Brand: Men didn’t like him, women didn’t like him, so who did?

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. The quarter pounder with cheese is made with 100 % fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot, crispy fries and an ice-cold Coke, and hopefully a lot of napkins. All for$8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Well, it's been a week. Russell Brand and David Walliams, Well, they've certainly dominated the headlines. And given us plenty to talk about. Welcome to The Weekend Tea with me, Michael Deacon. And me, Tim Stanley. Russell Brand was never part of lad culture. In fact, at the time, he was hailed as the antithesis of lad culture.

1:13Because lads, you know, they were seen as being beery and blokey and boorish. Whereas Russell Brand, he always presented himself as the opposite of that. He was camp, he was effeminate, he wore make-up, long hair, and made a big sort of song and dance about being sort of bookish. He was a kind of a Rococo-type figure, you might say. He was intellectual. He read Chomsky. used arcane vocabulary. That's why The Guardian liked him and Channel 4, I suspect, they certainly didn't like us lads. But first of all, I'd like to start with what I believe is the single biggest story of the week. I agree. Which is that Tim Stanley has bought a hat.

1:43That's correct. Tim. Yeah, let me get it out. While I'm getting it out, I just want to admire your shirt. Thank you very much. Yes, I thought I'd come dressed as a sofa from the 1970s. I feel like I spent my youth sitting on that. So this is, there is a shop around the corner which sells tat from turkmanistan yes and about a year ago i went in and i saw one of these hats this is called a papaka hat uh and i it was too small for me so i've been going back every few weeks to see if they had got a larger one and i went in today and they have got a they've got one which fits so this is rather exciting it's from the caucasus mountains i collect hats i collect i have a fez i have a main call this i'm trying to get a nice astrakhan if everyone can recommend one and this is supposed to be made from lamb's wool but I've looked closer and it's got that kind of curly, strong hair of a standard poodle.

2:37Right. I think... Do you have concerns, Tim? I think I'm wearing a poodle. Hang on a minute. You own a dog, I believe. I do, yes. Does your dog have any concerns about this hat? Oh, has the dog not seen the hat yet? I try to avoid wearing real dog. So I just hope... That's very wise, I think. ...that it is an artificial dog fur. But the other thing is I think it makes me look a bit like a rabbi, which is a look I'm trying to get going. I see, I see. Well, that's very good. Well, I think it's very fetching and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I won't. I don't care what people shout at me in the street.

3:07I'm going to take it off because I know you don't like working with props. So I'm going to put it over there. I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Sit there. Sit, boy. As much as I admire it, I feel there may be one or two other slightly more serious stories we're expected to move on to. One of them is to do with, shall we say, these scandals this week. We had Russell Brand and then we've had some serious allegations against David Williams, which he denies. But nonetheless, this is what's dominating the news. And there's also a second celebrity who's yet to be named because of an injunction.

3:36So they just keep showing us a silhouette, which is more sinister somehow than just showing their face. Well, yes. Well, quite. But anyway, both of these, the ones we know about anyway, both have been reading about, they're both former big BBC stars. Yeah. I've been interested in the way the BBC has handled this. First of all, let's take Russell Brand. Once he was convicted last week, they responded by putting a big article on the BBC News website. And this was the headline. How 2000s lad culture helped Russell Brand to hide in plain sight. Now, I'm going to have to take issue with that BBC headline.

4:09Firstly, because I myself was a small part of 2000s lad culture, because in those days, well, a couple of years, 2004, 2006, I worked for a lads mag of the time. Zoo and the BBC helpfully illustrated its article about how lads culture is to blame with a picture of that magazine that I worked for at the time. So it seems to me the BBC is just possibly trying to pass the buck a little bit, shift the blame onto the lad culture and I just want to counter that because yes, there's an awful lot of things you can blame lads mag for you know. Michael Deacon. Me for example, perhaps the most obvious but also there's one thing you can't blame us for and that's the rise of Russell Brand.

4:44Number one Russell Brand was never part of lad culture In fact, at the time, he was hailed as the antithesis of lad culture because lads, you know, they were seen as being beery and blokey and boorish. Whereas Russell Brand, he always presented himself as the opposite of that. He was camp, he was effeminate, he wore make-up, long hair and made a big sort of song and dance about being sort of bookish. He was a kind of a Rococo-type figure, you might say. He was intellectual, he read Chomsky, he used arcane vocabulary. That's why The Guardian liked him and Channel 4, I suspect, they certainly didn't like us lads, I'll tell you that.

5:13Now, it is certainly true that the Lads Mags of the time, we very heavily promoted the sort of edgy comedians of the day that our readers liked. For example, at Zoo Magazine, we hired Jimmy Carter, a weekly column for us. But there was one comedian we did not hire, and neither, to the best of my recollection, did any of the other Lads Mags. And that was Russell Brand. I shall tell you who did hire Russell Brand in this period. It was the BBC. They, first of all, gave him a show on BBC Six Music and then very rapidly promoted him to a plum role on Radio 2, their biggest station. So I tend to feel that if anyone at that time was sort of providing cover to Russell Brand or promoting him, wasn't us lads.

5:49It wasn't. I feel we're not to blame. Zoo magazine didn't hire him. Nuts didn't. Scrotum didn't. None of those. None of those. All the greats. All the greats. And look at you now. You see, you're not in prison. You're sat there dressed like a rhododendron bush. There you are. It's not true that Lads Culture led automatically to Brand or any of the other appalling people we're talking about now. And in fact, I think you're right. He was presented to us as almost a feminized version of it. Yes, yes. But what confuses me is men didn't like him and women didn't like him. So who did like him? Well, clearly a lot of very influential people.

6:28Just some commissioning editors at the BBC. In our culture. Yeah. And politics, it might be said. we remember Ed Miliband, desperate, desperate to be on Russell Brown's podcast because he thought this is the way to win the youth vote, practically prostrating himself before Russell Brown. Yes. Well, we were told that because he endorsed Ed Miliband, the Tories ought to be worried. Yes, yes. And many years later, it's now Labour that is anxious about the association. Well, quite. I tell you one other person who apparently was quite keen on Russell Brown for a time. I read in the showbiz magazine Variety this week.

7:02Let me read this to you. Russell Brand's pubic hair is no longer on display at a London museum of curiosities following the comedian's conviction and sentencing for rape and sexual assault. Now, the question that invites to me is, why exactly was Russell Brand's pubic hair on display in a museum in the first place? Yes. What does that say about our culture, about the fact that it was ever there? It's now been removed because the curator of the museum says, he has no place in my museum of horrors. anyway i like why was why was that even a law-abiding comedian yes i wouldn't put his pubic hair on display in a museum yes for posterity no i i'm i'm amused to hear that he'd just gone too far for this particular museum right yes we're happy to put uh you know a law abiding person's pubic hair on display but if they break the law that's just a step too far and we take our pubic hair displays very seriously and we don't want to endorse anyone they took i'm I'm sure there are museums that took down the pubic hair of Fred West and Ted Bundy and various other people.

8:04Anyway, one other thing I want to say about this whole business is the way that broadcasters have reacted to these stories. So you get the BBC. As soon as the allegations about David Walliams were finally published, BBC immediately scrubbed all of his shows from the iPlayer, including Little Britain. Yeah. They've all gone. To be clear, at this point, he's not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. but the BBC's just gone ahead and gone right we're wiping everything um Netflix has taken a slightly different approach so they've decided to keep up a Russell Brand stand-up show from about 10 years ago but at the same time they're now making a documentary um called Russell Brand Open Secret which is going to be about his crimes and all the rest of it yeah and I'm just a bit confused about what the rules are here I mean I want to compare the case of Michael Jackson now Michael Jackson was never convicted of a crime but in the last 20 years of his life a lot of very serious allegations were made about his behavior then he died um but his music is still played all the time and in fact just in may this year a film about him his life was made not including all those allegations yes and it's the most successful had the most successful opening weekend of any biopic in hollywood history it made over a billion dollars yes so i don't know what are the rules here either you can have all of your work immediately wiped even though you've been convicted or you people can go on making huge sums of money out of you i i don't know what i just guess that michael jackson is the human enron he's too big to fail right that there are too many people making money out of him and too many people love him and he's too part of the culture that you almost can't unstitch him and remove him from our world because the whole edifice would fall apart.

9:45And that wasn't the case with Brand, obviously. Yeah, clearly. Anyway, should we move on to politics? Yes. One of the stories of the week is that, as we know, for about 18 months, reform were leading the polls. But now, as of this week, according to a Telegraph poll, the Tories have finally overtaken them. Yes. What do you make of this? This is a relief. One of the difficult things about being on the centre-right for the last few years is you don't know who to suck up to. One minute I'm ringing Nigel and saying, oh, that Kemi's rubbish, isn't she? Then I'm ringing up Kemi and saying, oh, Nigel, he's a nutter, isn't he?

10:19So all this time, we've all been secretly thinking, would one of you please just overtake the other one? Right. Definitively and for good, so that I can pick a winner and nail my colours to that particular mask. So if the Tories could just hurry up and gain a good five to 10 point leader reform, I can finally say, well, I never liked reform. Right, okay. But this is contingent upon it going back the other way. I want to make this absolutely clear because I'm a man of principle. If it's reform that develops a five to ten point law to lead over the Tories, I'll do the other one too. I just want you to darn well make up your mind, please.

10:56It's important to be open-minded, Tim. I'm glad you're keeping your mind open to both of those possibilities. That's great. It's tricky for you at the moment because I was just looking at the numbers here. So according to a polling average, the Tories are currently on 21.73%. Yes. And reform are on 21.66%, which means the Tories are currently ahead by a margin of 0.7%. So, I mean, it's on a knife edge. This is the problem. We're going to have to meet up again next week and see how it's gone. And then I'd have to say the complete opposite. There you are. But so long as the polling is within the margin of Rob Jenrick, very small, it's impossible for a man to choose.

11:31What's a gal to do? You know, some days they ring me too, and I just feel like the prettiest girl at the dance. I really do. That's very moving, I think. What an image that is. I think I won't dwell on that. I'm just going to move on to royals now, because I was really impressed. We're going from the sordid to the ridiculous to the royal. To the royal. And, of course, they are neither sordid nor ridiculous. No, they are not. Certainly not. This is the Daily Telegraph. No, they are not. I want to talk about Prince George's drawing. Yes. He's done a drawing of a Kingfisher, which is being printed in Country Life magazine.

12:02I thought, my goodness, it's brilliant. It's a brilliant picture. I don't believe he did it. How did that? Right. Straight to the Tower of London. Off with his head. That is disgraceful. That's close to regicide. That is disgusting. It's too good. I call that treason. It's too good. It's an excellent drawing. I bet a butler did it. I bet a butler did it. I will not stand to hear this kind of talk. No 13-year-old child can draw anything that well. This is calumny. It's treason. You're going to the Tower of London. Anyway, what I wanted to say about that was, you know, I know how William felt as a dad because, you know, I always loved it, you know, whenever my son has done drawings for me, particularly when he was smaller.

12:37He would do it all the time. I know I'm very soppy and sentimental about these things. I keep some of these drawings up on the wall above my desk where I write my columns, that sort of thing. I'm very soppy about this sort of thing. But there was one drawing in particular that I loved the most. And it was when he was at nursery. He was about four years old. And he came home one day. He said to me, Dada, I drawed a picture of your hair. And he showed it to me. It's a scrap of paper. And all of it is a massive, wild, black scribble. They were absolutely crazy. So to be fair, it's a very good likeness.

13:04But anyway, I thought this was funny. So I took a photo of it. And I put it on Twitter. with a caption saying, Dada, I drawed a picture of your hair. And one person who liked that tweet was J.K. Rowling. Wow. So I was very excited about that. Not for the sake of my son. Wow, he's the world's biggest children. Forgot all about him at this point. I was thinking, hang on a minute. Is she interested in buying the original artwork? Where should I start the bidding? Like 80 million pounds, maybe 90? An original deacon. Well, there you go. Unfortunately, I've yet to receive any offers from her. But J.K., if you're watching, it's still available.

13:37Still hasn't found a buyer. Of course, in the royal family, every picture is of an heir. Well? I'll let that sink in. Heir, heir, heir. Oh, come on. I'm here all week, though I probably won't be after having said that. I'm going to leave that one for the producers. They can decide whether that stays in or not. Do you think that the royals put these things on the fridge? The fridge? They put them in Country Life magazine, for goodness sake. Fridge? Goodness me.

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15:38Anyway, I've got to test you now, Tim, because next week, I believe it's on Monday night, it's the 800th series of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Now, I appreciate that not all telegraph readers will be big fans of that show. But the reason I want to mention it is I just want to find out, Tim, how many of this year's celebrities have you ever heard of? Right, OK. It's like Mastermind. I'm going to go through one by one very quickly. I'm gonna say the name of a new contestant and you're gonna tell me who that is okay Wayne Rooney footballer Okay, that's good Ricky Wilson one of the Oh, no, sorry.

16:15No, no, no, no, no, no, I know this no no no no no I know this They they I'm gonna have to rush you. I'm gonna have to I'm gonna forget go full Paxman here. No in all seriousness No, what's that band from the 60s They sang Wouldn't It Be Nice No The Beach Boys He's a Beach Boy No, he's the singer of the Kaiser Chiefs They're only from about 20 years ago There were a lot of Wilsons of the Beach Boys AJ Adudu No idea TV presenter Leomi Anderson Married to Jerry of Thunderbirds fame Model and co-host of Glow Up, Britain's next make-up star Chloe Burrows Never heard of him Love Island finalist Mariella Frostrup Oh now we all know We all know Mariella Frostrup Yeah Presenter Fashion guru There we go She's fantastic Joanna Page Never heard of her Gavin and Stacey star Sharky Oh he sang You Little Thief It says here One of YouTube's Beta squad Jack Skipper I don't know Don't look at me Jack Skipper No idea Stand up comedian Social media star Apparently Claire Sweeney I don't know Actress coronation street right and uh i'm afraid i can't pronounce this person's name so do forgive me if i'm wrong aid and pitan i do apologize i've never heard of him i do apologize anyway paralympian so there you go so you scored two out of twelve are these people all on youtube uh almost certainly right okay so why is tv putting youtube stars on can they find no one from antiques roadshow or something well all i can say tim you're gonna have to start watching this show because you know Well, you're clearly out of touch with popular culture.

17:56I think I am, frankly. I had a piece of paper telling me the answers. Nothing could ever force me to watch a nutty taballoc. Well, in you go. I think one celebrity you've surely heard of, Mr Gordon Ramsay. I certainly have, yes. And he put a photograph of himself online, topless. That is right. Yeah, he was 60 years old last Sunday. And he marked this milestone in his life by taking his shirt off and posing for a photo topless and putting it on Instagram to his almost 20 million followers. Yes. And I have to say, I wasn't impressed. Hmm, really? Well, let me rephrase that. Because I'm looking at the shirt, Michael.

18:30I know. Please don't take it off. Let me be careful. I am not body shaming Gordon Ramsay. Right. There's nothing wrong with his body. In fact, for a man of his age, he's very fine-stick. It's lean and it's muscular. There's nothing wrong with it. He looks better at 60 than I do at 46, or indeed as any other previous time in my life. Yes. I just feel, hang on a minute, you're 60 years old. I just think you could possibly have a little more dignity. I mean, I just feel at that time of life, I understand it may be when a very young man would do it, but that time of your life, are you still sort of, you're desperately fishing for compliments from people on social media telling you how muscular and hunky you are?

19:04Really? Come on, shouldn't you be settling down with Songs of Praise or The Antiques Road? I mean, come on. You know, in the 80s... I don't mean to sound ageist, but I just feel... You know, in the 80s, Martin Amos went to... My grandfather never did this. Martin Amos went to Hollywood and he made a really bad science fiction film, I forget the name of it now. Saturn 3, was that the name? That's well done. And it starred Kirk Douglas. And he was told there has to be a scene in it in which we see Kirk Douglas's bottom. It's in the contract. Kirk Douglas, because Kirk Douglas looked good for 84.

19:32Yeah. But he insisted on showing his bottom on camera. So he had to write something in that would excuse Kirk Douglas taking his clothes off. Well, he ended up writing this into money, his novel of 1984. He did, that's right. It was all based on his experiences. But my problem with the photo of Ramsay is he's very muscular and lean. and he's a chef. Right. Now, a chef should look enormous. I look at that and I think, you don't know anything about food. There's a man who doesn't enjoy his food. Yes, you clearly don't eat. He's not tasting his own food. Perhaps he does. What, does he not like his own food?

20:03Yeah. Does he just sniff it? No, thank you. Yeah. I can't believe that. This man has won two billion Michelin stars. Come on. He does not look like a chef. Surely he's got to eat now again, right? Yes. A topless chef should have boobs like a page three model. Yes. Not all skeletal. exactly right so there you go so there you go you're absolutely right anyway here's a weird story for you okay um a poll has found the most delivered item of the year by sort of you know delivery service delivery and so on that type of thing yeah okay what item do you think have people ordered most by by courier toilet paper it's not toilet paper although of course over the last couple of weeks thanks to the scaremongering for the government it actually might be now tins of baked beans and bottled water but certainly up to that point the answer is ice cubes people are having ice cubes delivered to the house i'm afraid i don't understand this do they not know the recipe but do we do are there people they're going i don't know how to make these things i've got to order them from a supermarket or a shop because i i don't know how to if anyone is watching who doesn't know how to make ice cubes i can i can give you the recipe now it's put some water in the freezer yes yeah anyway but also i don't know about you but food i find is always delivered late after a couple of hours so the ice is going to arrive melted in which case the customer is going to say this is no good to me what do i do with it to which the delivery boy then says my recommendation is you put it in the freezer and make some ice yeah and by the way that's 20 quid so there you go yeah lovely okay this is this is even weirder okay uh a man was rushed to hospital this week after drying his hair too vigorously with a towel.

21:40Apparently, he's got a trapped nerve. He sort of snapped his neck doing it. And I've got to tell you, I felt a little bit smug about this. Let me tell you, I never dry my hair with a towel or at all. I come out of the shower, hair's wet. I apply the product onto wet hair. Styling cream, yes. Well, it says on the packaging, it says apply to wet hair and leave to air dry. Really? That is what I do. I always dry and then gel. It says on the packaging with this particular product, that's what you do. And after a couple of hours, it's dry by normal. That's what I do. So I'm in no danger of snapping my neck at least.

22:11There you go. A hairdresser recently told me actually that what I'm doing is actually very bad for your scalp. It could even potentially cause a fungal infection in your scalp. Oh no. As far as I'm aware, I've not got one. Although of course, I can't see my scalp. So I'm not certain. I'm feeling it now as if I'm going to find it. I don't think so. But on the other hand, at least I won't break my neck. So there we are. Well, also, I'm just pleased the towel didn't go up his bottom because usually hilarious medical stories all involve things you know the top 10 things ah yes yes discovered in the anal canal and so they're all accidental though oh completely as you understand you understand you sit down very fast very unfortunate the next thing you know you've got your academy award up your bottom um this one truly horrified me and i i'm reluctant even to read it out okay but at an at a peru airport um someone opened a case to discover more than 3 000 tarantulas hidden inside a smuggler's socks right i i read this story and i was just grateful that he wasn't actually wearing the socks at the time you know i was thinking now that's that's a brave smuggler yeah i've got to say especially there's 3 000 of them in there yeah my god i mean you'd think people notice your ankles are but you've got very bad cankles there mate you're really bulging um but also you know that episode of one foot in the grave where they go to the chinese restaurant and they come back with the rice dish they put it on the table and it starts to scuttle away i sort of have this image of the suitcase on the conveyor belt suddenly moving off in the opposite direction but these are these things apparently being smuggled in order to be sold to collectors in europe what pervert collects tarantulas i'm sorry i i cannot accept this no if you if i see one of those i'm stepping on it i don't even dare do that i mean i've never stood on a tarantula i call the police what do you do if you came over and found Tarantula what would you do?

23:55I assume I'd call the police. They look pretty strong by the way So I think you stand on it fight back. It wouldn't be enough. It's it's awful. It's a thing of the devil I've never understood it. Also anyone who does keep it like famously Government former Tory government minister Gavin Williamson. Yes, he did. It just screams Bond villain Yes, it's like it's it is one step away from having a shark pool in your home But that's why Gavin Williamson did it right because he was chief whip at the time Yeah, and he thought it would be scary to have a tarantula on his table. He thought there's just something about his sort of Frank Spencer appearance and Frank Spencer voice that perhaps wasn't intimidating enough to Tory and B's.

24:31So he introduced a deadly animal. He had to get a deadly animal to get them to do what they were told and go the right way. Anyway, just finally, one more story. Obviously, we're all watching the Christmas TV ads at the moment. You can't escape the wretched things. There's one for Tesco, which basically involves, I'll try and recap it as quickly as I can. a Tesco delivery driver delivering the goods turns up the house it's the wrong one calls the customer customer says whoops I put our old address we don't live there now and then the Tesco driver very kindly drives all the way back up the motorway to the countryside where the customer now lives yeah um uh and and oh yes and then the um the customer meets halfway uh the garage and then you know they hand over the goods but then it turns out the customer's car broken down so then the Tesco driver drives her all the way home with the goods and all the rest of it as well.

25:20Anyway, the ice has completely melted. Completely melted. Real life Tesco drivers have apparently been watching this ad and say, well, blimey, that's all sackable offences. You can't do that in real life. Tesco would sack us if that happened. This is certainly not my experience where the goods get delivered so often to the wrong flat. Right. And no one makes any effort to deliver it to you, let alone climb up a mountain as one tends to see in these Christmas ads. But I think, to be fair, a lot of what Santa does when it comes to delivery is probably a sackable offence too. Hang on, who's going to sack Santa?

25:52Who's his boss? I know, but doing it all one night and dropping it down the chimney, it's taking a mick a bit, isn't it? You think he should sort of spread it out over the course of a year? I think the unions would have a word, wouldn't they? Have you enjoyed any of the Christmas ads? Well, I tell you, I like the Tesco one a lot more than I like the John Lewis one. That one's pure evil. Everybody hates that, don't they? That's the one with the grandma with the nasty grandchildren. Being persecuted by these revolting, spoiled, entitled brats. and nobody says a word to them. It's elder abuse, I call that, personally.

26:24When it comes to advertising, I've always preferred the Soviet approach. Just have a very short advert with a gruff voice saying, Is Christmas by Sprouts? That's all I want to see. John Lewis should give you a call for next Christmas. That would be a lot more popular. It's Christmas by Turkey. If you're a fan of The Daily Tea, why not become a Telegraph subscriber? you'll be able to read more from our colleagues, including the journalists featured on this podcast. Plus, don't miss the latest opinion pieces from me and Tim. Join us today and explore everything The Telegraph has to offer.

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