Russell Brand's Ponderland

Nancy Banks-Smith Review

Russell Brand is a highly original, attractive, instinctive comedian. In all seriousness, what else could he do in life? He is much safer making jokes than driving a bus.

The Times Review

In Ponderland Russell Brand proves how very funny he is. The idea is that he riffs on topics in that Brand kind of a way that makes no sense written down. His jokes are not quotable, not because they are profane, but because they are a stream of mucky consciousness and absurdity.

Guardian Review

It's not been the easiest week for the pseudo-piratical japester. And yet Ponderland offers Brand the chance to redeem himself, via the medium of Comedy. It's an opportunity to lay waste to the haters and prove his comic chops to those who doubt his talent/point in the wake of Sachsgate. And yet Ponderland is not funny. It's lazy and rambling, dull and annoying.

At least Channel 4 still loves Russell Brand. The comedian, who quit the BBC yesterday over his 'prank' calls to actor Andrew Sachs, opens his new C4 series of eccentric rants with the subject of pets. It's a rich topic which allows him to weave together gleefully dirty stories about our unnaturally intense relationships with animals. Showing he's not entirely a reformed character, Brand shares a distressing but amusing tale of a woman who had an affair with her dog. Irreverent, witty and packed with imagination, Ponderland shows how good Brand is when he reins in his most childish excesses.

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.

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.