Stephanie Flanders

Video - Russell Brand: 'I took drugs every day'

Russell Brand has told Newsnight's Stephanie Flanders he believes in "abstinence-based recovery" as a method to tackle drug and alcohol addiction.

The comedian has made a documentary for BBC Three charting his own recovery, which includes footage of his life as a drug addict.

"I took drugs every single day," he said.

Radio Times review

Anyone hanging their head in despair at the prospect of a worsening European economic crisis should tune in to this richly dark satire. Not that it will allay your fears, but as it veers into increasingly absurd situations, and you realise that they correlate precisely with real-life situations, then you'll also realise there is nothing left to do but laugh dementedly like
a banker at bonus time.

BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders plays it straight as she reports on the European Bank of Common Sense and Stability's dubious efforts to solve Europe's sovereign debt crisis by rescuing the most debt-encumbered asset in Europe - a roofless henhouse in Fripperary, Squanderland. The jokes about the vagaries of the banking system come thick and fast (listen for the FX whenever the markets are mentioned), and if you listen closely you may even learn something about bonds trading. Superb.

The Squanderland Roof and the eurozone crisis

A comedy about the crisis in the eurozone. Not a sentence you expect to read very often. But apparently Radio 4 didn't think my explanations were funny enough.

Stephanie Flanders Blog

You don't get many plays about goats. Or economics. So when they asked me to star in a radio play about a giant speculative goat bubble, how could I say no? The only catch was that I had to play myself.