There is a surreal moment halfway through Channel 4′s Dispatches investigation of comedian Russell Brand in which the filmmakers submit a request for information from the station about Brand’s time at the broadcaster. Channel 4′s response is that it cannot comply because of data protection safeguards. Britain’s most radical television network is looking itself in the mirror and shaking its head.
It is a sliver of grim humour in the middle of Russell Brand: In Plain Sight (Channel 4, Saturday, 9pm), a ghastly 90-minute exposé produced in conjunction with The Sunday Times. The allegations against Brand – which he preemptively denied on YouTube – are that he sexually assaulted a number of women between 2006 and 2013 – including a victim who was 16 at the time.
Russell Brand: In Plain Sight is shocking viewing, not least because of the timeline. It’s all so recent. We’d been led to believe this sort of behaviour was something from another era – the ghastly days of Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter and others. But, according to Channel 4, Brand was enabled by those around him as his career took him from Big Brother to BBC Radio 2 and, ultimately, Hollywood.
The women who have come forward understandably wish to remain anonymous. One person who does speak on the record is Helen Berger, who worked as the comedian’s personal assistant between 2006 and 2007.
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“He was at his TV show, 1 Leicester Square, and he was walking this way and that way, and he would say, ‘Can you get me their numbers?’. They were members of the audience, on his show ... I saw a lot of things that if I were to walk into it now, I would say ‘that’s not right’, but back then, everything was so normalised.”
The picture painted is of an industry that looked the other way as Brand’s star ascended.
“Russell’s pointing out women that he found attractive in the audience, then getting the runners to get their details so that they could meet up after the show,” said one staff who worked on Big Brother’s Efourum, the spin-off that ushered Brand into the spotlight. “It was like we were taking lambs into slaughter. We were basically acting like pimps to Russell Brand’s needs.”
What was remarkable was that the worse his behaviour, the greater his success. His career should have ended when, in 2008, he and Jonathan Ross made a giggling call to actor Andrew Sachs so that Brand could leer about being intimate with Sachs’s granddaughter. He was indeed sacked by the BBC – though the broadcaster had turned a blind eye to inappropriate remarks he had made to a female newsreader and to an incident in which he had urinated in the studio.
Undeterred, Brand moved to Los Angeles, where Hollywood welcomed him with open arms. In Los Angeles, one of the assaults described by the Dispatches investigation allegedly took place. The details are, needless to say, upsetting: the woman recalls to Dispatches how a glazed look came over Brand. Afterwards, he texted to apologise.
It feels telling that only a handful of people are prepared to criticise the comedian publicly. There is footage of Bob Geldof using the C-word when referring to Brand at an awards ceremony (the comedian looks on in rage). But within the comedy circuit, only Scottish stand-up Daniel Sloss is prepared to speak out.
“‘I’m stood in bars with agents, promoters, channel commissioners and I’m hearing these allegations and rumours with Russell in the same room, and later on he would be on a movie, on a television show, he would be hosting something,” says Sloss. “He was still being employed.”
His comments are devastating. The silence of his peers is more devastating yet.
