Diana Wichtel on Russell Brand: It pays not to ignore hidden messages

Russell Brand addressed the serious allegations in a video posted on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). Photo / YouTube

OPINION

Bullies and predators. They get away with it for so long not by hiding but by being brazen. Louis Theroux talked about this when I interviewed him for the Listener in 2019. He’d made a doco about Jimmy Savile in 2000 and become friendly with him. After Savile’s death, when his vile predations became public, Theroux made a mea culpa documentary about the story he missed the first time.

“What I didn’t realise was that he would prove, in a sense, wilier than I was,” Theroux said. “I don’t want to overstate it but the consequence for me was a sense of professional failure of a sort.”

Actually, he was one of the few to raise the paedophile rumours with Savile. “How do they know if I am?” burbles Savile. “Nobody knows if I am or not … I know I’m not …”

Theroux tries to give even the most monstrous people – see Savile and the Nazis – the opportunity to be better. To see people as purely evil, he said, fails to account for how they are able to get away with what they do. This time, he was played. He missed something. Haven’t we all?

Unfunnily enough, when I talked to Russell Brand ahead of a comedy show here in 2012, Jimmy Savile came up. Brand spoke to him on his Radio 2 show in 2007. Savile asks if Brand has a sister he could meet. Brand says he has an assistant. What would he like her to wear? Savile: “I’d actually prefer her to wear nothing.” Even if Brand thought he was playing Savile, the exchange is gruesome. They get on to department store Santas. “I never trusted those Father Christmases,” muses Brand. “I’ve always thought of you as a sort of Father Christmas figure.” Savile is oblivious to any subtext.

When I mentioned this exchange, Brand took off like a rusty rocket. “F***ing hell. He was never off duty, was he, Jimmy Savile? In a way it’s an illness.” Everyone knew something was up, he said. “Because he’s not a normal guy. Look how he talks. Then I think, ‘Oh no. Look at me.’ Because I’m kind of crazy. I just thank God for my vanilla heterosexuality on a daily basis.”

He has written about his father paying for a prostitute for him when he was 17. Vanilla is hardly the word for his material about his sex life. “It is, really,” he insisted. “I just like women that are fully grown, adult women.”

The allegations against Brand include rape and sexual assault. One of the women was 16. He denied “these rather Baroque attacks” in a pre-emptive strike on YouTube, hinting at dark forces massing against him: “Is there another agenda at play?”

Our interview included an endless monologue - him, not me - about the cosmos. “Seventy per cent of the known universe is intangible, dark matter … The arbitrary perception of one species on one rock in infinite space cannot rightly be called reality. It’s just some TV show.” Suddenly his life isn’t just his own TV show.

As our 2012 interview ended, Brand asked if I was attending his Auckland show. I was, with my daughter (she was once a fan, before he dived down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole). He said to come backstage and say hello.

My daughter was furious when I said of course we weren’t going backstage. Never a good idea. She reminded me the other day – it’s burnt into her memory, apparently – of my actual words: “I’m not presenting my 21-year-old daughter to Russell Brand on a silver platter.”

A while ago I found Brand’s name on a list of my favourite interviews. He was funny. We talked about our cats. He was outrageous but his jet-fuelled modus operandi is to set off multiple alarms at once so that it all blends into a sort of background tinnitus too easily ignored. People tell you who they are. Sometimes it’s only later you realise you were listening all along.