I was reading Mic Wright’s excellent Substack blog Conquest of the Useless this morning when the header I have used for this particular blog came into view. I have always regarded Guardian hack Owen Jones as not a bit, but a lot, of a dick, a far left, populist, rabble-rousing Trot who does more to benefit the political right than most right-wingers, but having gone along with the crowd celebrating Russell Brand a decade ago, at least he now has the common decency to hold his hands up today and admit he was taken in by someone we now know is a convicted rapist. Wright reminds us how a timid media enabled his rise to fame. Just look at this list:
- Three-time Sun ‘shagger of the year’
- One-time New Statesman guest editor
- Guardian columnist
- Prospect magazine’s fourth most important thinker in the world 2015
- GQ’s Most Stylish Man 2006
- BBC Radio 2 presenter
- XFM DJ, MTV interviewer
- Temporary TalkSport host
- Channel 4 mainstay
- £1.8 million advance earning HarperCollins author
- Macmillan published self-help writer
- Film star for Universal and Disney
As you will see if you dig even slightly deeper, there’s much more than this. My own dealings with him, as an extremely minor blogger, have obviously been non-existent so perhaps that’s part of the reason why I never fell for the hype that surrounded Russell Brand and elevated him to a stage well above whatever actual talent he actually has.
I just saw him on telly and saw stuff about him in my newspaper of choice, The Guardian. If I saw him on telly, I never found him to be remotely funny, the stuff he wrote left me cold. His squeaky voiced shtick was fingers down a blackboard to my ears. Put simply, I didn’t rate him. I saw no unique talent in Brand, just a supreme level of confidence, probably arrogance, and an uncanny ability, a weird form of charisma, that managed to draw in large swaths of the media, to give him a platform and so enrich him. Always, there was the suggestion of sex.
The Sun ‘newspaper’ happily awarded him a made-up award called ‘Shagger of the Year’. It does not require the intelligence levels of a rocket scientist to work out what he was doing to receive such a prestigious accolade. As an admittedly ‘straight’ male, I found it hard to understand why so many women were apparently throwing themselves at his feet. Now he has been revealed as a rapist and a serial sexual predator, we have a clue as to why.
He built up immense power, too, courtesy of the media that feted and indulged him, just like they did with the likes of Jimmy Savile before him, enabling him to assault and rape women in plain sight. Where many of us ordinary folk saw a dodgy, slippery, creepy, modestly talented man who seemed to be permanently in the media, those in positions of power, including major politicians saw his endorsement as essential, presumably because he was so well-regarded among young people in particular.
Where millions tuned into his media appearances and read his newspaper and magazine columns, I looked away. His Guardian pieces were essentially flowery gobbledegook. I wondered for a while if I was somehow missing out on subtleties beyond my levels of intelligence because I knew people in my own life who could write better than Brand.
You know the term famous for being famous? Essentially people with little or no talent who somehow get propelled into stardom and wealth by way of media imaging, people like Katie Price, Jade Goody and Gemma Collins. Brand was clearly more sophisticated than those people but the point remains the same. His was the victory of personality over talent, a media creation, a Jack of no trades, master of one: self-publicity. And while millions were taken in, egged on by a media desperate to indulge and have a piece of him, there was a darkness to him which we now all know about.
Having successful courted (conned?) the left earlier in his career, the latter day Russell Brand did a 180, embracing not just the right, eventually the far right, but God. Once he embraced religion, I knew I had been right all along. Here was a grifter who would latch on to anything he felt would give him more money. See also Tommy Robinson and Nazis everywhere. He maintained a significant minority following among the hard-of-thinking, who found themselves able to excuse and indeed justify anything their hero said and did. And the immense power he had accumulated by grooming so many people seemed to ensure that the real Russell Brand was insulated from accountability. Until, that is, a number of his victims summoned unimaginable levels of courage to tell their stories to the authorities. Even Brand’s expensively assembled and aggressively powerful legal team could not silence them. Now, this rapist and sexual predator is going to behind bars for many years. Frankly, I hope he rots in prison.
In a world where talent is no longer the requisite for fame and fortune, particularly in the industry known as ‘Entertainment’, it is no surprise when cunning and manipulative people ascend the heights and use all that fame and fortune to trample on others. But sometimes, the little people, in this case the victims, get to fight back and win. The media sycophants who indulged and indeed encourage Russell Brand should at least reflect on what they enabled and even created. Grooming takes many forms. And many powerful people were taken in by him. They should hang their heads in shame and apologise. But you know they won’t, not when there’s money to be made.
