The Second Serve // The Golden Jacuzzi

Thursday’s item about whispers of a bombshell #MeToo-style exposé prompted a lot of guessing from readers as to who might finally be getting their comeuppance. Among the more popular off-Brand guesses were Noel Fielding and David Walliams.

Sadly, it seems those investigations will have to wait. Channel 4 is hardly likely to examine Bob Geldof’s thoughts about Noel Fielding the way they did with Russell Brand on Dispatches – even though Fielding also dated one of Geldof’s daughters when she was doing her GCSEs and he was 33. Not with the new series of Bake Off starting a week on Tuesday, anyway.

And as for Walliams, as long as he’s selling kids books by the million for NewsCorp’s publishing wing, HarperCollins, it seems foolhardy to expect NewsCorp’s broadsheet offering, The Sunday Times, to expose one of the boss’s plumpest cash cows to too much scrutiny.

Jonathan Ross has always been one of the people who found Russell Brand’s gentleman horndog schtick the funniest. But we wonder if Jonathan knew that one of the sixth forms Russell used to loiter around back in the day – sending his assistant over to get the numbers of teen students he liked – was where Ross sent his own daughter at that same time?

One of the women mentioned in the Brand/ST exposé is Jordan Martin, author of the self-published book ‘kNot: Entanglement With A Celebrity” which describes her relationship with a famous Hollywood star she calls “Randall Grand”.

We remember reading it back in 2014 and figured it would be worth digging out our old notes in light of the weekend’s stories. When we did we were greeted by a few long-repressed memories.

Most eye-popping? We’d forgotten there are a handful of Jordan’s photos in the book, including one that’s used to illustrate a particularly unpleasant passage about Randall getting her to give him regular haemorrhoid checks. The accompanying shot is of Russell, lying face down on a bed, arse up, ready for inspection.

We can’t vouch for the veracity of all the anecdotes in the Randall Grand memoir, as it’s not entirely clear what artistic license has been taken in the telling. What we can say is there is a surprising number of piss-based stories in it.

One of the things that “Randall” supposedly liked to do during their time together was piss in the sink. He would use his right hand to run the tap while he pissed and use his left hand to keep his book pinned open so he didn’t have to stop reading while pissing.

Worse is the tale of the hot-tub. “Dina” recalls the time she got in a jacuzzi with “Randall” and settled herself in next to him, ready to enjoy the nice, warm bubbles – when he suddenly poked the tip of his dobber up out of the water like a periscope and started pissing a big golden stream up into the air.

The other allegation about Russell Brand that’s been commonly swapped in media circles is that he used noted plagiarist (and occasional Wikipedia bully) Johann Hari as his ghostwriter – particularly for his political manifesto Revolution.

Brand has denied this allegation too, saying: “Other than food – and the other obvious things – no one puts anything into my mouth. Especially words. Unless that word is ‘boob’.”

Or unless it’s a joke he had the Have I Got News For You writers to provide him when he appeared on the show.

Some of the people rushing to Brand’s defence have been claiming that these allegations are only coming out now because Russell has built up a sizeable audience of his own that poses an existential threat to the mainstream media. But do the numbers bear that out?

There’s quite a span of popularity across Brand’s current YouTube and Rumble output, but an average video tends to draw about 250,000-750,000 views (with the odd 1m+ when he has a guest like Tucker Carlson, or he addresses allegations of sexual assault).

How does that compare with the number of views he used to get back in the day of The Trews? It was interesting to re-read what we noted in 2015 about Russell Brand’s big Ed Miliband interview. For all the breathless reporting there was about how Brand was posing a serious threat to traditional broadcast media back then, the Miliband interview had only been viewed 550,000 times before the election.

So while it’s possible the audience is different, in terms of active viewers it doesn’t appear to have grown that much at all.

Last week, to give you a breather from our bizarre themes, we offered up five music quizzes that were essentially playlist shuffles – with no rhyme or reason to them.

This week, we’re back on our bullshit starting with: Vocoders – ten songs that feature voice-changing tech. You get a point for naming each song and a point for naming each artist, for a final mark out of 20.

[Play it here]

Memories from a publicist who worked on Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook
[Read on The Fence]

‘Private Part Thieves’ are operating in Nigeria
[Read on tori.ng]

Monster fish taxidermy
[Nightmare fuel]