Comedy

C4 gets six nights of Russell Brand

If there’s one thing that’s continually hammered home nowadays, it’s how the habits of modern media consumers have changed. No longer content to slump slack-jawed on the sofa, today we don’t just watch TV, we dissect it. Rather than just taking it in, we chew it up and spit it out.

As does Russell Brand. Taking over a 30-minute chunk of Channel 4’s evening scheduling for six nights in a row, ‘Russell Brand’s Ponderland’ sees the camp comic wandering around a faux living room, taking, as he puts it, ‘a funny look at different topics using TV as a palette’.

Rather than the usual freeform nature of the comic’s one-man show, however, here he focuses his witticisms around a tour of television’s more ill-advised moments. ‘It reminds me of when I used to smoke dope, and you’d watch telly and think: did I really just see that?’ chuckles Brand. ‘There are some extraordinary things you come across. What it’s supposed to capture is that if you watch telly with your mates and you go: isn’t that ridiculous? There’s a bit that makes you laugh outside of the intention of the programme makers.’
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With programmes one and two focusing on childhood and science respectively, there is no shortage of bizarre moments for the flamboyant funnyman to lampoon. Jigging energetically around the stage, firing off volleys of falsetto observations and faux-aristocratic impressions, he’s like an energetic Frankie Howerd in a Worzel Gummidge wig, sending up video footage of acne-scarred teens playing retro computer game ‘Track & Field’, while lamenting the use of fear as an educational tool for children. At one point we get an educational video about safe swimming featuring a ghoulishly voiced figure in a black cowl lasciviously urging children to their death. Later there’s a ‘Tomorrow’s World’ entirely based around fibreglass being placed into concrete blocks, featuring a model doll of the field’s leading scientist, which the presenter carries around by the head.

‘TV was much more shit when we were kids wasn’t it?’ chuckles Brand. ‘Look at things like “Sons And Daughters”. In the daytime all bets were off: with things like “Pebble Mill”, they just didn’t seem to care what went out on the TV. Perhaps if you watch it again it’s all right, but I just remember it being an enormous struggle.’

With a format that bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Harry Hill’s TV Burp’, and Brand’s involvement in the preponderance of recycled reality-TV formats of late through his ‘Big Brother’ work, the naysayers might suggest that this is yet another example of the recent decline in British TV’s originality.

‘That’s not fair, because if you were to wander into a library and start grabbing books off the shelf willy-nilly, you’d probably read some really boring things about harvesting, or a pap novel that would mar a holiday or a flight,’ counters Brand. ‘But if you use television in the same way you would use a library, by making a decision about what kind of things you want to watch, then it’s good. There are some amazing things on the telly. And I hope that this becomes a discerning choice rather than a trash novel.’

Plus, with an emphasis on stand-up and video footage of Brand during his youth, there’s much more of a personal feel to ‘Ponderland’ than other satires. The first episode even has him phoning his dad to discuss the brownness of Brand senior’s penis in relation to his own.

‘We wanted to do stuff that you wouldn’t typically see,’ laughs Brand. ‘And there’s only one phone call you can make if you need to research the colour of your father’s genitals. He was very accommodating, although I know he lost his dad at quite a young age, so he will not know the torment that it can be to wait for your own genitals to make the rite of passage into the true brownness of your father’s.’

So given how much more analytical our TV consumption is than previous generations, how will future viewers feel when they look back on this series? ‘Hopefully they’ll think that this was funny and aware of itself and light and warm and comfortable. If it were to be furniture, it’d be the bed in the episode of “Jim’ll Fix It” that a boy was pushed around the street in because it was his ambition to be pushed around the streets in a bed.’ Right…

Russell Brand's 'Ponderland', from Monday October 22, 10.35pm, C4