Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there. 

Steve Baker called for the European Union to be "wholly torn down"

You may have heard Steve Baker, the new minster at the Brexit department, interviewed by Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning.

He used the new government line about listening to people and then proceeded to rubbish every view from other organisations that Nick Robinson put to him.

It was a masterly piece of interviewing, proving once again that a sustained line of questioning is far more deadly than bluster and bullying. (Are you listening, Paxman and Humphrys?)

But we should not have been surprised at Baker's unwillingness to listen. Here he is in 2007 calling for the European Union to be "wholly torn down".

If the government is serious about Brexit it needs the most skilled diplomats you can imagine.

Instead, it has appointed a team of ideologues and clowns.

How to pronounce 'Bowie': A definitive guide

The great man told us in an interview with Jeremy Paxman in 1999...

Six of the Best 502

"It is as if UK politicians regard their failure to propose anything new as a demonstration of their fitness for office. It makes them safer from Paxman of course, but also perhaps insulates them from each other. They are dull enough to be safe. It is the besetting sin of the British political elite." David Boyle explains why Paxo's encounters with Cameron and Miliband were so dull.

Smart meters are a government IT disasters waiting to happen, warns the Institute of Directors.

Dorothy King shows that "Early depictions of the Passion of Christ tended to omit the crucifixion, and there are very few representations of it in the Early Christian and Early Byzantine period."

Alan Garner reflects on creativity.

"Thunderbirds spoke of the 1960s British mindset that all problems, no matter how apparently intractable, could be solved through the application of technology by boffins." The Beauty of Transport looks at the technology of the original Thunderbirds.

Invisible Works visits the lost village of Pudding Newton.

So farewell then Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Paxman is leaving Newsnight and I am not sorry.

Paxman has always been at his best when interviewing members of the public. He was polite and gentle, drawing them out and encouraging them to tell their stories.

He is at his worst when interviewing politicians. As I wrote in Liberal Democrat News in 2010:

Wealthy, arrogant, members of powerful dynasties... It is not the politicians we should worry about these days so much as the interviewers. 

Take the biggest cheese of them all: Jeremy Paxman. Politicians are not brought before him to have their views examined: they are there to suffer a form of ritual contempt. Forget any ideas of a sustained line of questioning designed to probe and elucidate his interviewees’ views. What he offers is sneering, snarling and attempts to catch his victims off guard. 

Paxo acts as a channel for our hatred of the political class. It is all great fun, but contempt for democratically elected politicians is not the mark of a mature democracy. It is the stock in trade of fascists or, to be less melodramatic, of fruitcakes like UKIP in Britain or the Tea Party in America.

I went on to observe that Paxman was most famous for asking Michael Howard the same question 14 times - "And he still didn’t get an answer."

And that has always been his greatest weakness. Paxman is not a forensic interviewer like Andrew Neil. He does not develop a line of questioning that exposes the weaknesses or contradictions in a politicians case. He just throws out random barbs.

Most of all he can sneer. Jeremy Paxman could sneer for Britain.

But maybe we get the interviewers we deserve. Paxman's shtick is the embodiment of the outlook of a public that believes all politicians are corrupt and self-serving but reacts with outrage when government fails to solve their problems.

Calder on Air: Jeremy Paxman is Steerforth

My column from today's Liberal Democrat News. I am told my set was working beautifully in the repair shop earlier this week. I shall pick it up from the shop tomorrow. Perhaps it just needed a holiday.

Asking the Questions

Calder on Air should have appeared last week, but I wasn’t well and then my television set fell ill too. For a couple of days I put up with the blue faces and purple grass, reasoning that I must have OD’d on Day Nurse, but in the end I realised something was wrong and sent it back for repair.

Living without a TV not the radical step it was when I did it for several years back in the 1990s. These days you can watch on line, catch up with the BBC iPlayer or a DVD into your computer. But I did take the opportunity to think a little more widely about television and politics.

******
Wealthy, arrogant, members of powerful dynasties... It is not the politicians we should worry about these days so much as the interviewers.

Take the biggest cheese of them all: Jeremy Paxman. Politicians are not brought before him to have their views examined: they are there to suffer a form of ritual contempt. Forget any ideas of a sustained line of questioning designed to probe and elucidate his interviewees’ views. What he offers is sneering, snarling and attempts to catch his victims off guard.

Paxo acts as a channel for our hatred of the political class. It is all great fun, but contempt for democratically elected politicians is not the mark of a mature democracy. It is the stock in trade of fascists or, to be less melodramatic, of fruitcakes like UKIP in Britain or the Tea Party in America.

And there are alternatives. For better or worse, the days when Brian Walden on Weekend World could act like a kindly but irascible professor faced with a bright student are long gone. They are part of that lost era when a Marxist Play for Today could gain 14 million viewers – chiefly because there was little else to watch.
But some people do it better even now. For all his silly guests and references to Blue Nun, Andrew Neil can be a devastating interviewer. I once heard him, with forensic politeness, draw from Michael Gove the fact that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of the most expensive private schools in Scotland.

This mattered because in those days Gove was widely assumed to be a state-educated moth among the Brideshead butterflies of the Cameron front bench. After this interview I saw him in a new light – even if, unfashionably for a Liberal Democrat, I am still an enthusiast for his ‘free schools’.

Jeremy Paxman, by contrast is most famous for asking Michael Howard the same question 14 times. And he still didn’t get an answer.

******

The Genius of British Art (Channel 4) has been a good series, and Howard Jacobsen’s essay on Victorian art and sexuality was valuable in helping to overturn the absurd view of the 19th century that many still have. The Victorians did not cover piano legs because they found them shocking: that was a joke they told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

But if there is a worse factual programme this year than Janet Street Porter’s discussion of modern British art I hope I do not have the misfortune to watch it. All we learnt in the course of an hour was a) she enjoys hanging out with famous people and b) cannot talk for more than 30 seconds without blatantly contradicting herself.

******

Being without a television has driven me back to my bookshelves, and I have found a literary equivalent of Jeremy Paxman. He is Steerforth from David Copperfield.

Having learnt from the innocent young hero that one of the masters at Salem House has a mother in the poor house, Steerforth uses the information to publicly humiliate him and secure his dismissal.

No doubt that made him as popular with his fellow pupils as Paxo is with viewers. But I am with Tommy Traddles, the conscience of the novel: “Shame, J. Steerforth! Too bad!”