Russell Brand

You know what? - Rod Liddle eventually ruined this week. By Tuesday I was looking at everything on television, able only to wonder what Liddle would make of it. I'd been strapped into Liddle-goggles. What, for instance, is Liddle's stance on Russell Brand? Brand is 100 per cent white Anglo-Saxon - which presumably counts for at least ten Liddle points. Additionally, Brand talks like a souped-up Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost - which, in the absence of any more specific examples, one would presume is the kind of traditional, non-immigration-ruined British thing that Liddle would like. There's no modern rap-talk from Brand! It's all "I can't wait for the Great Exhibition of 1851!" this, and "Enjoy Pickwick's Patented Hair Pomade" the other.

However, a quick googling of Liddle's previous columns reveals that, in fact, he is down on Brand, big-time: "Smug, arrogant, over-paid, apparently stupid and not remotely entertaining." A fairly useful indicator to the rest of us that, given that Liddle hates him, Brand is probably awlright.

As the first real televisual access to Brand since last year's omni-demented Sachs-gate affair, The Road to Russell Brand: Skinned was an instructive insight into how Brand had dealt with it. Had he been a butterfly, broken on a wheel? Was he now tremulous, and wary?

"I was like - it's an exciting thing!" he beamed. "I'm in the middle of a storm - and I like it here! This is where I should always be!" Later on - referring to the incident on stage - he pointed out: "The thing is - I do worse than that every day."

Looking - with his big rack of teeth - very much like Mega Shark, the star of the recent B-movie Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Brand spent an hour answering Frank Skinner's questions, intercut with documentary footage of his recent publicity strike in America and appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Jay Leno Show.

Skinner's questioning didn't kick off with immense threat or weight: "I've always thought beautiful people couldn't be funny - but you've proved this wrong," was his first "question" to Brand. Somewhere, Jeremy Paxman must have felt a stabbing pain in his duodenum. But as the hour went on, Skinner lobbed in a couple of interesting observations - not least noting that, "I always found that, in order to be a womaniser, you had to turn down your compassion and humanity to get laid" - a proposition that Brand didn't have any real riposte to.

"It takes a lot of discipline - more than I have - not to go 'I will f*** you, you know'," he beamingly explained, over footage of fans screaming his name.

Perhaps the most amazing revelation in Skinnned, however, was neither sexual nor centred on controversy. Instead, it was that Brand has someone on tour with him to do his hair and make-up. Darling, I adore how you look but, honestly - ratting up your hair and applying two tramlines of kohl like that could just as easily be achieved by someone in security, or catering.

Here, in Russell Brand: Skinned (Channel 4), is another faintly ridic-ulous man. He's being interviewed, rather well, by Frank Skinner, although, to be fair, Frank doesn't have to work hard. It just comes pouring out: drugs (again - shut up about the drugs), the women, Sachsgate (he's both sorry and not sorry), ambition. And it's very good, because Russell Brand is very good - funny, clever, quick, eloquent (he knows how to use words like dichotomy and caveat). Sometimes you have to marvel at the man.

I don't love him, though, wouldn't get into a hot tub with him (very happy to with Frank Skinner, however). Maybe it doesn't matter: you don't need to love someone for them to make you laugh. It's probably for the same reason that lots of men don't love him: he's funnier and more attractive than we are, and he's going to mate with our women. But there's more to it. In spite of his chattiness, his tactile rubberiness, there's something cold about him. Look into his eyes. He's a lizard, that's what he is.

I've always wanted to dislike Russell Brand, but I can't quite do it. That said, I don't know what it is about him that I do like, I just know I can't dislike him as much as many do.

Even after Sachsgate - which demonstrated a level of purile stupidity that I expected from Ross but not Brand - I still can't wholly have an aversion to the man. I suspect it might be nothing more than the fact that he makes me laugh, and it's hard to abhor someone who amuses you.

He's witty, he can - one assumes, given the number of ladies he's been involved with - be charming and he can be self-deprecating when it's required. However, this sit down with Frank Skinner told us nothing we didn't already know and was, to be honest, just a pi**ing contest between the two to see who could be funniest.

We heard from both several tales of how fame had gone to their heads, both the ones they keep on their necks and the other ones, and the effect that something Brand described as "oestrogen mist" had on them. Basically, they have both been offered nookie on a plate from adoring female fans and both have partaken from that bottomless trough often.

Skinner questioned the moral rectitude of doing so and seemed genuinely embarrassed that he'd taken full advantage of that particular form of hero worship, but Brand answered the relatively serious question with jokes, so it lost any depth it might have had.

There was of course lengthy discourse about the Andrew Sachs affair and Brand rather confusingly at once apologised - again - and then refuted that he'd done anything that wrong in the first place. He did however - rightly in my opinion - proffer that much of the fuss wasn't about the incident itself but the wider issue of celebrity salaries and the BBC licence fee.

Overall, this was like Jeremy Paxman interviewing Bungle after a spliff; one didn't expect it to be deeply serious, just somewhat informative in its endeavour, but it just didn't have the energy to get past the giggling stage.

The idea of a "revealing, behind-the-scenes" documentary about Russell Brand is quite an odd one - his whole persona, after all, is one of a person happy to expose and riff on, ad nauseam, his many failings. Here, Frank Skinner inter-views a post-"Sachsgate" Brand, a man who has evidently put in work recently to try to understand and intellectualise his compulsions. More interesting is Brand's sheer drive. Could it be his hair that is responsible? "Without fame," says the comic, "this haircut just looks like mental illness."

There's something of the sexy, oversized pixie about Russell Brand, a filthy imp who's infamously priapic yet desperately romantic, profoundly literate and articulate, yet mucky-mouthed. And he loves trouble. Brand hides nothing in this documentary as he talks to Frank Skinner of his former addictions to heroin, crack, cannabis and alcohol and of his realisation that they were killing him. "I used to like being smacked up, out of my mind... it was the annihilation of the self... there was nothing... [Being an addict] was demanding, debilitating and lonely."

I won't apologise for the fact that I love Brand; he's a magnetic, fearless performer with a brilliant wit. But it's when he's at his most introspective that he is at his most interesting. Revisiting his home town of Grays in Essex, he speaks for everyone who ever came from somewhere dull when he says: "My identity was formed by not being part of it."

The world would be a sadder place if Russell Brand quit the public eye - he's scarily intelligent, supremely funny, startlingly honest and can't last a day without pushing buttons. In this documentary, ex-alcoholic Frank Skinner interviews Brand about his wild career, drug addiction, relationship with the media and even his dandy image, which Brand makes sense of using Simpsons creator Matt Groening's maxim that 'good cartoon characters are recognisable in silhouette'. A fascinating account, interspersed with early and recent performance footage.

After a certain pre-recorded Radio 2 programme generated a record amount of complaints after being eviscerated by the Daily Mail, Russell Brand jumped before he could be pushed and has been fairly quiet on British television screens since. This hour-long programme could spell the start of his rehabilitation, mixing elements of his live stand-up routine with some behind-the-scenes footage and, more importantly, a revealing interview with Frank Skinner.

Russell Brand: 'Sachsgate worked out well for me'

Asked if he had put 'Sachsgate' behind him, Brand replied: "I would have done nothing differently. I think it worked out really well."

The Second World War pilots finally meet their match when they eye up a couple of comely lady air force personnel. "You see her, clocking my unit and all this... These girls are class though, isn't it?" But after a ham-fisted approach, the boys are in for a surprise. It's the last episode in the series, so I'll be sorry to say goodbye to the pilots and to archly filthy Brabbins and Fyffe (imagine Flanders and Swann crossed with Russell Brand) who tonight try to prove what swingers they are by singing a song about being gay. As for the new characters... well, some of them work and some of them don't. Hapless, clumsy historian Dr Dennis Lincoln-Park is a small joy, but the patronising Dr Tia is just a twerp. But the Public Information Film spoofs have been fun. Tonight's will strike a chord in anyone whose childhood was tormented by dire warnings about the dangers of abandoned fridges.

Still on the love-hate theme, here's Russell Brand Doing Life (Channel 4[/z, Saturday). Obviously again it's mainly hate, since that's the correct thing to think about the dirty snake after what he did to poor Manuel from Barcelona. And actually I think all men hate Russell Brand because they think he might sleep with their womenfolk. He's probably doing so already - with yours, yours, yours, mine ... Hmm, I wondered why she was looking so bloody excited and ever-so-slightly guilty when she went off to "work" this morning.

The man is a ridiculous peacock, of course, with less emphasis on the pea part of the word. He's obsessed with it, constantly putting his hand down there, to draw attention. And the way he stands with his hips pushed forward, at the business end of a thrust, that's his default position. He's like a longbow, primed for action, and we all know what his arrow is, and where he wants to fire it. Eurghh.

Of course he talks a lot of gibberish, a big vomit of camp narcissism, it just pours out of him. Me me me, sleep with me me me. Then he says something about the exaggerated way people in shops look away when you do your pin number (7263 in his case), like Duran Duran: Wild Boys, Wild Boys. And it's impossible not to laugh.

Then he wonders if, for Macaulay Culkin, Michael Jackson's Neverland was Michael Jackson's Sometimes Land. I know puns haven't been funny for about 30 years, but he's found the exception to the rule, and I'm laughing again. And he keeps it up for an hour ... no, not like that! But yes, like that too I imagine, just ask your girlfriend. Or mine. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.