore surrounding Russell Brand’s crank call to Andrew Sachs that one might have reasonably expected his latest show to begin with him being wheeled on stage in the stocks, hanging through the holes like a helpless dandy waiting to be pelted with tomatoes.

But oh no; that wouldn’t be very Russell Brand. Instead, he opted to call it Scandalous and base much of the script on the fallout from the calls to the Fawlty Towers actor that lost him his job at the BBC, mocking rather than maligning his slap on the wrists from the tabloids.

Snippets of news are flashed across the stage, soundtracked by Mozart’s Requiem. “I blunder through life like a lunatic,” he says during the opening moments, “while 10 paces behind me people are cleaning up.”

It’s a throw-away comment but one that summarises very much the approach to comedy that has made him so famous - and continues to make him so charming.

He is in possession of a filthy mind, spending several points in the show soliciting for post-show entertainment. But when he sticks to the point, that being the compulsion of his ‘mental illness’ to walk him into sticky situations, it’s impossible not to laugh at his studious and eloquent accounts.

Inescapable

His early meanderings on his inability to write a script on a PC because of the inescapable draw of online pornography sets the tone. Brand, like the tabloids, enjoys nothing better than poking fun at himself. Or better still, poking fun at those who poke fun at him.

And so, he marvels at the power of his libido to turn ‘sluts into celebs’ and jokes that his prevalence in the 10 o’clock news headlines following Sachsgate led him to believe it was ‘his new show’.

He marvels at the sensationalism of one tabloid headline that calls a Russell Brand impersonator ‘a victim’ after he was forced back into a job as a pot-washer, and at America’s inability to handle a jovial jab in the ribs at their sacred MTV VMA Awards.

Some would call such egocentric comedy lazy. But Brand’s delivery is compelling and so insistent that it would be churlish not to see the funny side. And, when everybody else is talking about him, why shouldn’t he?

What did you think? Have your say.

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