Sean was a little, pale, ginger-haired man, always whispering and pessimistic. The people at Vera teamed him up with one of Elaine’s friends—this woman called Trish—so the pair of them could be like our pretend parents. Stung by the indignity, it was at this point that me and Matt finally made a sensible decision.
“Right,” we said, “let’s just do things that are mental.”
From this moment, the idea behind RE:Brand ended up being basically, “Let’s challenge diff erent social taboos. Let’s look at things that confuse and confound people, and I’ll embrace them.”
It was an extraordinary experience making that series. Each episode was such a psychological strain that, had I not already been a heroin addict, I would very likely have become one to cope with this silly show. I still stand by the actual programs, though. They’re painful and poignant and laden with pathos—not only because of the emotionally extreme subject matter, but also because I was in such a damaged place, psychologically. At this point I had absolutely no concern for my own physical or emotional well-being and was basically out of control. But while this made day-to-day life virtually unbearable for me, it also made for pretty good TV.
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It was Matt’s idea that I should have a bath with a homeless person. Together we contrived to take on these taboos: have a fight with your dad to examine the idea of the Oedipus complex, have a bath with a homeless person, get to know a member of the BNP* to see what they’re like, seduce an old woman—all these berserk notions which we ended up turning into twisted realities, and ultimately broadcasting to minuscule viewing fi gures, via the schedules of a little-watched satellite TV channel.
I’d first met Homeless James when I saw him being harassed by the police off Oxford Street, while begging by a cash point.
I’d gone over and got involved—on my Che Guevara tip—“Why are you hassling him? Aren’t we all equal? That could be you begging one day. Hey, I pay your wages.” That sort of stuff .
Then I started taking James up to the Vera offices, much to the chagrin of the directors and staff .
They
were quite happy to demonstrate social solidarity through Kit Kats but if you actually bring homeless people into their lives, it makes them uncomfortable. So James was forever in our office with his mate Alan—they were the Batman and Robin of the homeless community. One day, we brought him in for a cup of tea and stuff and asked him, “James, would you like to make a TV program? We’ll give you some money.” Obviously, he said yes. That’s how it is with heroin addicts—they’re very open to suggestion. If you give them money, they’ll agree to do just about anything.
At the time I was still living in that nice flat off Brick Lane.
The driving ideology behind the Homeless James encounter was that no one should really be homeless. With all the unoccupied buildings that there are in the UK, it’s irrational that homelessness should still exist. Presumably the reason it con-
* British National Party—racist political party.
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tinues is that we somehow think of the homeless as dirty and unpleasant, so how would it be if I took a homeless person, brought him right into the core of my life—shared my bed and my bath with him—how would that make us both feel?
The intention was to film with James for a one-week period, but the reality was that after two days he decided that he preferred being homeless to living with me. Also, as a junkie, he needed to get out to score drugs. I stayed in touch with James after the show and used with him quite a lot. We only fell out after I gave him £100 to get me some heroin and he fucked off and didn’t come back. It’s obviously difficult to have a genuine friendship when one of you is on MTV and the other is a tramp:
“He’s a homeless person and I’m a glamorous TV presenter—we’re the original odd couple!”
I do have very clear memories of being kept awake by James’s snoring on the night we shared a bed together, but the most significant moment in that particular episode was probably the bit where we had a bath together. We were both naked, and James’s weeping ulcerated leg was sending clouds of pus into the bath-water. But I just got on with washing James’s back and shaving him while he coped with this enormous discomfort by keeping his eye on the ultimate prize of £500, or what ever it was we were paying him.
There were some quite sad and touching moments. I took him out on a double date to a posh restaurant with a couple of birds I was seeing. He’d been scrubbed up and given some clothes that I didn’t want, so that he resembled a small-time drug-dealer. We went to a place called Freddie’s in Islington. As I recall—from watching the tapes as much as anything else—it was quite sort of stifled, until the champagne started flowing, but even then he was uncomfortable.
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radio station XFM, where me and Matt had a Sunday lunchtime show. The item that I’d brilliantly created in honor of this occasion was “Homeless James, your homeless agony uncle—for all your homeless needs.” There was a dearth of callers, on account of the fact that homeless people don’t have radios. To make up for this deficit, I had to look elsewhere for problems to solve, and ended up looking through tabloid newspapers—specifi cally, the Sport.
In my opinion, the letters in the Sunday Sport’s problem page are not real; they are in fact—as most of the paper is—just an excuse to print pornography. The problem I chose to read out in the hope of getting Homeless James to solve it was one where a woman had been having an affair with her husband’s father and had been sodomized by him. She was keen for her husband to start sodomizing her, but didn’t know how to approach the subject. Obviously it didn’t say “sodomize” in the paper, it said
“fucked up the arse.”
I was professional enough to realize that you can’t say that at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, so I changed it, very cleverly, I thought at the time, to “f ’d up the a-level.” After I finished the item, we put a track on, and the controller—Andy something, his name was—rang up and started using worse language than anything I’d said. The next day, I was fired. Driving home from that show in a cab with James and Matt, I had a terrible nauseous feeling, just thinking “everything is going wrong.”
The next day we took him to the Ideal Home Exhibition, thinking, “Oh that’ll be amusing, as he’s homeless”—some of our ideas were a little stunted—and there was a moment which was actually screened where I said, “Look James, do you feel exploited by this?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do a little bit.” When I asked him why, he said, “You don’t really know me. I could be 248
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anyone. I could be a murderer or something—I’m not—but having me living in your house is still a bit weird, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”
So that was kind of how it ended. It’s strange booking a cab for a homeless person. Where do you say they’re going? We gave him £20 for his fare and they dropped him off in one of his old doorways at C&A (it’s Niketown now).
One discarded RE:Brand idea which it’s probably best we didn’t follow up was: “Let’s get a load of prostitutes, make them live with my mum, and she’ll be their pimp. We’ll change her car into a pimpmobile and make her put adverts in the paper and deal with all the customers!” I remember that phone call very clearly: “Mum, can I have loads of prostitutes come and live round your house for a TV program?” “Oh, alright darling. Yeah, OK,” she replied, in that same soft and gentle voice she always used as she continued resolutely in her mission to love me.
That misguided program idea mutated into me just going to live with an individual prostitute. We picked this woman called Ali, who I’d met on this holiday with Matt on the Norfolk Broads, where we’d had to get this woman we didn’t know to pretend to be my wife because the boatyard owner didn’t want to rent out a boat to two men
he’d assumed were gay (but that’s another story).
She was living in terrible poverty. Well, not terrible in a dramatic sense, but just in that way which is tragically quite mun-dane and common. Her living room door had a hole in it, so that her boyfriend Pete could observe what was going on when she took her clients upstairs.
The premise of the program was outlined in my opening monologue. “Hello there, I’m Russell Brand. Now, we all sleep with prostitutes don’t we, but would we still do it if we knew a 249
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little bit more about their environments?” “Cut! Russell, we don’t all sleep with prostitutes—that’s just something you do.”
The idea was nonetheless a good one—would anyone sleep with prostitutes if they weren’t able to dehumanize them? If they understood that prostitutes were women with lives and families and problems and hopes and dreams, would they still be able to empty themselves soullessly and leave fifty quid on the table?
I know some people would, but it’s partly the surrounding culture of anonymity and exploitation that allows these things to fl ourish. That’s what I wanted to demonstrate by living with Ali and Pete and their daughter for a few days, and then finding out how it would feel at the end of that period to go, “Right, well, it was nice getting to know you, but here’s a hundred quid, let’s fuck!”
The operation they were running up there was crackers. Ali was working to support not only Pete, but also his brother. Th e
two of them pimped her out by putting cards around the Nor-wich area, and then stayed at home to make sure she was OK
while she brought clients in. There was one time when the other two were out delivering cards or scoring gear or something and it was only me and Matt in the house downstairs with the baby.
We could hear her upstairs working.
She told us heartbreaking stories about the stuff that she’d do. She could make more money offering “oral without”—blow jobs with no condom—and she told me about one bloke with a syphilitic, tumor-ridden cock, and her saying, “Oh, you’re gonna have to put a condom on that love,” and then still giving him a blow job.
They were always going to “Cash Converters” to convert their TV into heroin. The sign outside the shop read—“Convert your unwanted goods into cash.” In the window there were things 250
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that obviously had a sentimental value, all steeped in emotions (a sitar seemed especially poignant). The wording is lovely—
“Convert your unwanted goods”: “I don’t want these goods—what I want is heroin.”
Of course I was a junkie then as well, so I was using with them the whole time we were making the program. Th e hypoc-risy of it was ridiculous, really. There were bits where on camera I’d be going, “Stopping using heroin is the hardest thing in the world, but you’ve gotta do it mate—you guys have got to look after yourselves.” Then the camera would be turned off, and I’d say, “Right, OK, let’s go,” and we’d all have a big use-up.
Ali
seemed—quite
understandably—somewhat scatter-
brained and absent, just as a way of coping with the situation.
Her hands were like chorizo bound with twine. Th e brother
was quite an interesting character, always looking off into the distance—where things were more bearable. And I became quite close with Pete, the dad—this pinched man, this mobile corpse.
I had this one chat with him in the garden—which was all on tape—where he was talking about his addiction. He started to break down and he was just sobbing, “I hate myself, I hate myself,” when his daughter came running out and zipped his fleece up around her, as if this coat was the toxic swaddling of their common problem, from which they both peered out desperately.
At the end, we took them out on a boat to film the final scenes on the Norfolk Broads—which was obviously where Matt and I had been when we first came across Ali. Everything was cool, and we got some beautiful footage of them having quite a nice day out. Then I took Ali and Pete into my room, and explained the idea of the show, and the fact that I was now going to offer him extra money for me to have sex with Ali.
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Pete just started crying. It was agonizing, and made me feel terrible, but I still thought, “This is what you’re doing every day, it’s just that you’ve got to know me.” Of course, if he’d have gone,
“Oh fi ne, yeah, thanks for the money,” it would have put me in an incredibly difficult situation; it was bloody lucky that they didn’t want to go through with it, really.
When Elaine and Geoff at Vera saw the footage, they thought it was amazing. I suppose it’s not normal to see this sort of thing happening on camera, because “the talent” doesn’t generally behave like that.
In the next program, “Wanky-Wanky,” we addressed the subject of sexuality. As the title suggests, this episode was a little more juvenile than its immediate pre deces sors, but still interesting nonetheless. The question was, “Is your sexuality constructed by environment and experience, or is it innate?” I examined this issue by wanking off a man in a toilet. In conclusion, your sexuality is innate.
I had this friend called Cyprian. He was a gay Jamaican who spoke a bit like Eartha Kitt—“Oh Russell,” he’d purr, “you are a very attractive boy.” I’d met him in a club in South London where he’d given me some Ketamine. (Ketamine is an unusual drug—this was the only time I took it, actually. It situates you in a kind of pulse, creating an effect in your head like the high-pitched noise tele visions used to make after closedown: “Shash,”
I think it’s called. Mind-shash, brain-shash: that’s what Ketamine gives you; it’s like going into a tunnel of shrill sound.) I thought Cyprian seemed like a good person to give us access to the gay community. We explained the idea of the program to him, and he agreed to help us out with it. Th ere are
some daft bits at the beginning where we wander about and he teaches me blow-job techniques on a sausage, even though I was 252
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a vegetarian at the time (that was my main concern, rather than the fact that I was practicing fellatio on a West End street).
Then we started hanging around outside this gay gym in Covent Garden, trying to pick up men without very much success.
But as soon as we went into a gay pub—the King William on Poland Street, it was—our luck changed.
This pub was for bears—gay lads that are big and burly—and the fi rst bloke we spoke to was Gary. I strolled up to him with the cameras and said, “We’re making a TV program where we examine and explore homosexuality—can I wank you off in the toilet?” And he went “Yeah, okay.”
Me, Will and Gary went to the men’s toilets and arranged ourselves in the cubicle and got on with making the show.
The first thing that struck me was the unfamiliarity of male genitals—they looked somehow ridiculous to me.
Of course, there is an element of aesthetics involved. Had Gary been an Adonis or had he been like David Beckham or Leonardo DiCaprio, things might have been different, but as it was, he was too strewn with quirks. My own genitalia were well- groomed, neat and delectable. Gary’s genitals, on the other hand . . .
Worzel Gummidge never bared his genitals, but had he one day got drunk on moonshine and savaged the world with his nudity the sight that would have greeted the astonished Crow-man and a frightened Aunt Sally would have been very much like what I had to contend with—an angry thicket of pubic hair, clutching skyward like furious Shredded Wheat, as if to escape Gary, sentiments I was beginning to understand.
With trepidation I reached down toward the nub, which was draped in a film of scum—before you balk, remember these are just anecdotes to you, not mucky little memories.
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touch yours, Russell, it’ll be easier for me to get turned o
n.” No reflection required, no erection desired. “Fucking hell, mate, do me a favor.” Then Will, from behind the camera: “Go on Russell, it’ll be funny.” Many times in my life I have allowed that sentence—“Go on Russell, it’ll be funny”—to direct me into the jaws of trouble, danger, harm and sackings, and once more I was helpless to resist its siren lure.
At that time, it was my custom to wear colorful Y-fronts emblazoned with icons. I believe on the day in question the honor had fallen to Che Guevara (Elvis and David Bowie were safe at home in my underwear drawer). Gary reached over and peeled my pants down. As he began to stroke my genitalia, I realized they looked like something found in a butcher’s shop.
It was a sparse ration that Gary contented himself with that day, plucking at my indiff erent cock. But then one of my great gifts and worst curses kicked in: ego. For, in spite of the fact that I happen not to be gay, and found the whole experience quite unpleasant, I’m so vain and egotistical that, somewhere inside of me, I really wanted to be good at giving Gary a wank.
So I pretended it was my own beloved winky. Triumph! Gray sperm ribbons decorated the lavvy, a ticker-tape parade for the unknown soldier. I fled immediately from the cubicle and washed my alien hand with hot water and soap.
Watching the tapes, you can see that I was in a proper state after that. Ironically of course, due to broadcasting law, the bit where I wanked him off couldn’t be shown. We could only use audio. The whole thing was a really disturbing and unsettling thing to do—and I immediately got in touch with some lap dancers to do some heterosexuality. Me and two lap dancers, one American, one Australian, went out in a limousine and filmed that as some sort of denouement to the episode.
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There were a lot of loopy ideas flying around at that time. “Cut off your thumb, have it frozen for a week, and then we’ll sew it on again,” that was one of them. Then, “Why don’t we chop off your foreskin, cook it, and eat it?” This latter stroke of programming genius came from that Trish woman—she’d started to go a bit mad. In truth, everyone was feeling the pressure.
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