Brand laughs off Sachs scandal
Furore is fodder for his stand-up
Russell Brand has laughed off the media storm surrounding his crude phone calls to Andrew Sachs, turning the furore into the cornerstone of his latest stand-up show.
Critics hoping for contrition over the scandal that cost him his Radio 2 job and plunged the whole BBC into a row over standards, have been left disappointed that his new live show makes light of the whole affair.
Although he admits, ‘we crossed a line. We made a mistake,’ Brand dismisses the affair as ‘only silly larking around’.
Jokingly blaming his ‘mental illness’ for his behaviour, he described the footage of him and Jonathan Ross during the Radio 2 as ‘two idiots dancing towards a canyon’.
During the show, which has previewed to his fans in Reading and London, Brand dances around to the ITN News At Ten theme tune, singing: ‘I am the News!’
‘The news became like my own show,’ he said. ‘Every time I left my house it could be seen by millions of people. I didn't realise it was so serious.
‘When you're as narcissistic as me, it makes my ego even bigger when you're all over the news.’
He added that he was upset by the lack of praise his got for the message he left on the Fawlty Towers’ star’s phone. ‘What stunned me about the whole thing was no one mentioned how great my song was,’ he said. ‘I rhymed ”menstrual” with “consensual” - it was fucking brilliant.’
‘It was a statistical inevitability that eventually I was going to sleep with the grand-daughter of someone from a sitcom. I might have done another. I might even have done Baldrick's.’
Brand also uses the show, which has previewed to his fans in Reading and London, to read out the death threats he received after calling George Bush a ‘retarded cowboy’ at the MTV Awards in the US.
Meanwhile, Friday Night With Jonathan Ross returns to BBC One this Friday, following the host’s three-month suspension following the Sachsgate affair, with guests Tom Cruise, Stephen Fry, Lee Evans and Franz Ferdinand.
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Published: 19 Jan 2009
