It’s getting tricky to find someone who doesn’t like Russell Brand. Once was a time when his nut-crushing slacks, neck scarves, crow’s-nest barnet, overactive ‘dinkle’ and back story of smacked-up naughtiness had a nation up in arms. Now he’s on Radio 2 and has a column in the Guardian. But just when it seemed Middle England had taken his contradictions and controversies into its fickle heart, here comes a memoir to stir up trouble. Except that it’s a bestseller.
Coming from a comic as explicitly (in all senses) autobiographical as Brand, most of ‘My Booky Wook’ is old news. New morally reprehensible depths are still plumbed, though: he pretended to have AIDS so he could bunk off from an early job in a language school; and when, as an Italia Conti student, both Louise Nurding and Kéllé Bryan (later of Eternal ‘fame’) wanted a piece of him, Brand opted for a date with Kéllé because, as he gleefully reports, he fancied a bit of black.
Yet despite all this, he is – infuriatingly – charming. His barrow boy-meets-Brian Sewell linguistic mix doesn’t quite make the jump from stage to page, but his pseudish best is very good indeed: ‘So I was whooped out of Grays School the way Coriolanus was driven from Rome.’ Elsewhere he includes a brief biography of Ben Jonson and a plot synopsis of ‘Volpone’, while neglecting to explain who Julian Dicks is. In fact, a major omission from this fine and funny (though perhaps selective) self-portrait is the source of Brand’s bookishness. ‘The only times I enjoyed school,’ he writes, ‘was when a dog got in the playground.’ So why did he take to reading Camus with the same fervour as he later smoked heroin?
