Russell Brand

There are good reasons why Russell Brand has become such a comic phenomenon - and there are equally good reasons why he has been suspended from BBC duties. Publicity accompanies Brand like an attendant pilot fish, so much so that Sachs-gate suddenly seems like brilliantly spun PR for his returning Channel 4 stand-up series. Those who enjoy his surreal, decidedly unwholesome observations on the oddities of life will gleefully lap this up.

Filmed during a sell-out tour a couple of years ago - long before he was winding up the American Right - the manic motormouth roars through his gig in front of an ecstatic audience. Reviewing the show in The Times, Ed Potton wrote: Brand has the rare ability to combine the innocent and the sordid, comparing his childhood joy at being allowed to stay up until ten with the more mature thrill of smuggling heroin.

By the end, even his detractors ended up with a grudging admiration for his surreal intelligence and his vivid use of imagery. Here is a man who described a bearded Saddam Hussein as looking like a Father Christmas who'd been sacked from Debenhams for being drunk at work.

Lanky comedian Russell Brand performs a stand-up show which was filmed in London in 2006. His quirky and foul-mouthed observational comedy isn't always successful, but it's engaging enough to stop you spending the entire programme thinking how satisfying it would be if you could give his alarming bush of hair a good run through with a comb.

Coming on like the unlikely lovechild of Pirates Of The Caribbean's Jack Sparrow and Dot Cotton, this gig from Brand's 2006 stand-up tour showcases his talent for spinning the most mundane aspects of life into a lengthy skit.

Merely collecting his luggage at the airport is good for 10 minutes of material.

But just as you're worrying that he might be intending to describe his entire skiing holiday to us in real time - and struggling to picture him in salopettes and mittens, or with the group of alpha male northern mates he claims to have gone away with - he changes tack.

There's mileage to be had from his run-ins with Rod Stewart and Bob Geldof, as well as his specialist subject: sex. It's filthy, funny and highly educational.

I confess to not subscribing to the love-or-hate-him, Marmite view of Brand; I think he's quite easy to both love and hate. More frequently, I'm just annoyed by my inability to figure him out, but this run of shows helped with that, with its vertiginous wobbles between self-deprecation and self-loathing, its precarious juggling of meretriciousness and idiocy and bawdiness. 'Just shut up for a minute!' I thought during one episode and then I realised I had tears of laughter on my cheeks. Perhaps the most moving - and telling - moment came when Brand was recalling being cornered by rowdy fans at Upton Park, an incident that seemed to provoke in him a crisis of masculinity.

4Laughs Review

Resplendent in his he/she fashion, Russell manages to deliver some very witty monolgues on everything from Coco Pops to climate change. The format, however, is somewhat run of the mill.

New Statesman Review

Russell Brand's Ponderland is the latest attempt by Channel 4 to find a vehicle for the station's outrageous star. However fast Brand talks, however many rude words he uses, it's still a teased pompadour of perfection, every line worked to within an inch of its life by its writers. This is not to say that it's not funny, because it is. But with its use of a studio audience whose titters sound weirdly like a laugh track (were they so timid that Channel 4 had to overdub them afterwards?) and its Clive James-style use of archive film, it has a manufactured quality that is somewhat at odds with Brand's increasingly worked-up Frankie-Howerd-meets-Ozzy-Osbourne persona.

I'll declare an interest and reveal that I am a fan of ubiquitous, outrageous, kohl-eyed Russell Brand, which some people my age apparently find strange. But beneath the back-combed hair lies a smart if unconventional mind. Russell Brand's Ponderland, showing each night this week, combines reminiscences on various topics with archive and newly-filmed segments, plus phone calls to supposedly 'unsuspecting' targets. Last night's opener was about the fears and confusions of childhood and the phone target Russell's dad Ron, who was called upon to reflect on the difference in colour between boys' and men's willies. Well, Brand has never been known for holding back, though I sensed a slightly less wild Brand than hitherto. There were even some grains of common sense amid the hilarity, the f-words and the 'awright' accent.

The material was funny, and predictably lyrical, juvenile, smutty and sophisticated all at once. But to keep the fun factor and prevent seeming stale - it needs to move at a slightly quicker pace and be a bit more experimental.

Time Out Review

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.