On Brand - On Brand Book Club: My Booky Wook Part 5 [PREVIEW]
Aired: 2026-03-11
Duration: 57:53


=== Propaganda Live and Russell Brand (09:47) ===

[00:00:00]  This is propaganda live.
[00:00:01]  I only suggest a vote.
[00:00:05]  What a fantastic and special show it is.
[00:00:08]  Russell Brand is a famous rapist.
[00:00:11]  This is just from memory.
[00:00:12]  You can just go, hold on, but they said that, they said that.
[00:00:15]  I became a Christian, preempting that charges would appear from deep history.
[00:00:21]  I went to one white party.
[00:00:23]  What?
[00:00:24]  What are you talking about?
[00:00:25]  I'm a migrant right now in the United States.
[00:00:30]  In fact, I would call myself an exile, a political exile.
[00:00:34]  Lying, probably true.
[00:00:36]  Inevitably, I lie sometimes.
[00:00:38]  I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
[00:00:45]  I'm the main problem.
[00:00:46]  I'm the main problem.
[00:00:48]  Let's go full screen on Russell.
[00:00:51]  Some people from MTV came to see me perform up in Edinburgh and asked me to audition for them when I got back to London.
[00:00:57]  Getting that job would provoke possibly the clearest ever demonstration of my astonishing capacity, and it's even astonishing to me to descend in the blink of a proverbial eye from enormous obsequious gratitude into indifference, cruelty, and pompous affectation.
[00:01:14]  I feel like he was much more self-aware back in 2007 when this came out.
[00:01:19]  You know what I mean?
[00:01:19]  Like, he would never describe himself in these terms now.
[00:01:24]  I was incredibly thankful that I wasn't going to have to sign on anymore onto the dole welfare, right?
[00:01:30]  And could shrug off the indignity of standing in doll queues, knowing that in every encounter with a clerk, they're trying to withdraw your benefits.
[00:01:36]  Particularly if they know you're in the entertainment industry, you can see their sneering cynicism with regard to your career.
[00:01:42]  Oh, like you're ever going to make any money from show business.
[00:01:46]  I experienced that in Gray's job center when I was 16, and subsequently in Bermondsey, Kentish Town, and Finsbury Park.
[00:01:53]  An odyssey of social insecurity.
[00:01:56]  It is funny for a guy who spent so much time, you know, on welfare, how much of an issue he takes with it these days.
[00:02:06]  You know what I mean?
[00:02:08]  I don't know.
[00:02:09]  Like, I kind of want him to read this book now and see what he would make of it.
[00:02:17]  I could probably claim it was by a different author and he wouldn't notice for a while, I would imagine.
[00:02:22]  Apart from the odd bit of acting, this was my first regular work on tele.
[00:02:26]  And when MTV gave me a contract to make 90 shows, I thought, that's it.
[00:02:30]  What a relief I've made it.
[00:02:32]  And went from, oh, that's ever so kind of you, to, where's my fucking taxi? in about 10 seconds.
[00:02:38]  It was the delightful Andy Milligan who gave me my first break.
[00:02:42]  He was a skin-headed lad from Newcastle who looked a bit like Tom Thug, a character from a short-lived southern Viz rip-off, oink.
[00:02:49]  When I cast my mind back across the porridge-coloured mindscape, one of the best moments of my life was arriving at MTV after I'd done the pilot for our new show and seeing loads of people gathered around a TV set, really laughing.
[00:03:01]  I thought, what's going on there?
[00:03:03]  And peered through the crowd to see that they were all watching a tape of me.
[00:03:07]  The idea for the show, which ended up being called Dance Floor Chart, was a very simple one.
[00:03:13]  Me going up to people in nightclubs and talking rubbish to them when they were off their heads on pills.
[00:03:18]  Sample dialogue.
[00:03:19]  Russell.
[00:03:20]  You know, Postman Pat and his black and white cat.
[00:03:22]  Lad, yeah?
[00:03:24]  Russell.
[00:03:24]  How do we know it's his cat?
[00:03:26]  Lad?
[00:03:27]  Well, we just do.
[00:03:28]  Russell.
[00:03:29]  Can he prove it though?
[00:03:30]  Lad.
[00:03:31]  It is his cat, it says at the beginning in the song, Russell.
[00:03:34]  Can we trust them, though?
[00:03:36]  Lad.
[00:03:36]  Look, it is his cat.
[00:03:37]  Why would they?
[00:03:38]  The lad tapers off into drugged confusion.
[00:03:41]  Russell, they can't prove it.
[00:03:42]  There are no papers.
[00:03:44]  Lad, as if realizing the CIA killed JFK, yeah, you're right.
[00:03:48]  It's probably not his cat.
[00:03:51]  That was the format of the show.
[00:03:53]  The lad was high on ecstasy, but I was by now quite the connoisseur of opiates and crack.
[00:03:59]  Don't you think it's out of order taking the piss out of all them pilled up people in clubs, people would inquire.
[00:04:05]  I was on crack and heroin, I'd reply.
[00:04:07]  I didn't even know I was in a club.
[00:04:09]  Then, late as usual, I met the second comic genius that was to blight my life, Matt Morgan.
[00:04:16]  He was just an intern there when I met him.
[00:04:19]  He came from Dartford, which is just the other side of the river from Gray's.
[00:04:23]  He had a similar background to mine, as well as sharing my taste in comedy.
[00:04:26]  The first conversation we had was on a plane flying to Ireland.
[00:04:30]  I had these giant African snails with me, even though it was the time of foot and mouth, so you weren't even supposed to have apples on planes, let alone snails.
[00:04:39]  I said, look at my new pets.
[00:04:40]  They're great.
[00:04:41]  What shall we call them?
[00:04:42]  He said, Wiggins, which is a name in a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch about a headmaster who sexually abuses boys.
[00:04:49]  Then we talked a bit about Cook and Chris Morris's brass eye, which we both really loved because it's so clever and dangerous and acute, and I immediately recognized him as a kindred spirit.
[00:04:59]  Matt, like me, was from a small estuary town.
[00:05:02]  He actually went to the same school as Mick Jagger.
[00:05:05]  He also felt sort of ostracized and alienated growing up and shared that same kind of darkness to his sensibility that I have.
[00:05:14]  He would tell me stories, which we later turned into a very scary sketch called Mr. Natterjack, about there being a bird trapped in a vent in his bedroom wall when he was a child and none of his family believing him.
[00:05:24]  He was afraid to go to bed because of the noise it was making.
[00:05:27]  Mummy, there's a monster in the bedroom.
[00:05:29]  There's not a monster.
[00:05:30]  Go to bed.
[00:05:31]  And then he had to listen to this crow dying in his air vent.
[00:05:36]  I mean, it's the casualness that gets me with all of this stuff.
[00:05:42]  Is he going to give cocaine to the snails?
[00:05:45]  Well, well, we'll see.
[00:05:49]  Hi, hi, hi, Robini.
[00:05:53]  We went over to Dublin.
[00:05:54]  MTV's on their regular telly, so I was a bit famous there.
[00:05:57]  Got with some girls, got in a little bit of trouble, and he quickly became the only person at MTV I'd hang out with or indeed talk to.
[00:06:05]  We got in all sorts of sex adventures together over the years, but there's never been any actual rhubarb between us.
[00:06:10]  Not that there's anything wrong with that.
[00:06:12]  It's just not our way.
[00:06:14]  I think he means sex between them.
[00:06:18]  It's unclear.
[00:06:19]  It's unclear.
[00:06:22]  It's worth bearing in mind that Matt Morgan has, you know, kind of, for a good chunk of time, distanced himself from Russell in the modern day.
[00:06:32]  I think even pre-allegations.
[00:06:36]  And there is a part of me in reading what we're about to go through that wonders, like, yeah, is there a bit of guilt?
[00:06:43]  Is there a bit of, like, oh, I was massively complicit in a surprising amount of this, you know?
[00:06:49]  And maybe he didn't, you know, realize or anything or thought everything was fine, but I'm like, ah, you know.
[00:06:57]  He seems to be very present in a, yeah, surprising amount of this.
[00:07:07]  Part of the special affection I felt for Matt is because he's a couple of years younger than me.
[00:07:12]  When I first met him, Matt was like Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, and prior to that, I'd always been the Rodney.
[00:07:18]  Not just in my own family, where my dad was a bit like Delboy, a sort of upbeat Thatcherite go-getter.
[00:07:24]  Fucking kill me now if I ever meet someone like that.
[00:07:27]  And my nan was like granddad, sentimental, lacrimose, and lovely, and I was kind of gawky and aspirational, trailing along behind, but in other relationships too.
[00:07:36]  Carl Theobald was older than me and senior, whereas while Matt is very clever and funny, he was the first person I'd really been friends with in adult life who was demonstrably my junior.
[00:07:46]  Because I was a TV presenter and he was an intern, that meant I had status in the relationship.
[00:07:52]  This just made him more sulky and adolescent, which I found very entertaining.
[00:07:57]  It does say a lot that, like his longest standing kind of you know friendship, professional whatever was based largely on the fact that he enjoyed having that power dynamic like that, and and and now I look at him now and I'm like oh, you've just been doing this the whole time.
[00:08:19]  You know that have having his five quote-unquote friends on screen, friends that he pays on screen, you know with him I'm like oh yeah no, the the only people you have in your life are people you pay.
[00:08:32]  That is that, and and a part of you likes that.
[00:08:39]  That's the fucked up bit for me.
[00:08:40]  I'm like I would find that deeply depressing.
[00:08:45]  He seems to largely enjoy it.
[00:08:47]  Um and uh, and yeah, casualness from trauma yeah yeah, I do get it like, don't get me wrong, I have, I have been, I have been that person who tells a story um, of some kind that I, you know from my life, that I find to be funny and everyone looks a little bit horrified.
[00:09:06]  I have done that, you know I, I recognize that, but it's it's, I would say, in in every, in every single possible terrible thing in this book.
[00:09:20]  He is just so incredibly casual and callous about all of it.
[00:09:24]  It's, I don't know it's, it's.
[00:09:26]  It's really um unsettling to read.
[00:09:30]  You know it just being thrown around so matter-of-factly.
[00:09:36]  You know, even with like a degree of almost approval um, Matt would never go and get drinks for me because he was too lazy.

=== Jackass PR Stunts in Leeds (03:43) ===

[00:09:47]  But I did make him score heroin for me a couple of times later on.
[00:09:51]  He refused initially but I bullied him into it, saying, I'll still get it Matthew, you'll just inconvenience me, I'm not going to give up heroin because you don't go and get me some now.
[00:10:00]  When he wrote an article called 10 things Russell Should Be Ashamed of in my tour program, this incident was one of the 10.
[00:10:07]  I want to read the rest of that list.
[00:10:10]  Meeting Matt was the beginning of a period which, in retrospect, feels like quite good fun.
[00:10:15]  There's an episode of the MTV show Jackass, where Johnny Knoxville and the lads recreate a stunt from the film Cool Hand Luke to see if they could eat a load of hard-boiled eggs without vomiting like Luke does.
[00:10:25]  To promote Jackass in the UK, MTV restaged this all around the country, which meant I had to go to every major British city, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, hyping up Jackass through a microphone in shopping centers, doing this competition and posing for pictures in local papers while trying to avoid streams of egg-strewn vomit.
[00:10:44]  Even quite recently, when I was back at MTV doing One Leicester Square, I would bump into the people that were my PR handlers on that trip.
[00:10:51]  One lass reminded me that I put lap dancers and prostitutes on her gold card and got the hotel to give me cash on her account without her prior knowledge.
[00:11:01]  That's a crime.
[00:11:03]  Looming larger than any of these misdemeanours, though, was the saga of the aforementioned giant African snails.
[00:11:10]  I bought them at Brixton Market, took them on tour with me for a bit, and then grew a little tired of them.
[00:11:16]  They were good for a while, but once you've grown used to the fact that they're bigger than normal snails, they get a bit boring.
[00:11:22]  After a couple of weeks, the novelty is all but worn away.
[00:11:25]  It's just like they're normal snails and you're closer to them.
[00:11:28]  I had to order them room service, spinach they liked, though not with Hollandaise sauce, any kind of salt will kill them.
[00:11:36]  It's Russell and any animal is just always disconcerting.
[00:11:41]  In the end, I left them behind at the Leeds Hilton.
[00:11:43]  I was at some shopping centre.
[00:11:45]  Normally they're called the Corn Exchange, so let us assume that was the name.
[00:11:49]  With all these Leeds Yobo lands scoffing eggs and puking them up all over a tarpaulin floor, when the MTV PR girl comes up to me with a phone and goes, um, Russell, it's the North Yorkshire Police on the phone.
[00:12:00]  They've had a call from the RSPCA about you leaving giant African snails in your room at the Hilton.
[00:12:05]  Do you want to speak to them?
[00:12:07]  North Yorkshire Police, RSPCA, Hilton, sounds like a lot of aggro, I thought.
[00:12:13]  You take it, your PR.
[00:12:15]  But later on, the story got out and I had to talk to some syndicated press people about it.
[00:12:19]  It was only ever picked up by local papers in the Irish press for some reason.
[00:12:23]  They asked, what do you say to these charges from the RSPCA that it was gross neglect of a rare and endangered animal?
[00:12:30]  Well, this was ridiculous because they're normally food.
[00:12:32]  You buy them at the market, either alive or frozen, and you're meant to put them in a stew.
[00:12:36]  So effectively, I had saved them from a certain death and taken them on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
[00:12:42]  So I said, I miss them, pets.
[00:12:44]  Sebastian and Jake, they were called.
[00:12:46]  I gave them different names every time someone asked me.
[00:12:49]  They meant the world to me, and I'll do whatever it takes to get them back.
[00:12:52]  They lived like proper little toffs with me.
[00:12:54]  Burlington Berties, they were accustomed to the finer things of life.
[00:13:02]  Yeah.
[00:13:05]  Putting it in a book is indeed fucking insane.
[00:13:07]  Um, I once read this Irish newspaper and saw that they put this load of rubbish in it verbatim.
[00:13:17]  I suppose that was my first taste of a form of public notoriety with which I have subsequently become all too familiar.
[00:13:24]  Seeing that clipping stuck to Andy Milligan's desk at MTV made me think, this is good.

=== Hackney Flatmate Antics (12:05) ===

[00:13:31]  Me and Matt just used to fuel each other's madness when we were doing that dance floor chart.
[00:13:35]  We'd both be off our heads in some club somewhere.
[00:13:38]  I'd ask him to think of an image and he'd pause and then say, Wurzel Gummage at the Berlin Olympics, lying to Jesse Owens about Team Wolf's dreams.
[00:13:47]  Then I'd go off and present this alternate reality to some hapless sod and they'd have to come to terms with it.
[00:13:53]  There were a lot of 80s films involved.
[00:13:54]  It was just my childhood being reconfigured as jokes and it was sort of a cult hit.
[00:13:59]  I thought, this will be the thing that makes me famous in a tiny insular cable TV way, but still famous.
[00:14:06]  I was meeting loads of women when we were out in the clubs and getting a lot of blowjobs in toilets.
[00:14:11]  Amanda had come back into my life, so I was seeing her as well, and it was the first time I'd ever had a bit of cash to spare.
[00:14:17]  I spent it mostly on two tight t-shirts, which I wore with most of my abdomen visible, and highlights in my hair.
[00:14:23]  Matt said I dressed like some kind of swarthy Latino lover.
[00:14:27]  That place above the bank where I lived with Mark and Andy was like the house in Fight Club.
[00:14:32]  Dirty plates piled up everywhere, people riding around on BMXs.
[00:14:35]  And after I'd been at MTV a little while, I moved out and got a room with their old next-door neighbor, Danielle.
[00:14:41]  He was a juggler, but he had a good job selling commodities or something like that.
[00:14:45]  And he'd got this amazing flat in a converted church in Hackney Road.
[00:14:50]  This was the first time in my life that I'd lived somewhere nice.
[00:14:54]  There were three or four different flats attached to a cool bar that held interesting events, leading off of a beautiful courtyard, and Danielle's shop was on the top floor.
[00:15:03]  It was a really interesting L-shaped space with a lovely living room, a skylight, and wooden floors.
[00:15:08]  I had a great little room and good money coming in from MTV, so I was always able to pay the rent.
[00:15:14]  When Matt stayed there, I used to make him sleep in the corridor on an old brown duvet that I'd had since I was about nine.
[00:15:21]  He used to plead with me, can't I sleep in your room?
[00:15:24]  And I'd say, no, Matthew, you will be sleeping on the brown.
[00:15:32]  Again, this guy's supposed to be his friend.
[00:15:35]  Slash employee.
[00:15:38]  I'd only been there about a month when Danielle said, Russell, you've made my house feel like a brothel.
[00:15:43]  The whole place smells of drugs, and every time I come in here, there are different women.
[00:15:47]  It wasn't Matt he was complaining about.
[00:15:48]  I did have other guests.
[00:15:51]  He was right.
[00:15:52]  If anything good came my way, I had to fuck it up.
[00:15:55]  Danielle couldn't understand why, because he was a gentle person who really knew how to live.
[00:15:59]  He loved cooking, and once he brought all these slippers back from Morocco in all different sizes and left them by the door for visitors, that would never occur to me.
[00:16:07]  He was from another world, France.
[00:16:10]  Danielle perhaps found me a difficult flatmate on account of the antics.
[00:16:14]  I was always up to antics.
[00:16:16]  He never learned of the time I was locked out, though.
[00:16:20]  This anecdote is an almost perfect representation of instant karma.
[00:16:24]  I did something bad.
[00:16:25]  The universe caught me and promptly punished me.
[00:16:29]  When John Lennon sang Instant Karma's Gonna Get You, I thought, how?
[00:16:33]  It'll never get me.
[00:16:34]  I'm too smart, too swift, too tricky, and too quick, but he was right.
[00:16:38]  I met this German lap dancer called Michaela.
[00:16:41]  She was one of a long line of lap dancery-type girls who distracted me from the sadness at this time.
[00:16:47]  Sisters of mercy, Leonard Cohen would have called them, offering salvation and redemption.
[00:16:52]  I called them tarts.
[00:16:56]  Karma must have been listening and waiting.
[00:16:59]  I was going to lap dancing clubs quite a lot at the time, in particular Spearmint Rhino.
[00:17:04]  Cunningly, I used to phone them up and go, Hey, my name's Zach Shobiz.
[00:17:07]  I'm the manager of Russell Brand, the hot MTV presenter, and he's on his way down to your club.
[00:17:12]  Don't make him wear shoes and trousers like you do all the normal guys.
[00:17:16]  Welcome him with open arms.
[00:17:17]  Show him a good time.
[00:17:19]  A few minutes later, I'd arrive.
[00:17:21]  Hi, I'm Russell.
[00:17:22]  I think my manager, Zach Shobiz, phoned, and they'd say reverentially, oh, come in, Mr. Brand.
[00:17:28]  Nice trainers.
[00:17:30]  Some of the dancers recognize me from MTV, and I'd be able to chat them up and kidnap them.
[00:17:35]  You're not supposed to do that.
[00:17:36]  It's against policy, like touching and feeling and wistfully reflecting that everything could have been so different if you'd only learned how to love.
[00:17:45]  Yeah, if only.
[00:17:50]  Just fundamentally broken human being.
[00:17:56]  This is all I'm getting from this.
[00:18:02]  Sleeping on the brown, yes.
[00:18:05]  Michaela.
[00:18:07]  She was sexy in a lap dancer sort of way, which many might think, incidentally, is the best way to be sexy.
[00:18:13]  Other ways include sexy like a teacher, sexy like a policewoman, a mate's sister, a biblical character, Cher, Eva Braun, a Bronte sister, a babysitter, Madonna, or the Madonna.
[00:18:23]  I like lap dancer sexy.
[00:18:26]  I got her delivered to the house in a cab using the MTV Addison Lee cab account, of which I am still the world record exploiter.
[00:18:34]  I used to hang out in crack dens with a car outside, you know, get my mum brought round, takeaways delivered, and my mum's takeaways delivered.
[00:18:41]  On one crazy occasion, I had my mum delivered to a takeaway just to mix things up.
[00:18:46]  And this was before, you know, delivery was, you know, as much of a common thing in the UK as it is now.
[00:18:56]  I had dealers picked up in Camden so that they could drop me off drugs in Hackney and then get taken home.
[00:19:02]  I just exploited that account from the moment I started working at MTV till the moment they sacked me.
[00:19:07]  I simply didn't use public transport from the second an MTV researcher spoke these cherished words.
[00:19:12]  Russell, as a presenter, you get an account number to use at Addison Lee whenever you need to get to work.
[00:19:19]  I ignored the get-to-work bit.
[00:19:21]  Every single journey I took from then was in an account cab and not just my own journeys.
[00:19:25]  Sometimes I'd have two or three cars out at a time, ferrying my mum around or picking people up from airports.
[00:19:33]  Michaela arrived in her car just as someone else departed in theirs.
[00:19:37]  Danielle was away in Paris.
[00:19:39]  We were watching pornography together and having sex in the living room.
[00:19:42]  This is the life, I thought, like a Beano character eating sausage and mash on a deck chair, as I ejaculated.
[00:19:49]  Michaela hadn't come.
[00:19:51]  My policy was, first sexual encounter orgasm comes free.
[00:19:55]  After that, be on your toes, because I won't be hanging about.
[00:20:01]  Yep, that sounds correct.
[00:20:04]  Her orgasm quota had been met earlier in the evening.
[00:20:07]  It was now three in the morning, so I strolled off into the flat all nude to quiet my belligerent mind with a fizzing brown snake of heroin.
[00:20:14]  Michaela began loudly putting her stuff away in the way that women do when they want you to say, oh, don't put your stuff away.
[00:20:21]  I wasn't going to fall for that one.
[00:20:22]  They teach you that on your first day of womanizing school.
[00:20:26]  Michaela was angered by my well-tutored ignorance.
[00:20:29]  See, he's been practicing the fucking willful ignorance thing for a long time.
[00:20:34]  She came out into the corridor, fully clothed and carrying her bag, walked up to me with rage twinkling in her perfect green eyes, and smacked me really hard in the face.
[00:20:44]  I'm very much of the view that it's wrong to hit a woman, or anyone really, so I had to be innovative when meting out retribution.
[00:20:50]  Thankfully, the smack had awoken my creativity.
[00:20:53]  I grabbed her shoulders and bum-rushed her towards the front door.
[00:20:57]  I never know whether to say bum-rushed or frog-marched.
[00:20:59]  Let's call it a frog's march, or a bum march to keep the mood light.
[00:21:04]  It was the manner in which a bouncer would evict a drunk.
[00:21:07]  As I escorted Michaela through the front door, I felt very strongly that I needed to avenge the slap.
[00:21:12]  She can't slap me just because I didn't make her come, then swanned off, leaving porn on the telly while I smoked gear.
[00:21:20]  Yes, what kind of a man would let such a slur pass unaddressed?
[00:21:25]  Not me!
[00:21:26]  So naked and riled and 100% sure that what I was about to do was objectively right and what God would have wanted, I spat in her face.
[00:21:36]  Yes, that's right.
[00:21:37]  I spat in the face of a beautiful woman that had made me come.
[00:21:40]  She had slapped me, and I was convinced that it was the only course of action and that there'd be no consequences.
[00:21:47]  Then the front door clicked shut behind me.
[00:21:50]  Uh-oh.
[00:21:52]  I discreetly pushed the door to check it was shut.
[00:21:55]  It was.
[00:21:56]  Michaela hadn't noticed yet because she was too stunned by the spitting atrocity.
[00:22:01]  Hmm, I thought, this doesn't look good.
[00:22:03]  It's three o'clock in the morning.
[00:22:05]  I'm completely naked.
[00:22:06]  I've got no money, and the only person who could possibly help me has got my spit running down her face.
[00:22:12]  She still hadn't noticed the door.
[00:22:14]  Fuck you, I'm going, she shouted, and started to walk off into the cold hackney night.
[00:22:19]  Before you go, Michaela, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise.
[00:22:23]  She stops and looks back, wiping her face.
[00:22:26]  This will take some charm.
[00:22:27]  It was a beastly thing to do, even if you did slap me really hard in my face, which is my livelihood.
[00:22:32]  I'm sorry.
[00:22:33]  I'm really very sorry.
[00:22:35]  She hasn't walked away.
[00:22:36]  Do it.
[00:22:37]  Ask.
[00:22:37]  You've got no choice.
[00:22:39]  Michaela, darling, can I borrow your phone, please?
[00:22:41]  I seem to have locked myself out.
[00:22:44]  Selfishly and with no thought for my feelings, she starts laughing, but I managed to win her round to the extent that she'll let me use her phone to call talking pages and get a locksmith.
[00:22:53]  Unfortunately, the first two or three aren't open 24 hours, and when I do finally get through to one, I've just started to give them the address when the credit runs out on her phone.
[00:23:02]  At this point, Michaela decides she's not going to hang around for my benefit anymore and clears off, never to be seen again.
[00:23:09]  Time moves very slowly when you're standing naked on Hackney Road at three o'clock in the morning.
[00:23:14]  I can hear music from the bar below, and I realise there must be a party with a late license, but I can't go down there completely naked.
[00:23:21]  Luckily, there's an umbrella standing up against the door, so I open it up between my legs, like in a Marx Brothers movie, and use it to shield my genitals.
[00:23:29]  Did I mention that the umbrella is pink?
[00:23:32]  That's one detail of this story I often try to forget.
[00:23:38]  I think that's far from the worst thing so far.
[00:23:41]  Um, and yes, yes, the Michaela's terribly selfish for not considering Russell in all this.
[00:23:50]  Um, just then, a girl emerges from the bar to change a barrel.
[00:23:53]  She looks me up and down with the pink umbrella shielding my dignity, or what's left of it, and says, Can I help you?
[00:23:59]  What a question.
[00:24:00]  It's 3:45, I'm naked, but for the stupidly comic pink umbrella.
[00:24:04]  It's cold, and I'm in hackney.
[00:24:06]  Pretty much anything you do would be a help.
[00:24:09]  10p, a suite, a match.
[00:24:10]  I've got nothing.
[00:24:11]  Eventually, she offers to call me a locksmith.
[00:24:14]  After I've waited for what seems like an age, but it's probably only 30 minutes, she emerges again.
[00:24:19]  I ask her how long he's going to be, and she says, Oh, sorry, I forgot.
[00:24:23]  Which I love.
[00:24:24]  I love that.
[00:24:25]  I love it.
[00:24:25]  Good for you.
[00:24:27]  Finally moved to action by my increasingly despairing pleas, she roots around in the cellar and comes up with a pair of those chef's trousers, giant, musty, stinking things, and lets me come down to use the phone because it's quieting down a bit now.
[00:24:40]  I pull the trousers on, they're much too big, and I have to hold them up by the hand with the pink umbrella over my shoulder.
[00:24:46]  I walk into the bar behind this girl, and obviously, it's gay night.
[00:24:50]  Gay night.
[00:24:51]  Really gay it was.
[00:24:52]  The whole night dedicated to gayness.
[00:24:55]  The whole place was full of gay lads sniffing poppers and GHB.
[00:25:00]  As I'm trying to use the phone, with change that she's grudgingly lent me, my trousers are falling down, and all these gay lads touch me up while I'm struggling to make the call.
[00:25:09]  But I finally managed to get through to the locksmith I spoke to before.
[00:25:13]  He agrees to come, and I go back outside and wait for ages and ages.
[00:25:18]  Eventually, he turns up, takes out a bit of plastic that looks a bit like a cut-off Coke bottle, and runs it down the narrow gap between the drawer and the frame, roughly the way you'd swipe a credit card through a machine.
[00:25:29]  The door just opens straight away.
[00:25:31]  The whole process probably takes about 10 seconds, and he charges me £250.

=== Longing for Heroin Over Success (03:29) ===

[00:25:36]  Instant karma.
[00:25:38]  I spit.
[00:25:39]  Almost before the spit lands, the door shuts behind me, the crime and punishment administered in the same moment.
[00:25:45]  Danielle never found out about this terrible indiscretion.
[00:25:50]  And then he wrote it in a book.
[00:25:54]  Once I finally got a bit of success, it became clear that my internal deficit of sadness and longing would not really be sated by the things I'd always thought would save me.
[00:26:04]  This realization made me turn to hard drugs, specifically heroin, in an even more concerted way than I ever had before.
[00:26:12]  Ever since the first couple of times I'd taken it in my early 20s, I'd always maintained a great interest in heroin.
[00:26:18]  I'd sort of fallen in love with the warmth of it, the way it felt like crawling back into the womb.
[00:26:24]  I always knew it would be the one because it was the only drug that did what was promised.
[00:26:29]  I won't lapse into saying that it did exactly what it says on the tin because I despise advert authorized idioms.
[00:26:37]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:26:40]  You're now selling a methylene blue, buddy.
[00:26:43]  Yeah, things have changed, I guess.
[00:26:46]  But heroin delivered.
[00:26:48]  LSD kind of does a bit, especially when all the things that are familiar to you peel away and you suddenly realize the fragility of how you normally see the world.
[00:26:56]  Marijuana kind of doesn't, really, although it's a laugh for a while.
[00:27:00]  I say that having smoked it constantly for a decade.
[00:27:03]  Alcohol makes you sick and gives you a headache.
[00:27:05]  Crack is like inhaling plastic, but so brief and flimsy and brittle as a high.
[00:27:10]  Normal cocaine just makes you nervous.
[00:27:13]  It doesn't for me, but okay.
[00:27:15]  Amphetamins are even worse, and ecstasy never really agreed with me, but heroin gets the job done.
[00:27:21]  What it mainly does is take you right out of reality and plant you somewhere more manageable.
[00:27:26]  In short, it contextualizes everything else as meaningless.
[00:27:29]  All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we're missing something.
[00:27:33]  Say that thing is a god.
[00:27:35]  That all the longing we feel, be it for a lover or a football team or a drug, is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we're supposed to feel for God, for oneness, for truth.
[00:27:45]  And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need.
[00:27:50]  My mate Carl once told me he'd been looking after this five-year-old boy who, not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words, said, I want something.
[00:27:59]  He didn't know what it was.
[00:28:00]  Not, I want sweets or a can of coke or to watch the tweenies or whatever it is they're into now.
[00:28:05]  I liked Bagpus.
[00:28:07]  But I want something.
[00:28:09]  All of us, I think, have that feeling.
[00:28:11]  And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.
[00:28:16]  It makes you feel lovely and warm and cozy.
[00:28:18]  It gives you a great big smacky cuddle.
[00:28:21]  And from then, the idea of need is no longer an abstract thing, but a longing in your belly and a kicking in your legs and a shivering in your arms and sweat on your forehead and a dull pallor on your face.
[00:28:32]  At this point, you're no longer under any misapprehension about what it is that you need.
[00:28:37]  You don't think, oh, nice to have a girlfriend read a poem or ride a bike.
[00:28:41]  You think, fuck, I need heroin.
[00:28:46]  Yeah, that I want something thing.
[00:28:49]  I mean, not everyone feels like they have a deep well of nothingness inside them, Russell.
[00:28:56]  While Rebrand was the zenith of my preemptive Vegas Elvis period, you know, do the decline into bloated egotism before anyone knows who the hell you are, then it can be a secret.

=== Eighteen-Year-Old Daughter on Cruise (05:58) ===

[00:29:06]  Cruise of the Gods, a one-off BBC comedy special, would go down as the nadir.
[00:29:11]  I convinced the agent Connor McCoffin, whose clients include Paddy Considine and David Walliams, to represent me for acting work.
[00:29:21]  He came and saw me do stand-up a couple of times in Edinburgh when I was being all mad and reckless and injuring myself, and he really liked it, as well as on that night marish evening at 93 feet east.
[00:29:32]  Imagine being at either of those events and being like, yeah, this is the guy we need.
[00:29:36]  This is who I want to represent.
[00:29:38]  Like, yeah, Jesus.
[00:29:40]  My friend Carl Theobald had wisely advised me to be wary of those who gave me approval when I'm in a self-destructive mode.
[00:29:46]  This is how he characterized the ensuing dynamic.
[00:29:49]  Oh yeah, look at him go.
[00:29:50]  Wow, he's like a runaway train.
[00:29:52]  Go on, Russell.
[00:29:53]  Whoa, tear it up.
[00:29:54]  He's wild.
[00:29:54]  He's dangerous.
[00:29:55]  He's unstoppable.
[00:29:57]  He's done what?
[00:29:58]  Sorry, Russell, you're fired.
[00:30:00]  And so, to the 2002 baby cow production Cruise of the Gods, starring Rob Bryden, Dave Walliams, Steve Coogan, and me in a much, much, much, much smaller role, but nonetheless present on the boat trip throughout.
[00:30:15]  Cruise of the Gods was filmed on a ship sailing in the Aegean Sea for about three weeks, visiting Greek islands and the Turkish port of Istanbul.
[00:30:23]  I was in no fucking state to be going anywhere on my own, but it was a great job and an amazing opportunity.
[00:30:28]  Coogan was huge at that time.
[00:30:30]  I think this was around Alan Partridge sort of, you know, sort of moment.
[00:30:34]  But it was a great job and an amazing opportunity.
[00:30:38]  So I've just read that.
[00:30:40]  Rob Bryden wasn't doing badly either.
[00:30:42]  And while David was not that famous yet, David Walliams, he'd done rock profile on the telly, and I was really looking forward to working with him.
[00:30:52]  The story concerned a TV science fiction convention held on a cruise ship where obsessive fans of a Star Trek type show would go to meet the heroes of the program they had watched in its heyday 10 to 15 years before.
[00:31:05]  The central theme was the interaction between these aged and jaded stars.
[00:31:09]  I can't remember the exact intricacies of the plot.
[00:31:12]  I didn't read the script.
[00:31:13]  But it should not be assumed that I embarked on this cruise ship with a bad attitude.
[00:31:17]  Quite the reverse.
[00:31:18]  I'd put myself through a mild heroin withdrawal before going on board, falling back on whiskey and grass, as I thought it would be stupid to take hard drugs on the boat.
[00:31:27]  I said to Martino, who clearly found a job on this somehow again, Who demonstrated his limitless compassion by remaining my friend after the carnage of rebrand.
[00:31:39]  I don't want to get in any trouble on this job.
[00:31:42]  I want to be known as the bookish actor who just kept himself to himself.
[00:31:46]  Martino encouraged this.
[00:31:48]  That is a good ambition to have, Russell.
[00:31:50]  If you can achieve it, you will have done well.
[00:31:52]  So off I went with that goal in mind.
[00:31:54]  Within a week, I had been fired and sent home in disgrace.
[00:31:58]  Part of the problem was that I was so busy congratulating myself on not doing hard drugs that I just got pissed and stoned all the time instead.
[00:32:06]  But that was not all there was to it.
[00:32:08]  Some of the details of what happened on that boat are sketchy, but one thing I do remember is that the cruise ship wasn't exclusively for the use of the production.
[00:32:16]  There were passengers on that ship, and some of them had daughters with whom I could pursue romantic entanglements.
[00:32:23]  Not a daughter in a terrifying way.
[00:32:25]  She was 18, old enough by two long years to have sex with.
[00:32:32]  Russell at this time would have been around 27, something like that.
[00:32:38]  Um, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:43]  I once, I, when I was 22, I had a date with an 18-year-old.
[00:32:48]  Um, I was in London.
[00:32:50]  I had a date with an 18-year-old when I was 22, and immediately I was like, oh no, this feels weird as fuck.
[00:32:56]  This is, this is, this is not correct.
[00:32:59]  I cannot imagine, I cannot fathom being 27 and trying to prey on this 18-year-old girl while she is there with her parents and family on a cruise.
[00:33:12]  I j I oh, and this is the, this is the stuff, like this and and and and the spitting and everything.
[00:33:24]  This is the stuff that made it into the book.
[00:33:27]  This is the stuff he's happy to tell us, you know?
[00:33:30]  I'm like, there is no way of reading any of this and being like, oh yeah, there couldn't possibly be anything he's left out.
[00:33:37]  Like, nah, nah, nah, nah.
[00:33:40]  This is the stuff that made the cut.
[00:33:46]  I was safely above the legal age and under my drugbrella, the device that protects me from all condemnation.
[00:33:52]  Beneath its shelter, I cannot be damned, nor can judgments affect me.
[00:33:56]  They are deflected like the rain as I skip off into the decadent night.
[00:33:59]  One drunken evening up on the deck off the coast of some bejeweled aisle, I was trying to make the daughter love me by shouting into the Aegean night, Let's kiss with the moon as our witness and the ocean as our priest.
[00:34:11]  She was against it, saying things like, I hardly know you and you're drunk.
[00:34:15]  A quest such as this was beyond the realm that language could conquer.
[00:34:19]  The daughter was German.
[00:34:20]  I was prepared.
[00:34:21]  I leaped over the railings that ringed the boat and I hung off the edge, chivalrously proclaiming, this is how badly I want you, dangling over the sea, switching hands and doing it one-handedly, just dicking around, really.
[00:34:33]  This was one of the most unsuccessful seduction strategies that I have ever employed.
[00:34:38]  The daughters started crying.
[00:34:40]  Sorry about that, I said, getting back on deck.
[00:34:42]  A kiss may cheer you up.
[00:34:44]  It did a bit, but not enough for sex to happen.
[00:34:48]  So he still, despite all this, he still kissed it.
[00:34:52]  Poor girl.
[00:34:54]  I pointed out some stars, did a bit of Shelley and Coleridge, the ancient mariner, but there was definitely to be no sex, so I cleared off.
[00:35:03]  Later that night, there was a cabaret.

=== Unsuccessful Seduction Strategies (03:32) ===

[00:35:04]  It was a drab affair.
[00:35:06]  There were a few people scattered around the room, and Poseidon, saddened by my earlier plight, provided dancers.
[00:35:12]  I lured one back to my cabin by saying things to her.
[00:35:15]  The quickness of it was brilliant, actually.
[00:35:17]  One minute she was on the stage, the next minute I was talking to her, and then we were having sex.
[00:35:22]  She was one of those rare women who recognise that life is finite and saw orgasms as a wonderful distraction.
[00:35:29]  Oh, if only we were all so wise, Russell.
[00:35:33]  A few stolen moments from this encounter linger in my memory.
[00:35:36]  The hint of a leotard, the glint of a blue eye, the smell of her hair, the touch of a woman, momentarily comforting me amid all the confusion that swirled around me.
[00:35:44]  I got sad at sea and missed my drugs and comforts.
[00:35:48]  Other drugs.
[00:35:49]  Sure, I'd brought some drugs, but not proper ones that smashed down on thoughts like Thor.
[00:35:54]  I felt shy with the others.
[00:35:56]  Rob, Dave, and James Corden out of the history boys.
[00:35:59]  That's right, James Corden was there too.
[00:36:01]  What a fucking nightmare.
[00:36:03]  Honestly, Russell Brand, James Corden, and David Walliams in the same place?
[00:36:10]  I cannot express how quickly I would be sprinting in the opposite direction.
[00:36:15]  Jesus Christ.
[00:36:19]  Coogan was off somewhere.
[00:36:21]  I didn't meet him till years later.
[00:36:23]  It's not that the professionals weren't interested in talking to me.
[00:36:26]  Rob Bryden seemed fascinated by me and said, It wouldn't surprise me, Russell, if you took to the air and flew away off the back of this ship.
[00:36:34]  Sadly, this was a pretty accurate prophecy of what did happen.
[00:36:36]  You're like Peter Pan, he enthused.
[00:36:39]  You're going to be a massive star.
[00:36:40]  Although I secretly believed this and yearned for it to happen, it didn't seem very likely at the time because I was in a right state.
[00:36:48]  The idea that I would one day share a yoga class with David Walliams would have appeared even more improbable at this juncture.
[00:36:55]  I didn't particularly like David at first, and he later revealed that he fucking hated me.
[00:37:02]  Okay, David Walliams has exactly one redeeming feature, and it's fucking hating.
[00:37:07]  Yeah, okay, there's one thing.
[00:37:11]  I wonder if he'll end up in prison soon.
[00:37:14]  Well, we'll see.
[00:37:16]  He had a certain charm, but there was inevitably something of a clash between his a feet head boy and my subversive truant.
[00:37:23]  I found the idea of making conversation with them nerve-wracking.
[00:37:26]  Yet there was Rob, who was such a socially skillful man, constantly playing the piano and bursting into his impeccable Tom Jones, and Walliams with his high camp Kenneth Williams routine.
[00:37:37]  Everyone seemed so at ease and so comfortable, and I didn't know what to do with myself.
[00:37:41]  So, when we got to Istanbul, I said, I'm going to go out tonight.
[00:37:45]  The boat was in the harbour, and when the suggestion was made at about eight in the evening, everyone agreed to come.
[00:37:50]  I remember Rob and Walliams saying, let's all go.
[00:37:53]  By the time it got to midnight, of course, they'd all changed their minds.
[00:37:57]  I mean, yeah, it's midnight.
[00:37:59]  like what do you expect you know like that's people do this a lot They don't seem to realize that the future is just like now, but in a little while.
[00:38:07]  So they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes.
[00:38:14]  But everything's not going to be made of leather.
[00:38:16]  The world won't stink of sherbet.
[00:38:17]  Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to the animals.
[00:38:22]  You'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.
[00:38:28]  Listen, as someone with autism, if I followed this particular thing, I would never go anywhere.

=== Midnight Prostitute Encounter (14:53) ===

[00:38:37]  I'd be like, oh, there are people?
[00:38:40]  Lots of people?
[00:38:41]  Nah, nah, not doing that.
[00:38:43]  You know, I have to just schedule things in and then do them, and then I'm fine once I'm there.
[00:38:48]  You know?
[00:38:49]  Like, I enjoy them once I'm there.
[00:38:52]  You know, this system of like, you'll feel basically the same.
[00:38:55]  Like, oh, that's a terror.
[00:38:56]  That's not going to sell me or anything.
[00:38:59]  Oh, dear.
[00:39:03]  At midnight, I swaggered drunkenly down the gangplank and got into a cab on my own.
[00:39:08]  All right, mate, I said to the cab driver.
[00:39:09]  I'm looking for birds.
[00:39:11]  He was Turkish, so he didn't understand.
[00:39:14]  He looked at me in the rearview mirror, perplexed.
[00:39:18]  Like, yeah, birds to regular people is a thing with a beak and wings and feathers, and most of the time they fly.
[00:39:28]  Just fucking talk normally for five seconds, you prick.
[00:39:33]  I did the internationally recognised mime for a woman, the silhouette of a Coke bottle or Marilyn Monroe or an hourglass.
[00:39:40]  He said, Ah, ladies!
[00:39:42]  Went, yeah, and off we sped.
[00:39:44]  In my imagination, smoke flew out the back of the taxi, and there was a wheel spin and a skid noise as well.
[00:39:50]  We made our way at breakneck speed through the streets of Istanbul and eventually arrived outside a brothel miles away from the boat, so I was already thinking through my drunkenness.
[00:39:59]  This is a bit mad.
[00:40:00]  Outside this place was what I can only describe as a snaggle-toothed crone.
[00:40:06]  In fact, if you're ever looking to use a snaggle-toothed crone in a film and this one turns up to audition, book her.
[00:40:12]  Don't go, no, there might be a better one around the corner, because there won't be.
[00:40:17]  And ah, so crumbly blunder trust, my commiserations, you have also met people.
[00:40:21]  Yes, yes, they're out there.
[00:40:22]  I can confirm.
[00:40:23]  They're definitely out there.
[00:40:25]  Saw some earlier today.
[00:40:28]  That brothel was more of a lap dancing club, really, but sex was never far away.
[00:40:33]  It was like the set of an old-fashioned Saturday night ITV game show, you bet, or maybe Family Fortunes, but produced on a budget of about 35 quid.
[00:40:42]  There were four or five women in CNA frocks hobbling about on this floor that would light up like in the Billie Jean video, but not so well coordinated.
[00:40:50]  Apparently, CNA is a now disbanded department store.
[00:40:55]  Then why just use things that people know?
[00:40:59]  It's God, you're bad at this.
[00:41:02]  I didn't really fancy any of them, the women.
[00:41:06]  And the atmosphere was quite depressing.
[00:41:08]  There were a lot of burly great Turkish men sat around in drab suits, the same way those who operated beyond the fringes of legality in London in the old days would dress in suits to lacquer over the criminality.
[00:41:18]  I sat down in the corner and a bloke came over with some suspicious-looking bar snacks.
[00:41:23]  See anything you like? He asked.
[00:41:25]  No, not really, came my response.
[00:41:27]  At this point, he introduced himself.
[00:41:29]  I've still got him in one of my phones somewhere.
[00:41:32]  I think he was called Ishmael or Isimir or something like that.
[00:41:35]  Why don't you like these women that we've got here? He demanded, with a grandiose sweep of his arm across this dreary kingdom, gesturing towards the broken-faced marionette women doing a stringless dance of death on the Billie Jean floor.
[00:41:47]  They're just not my cup of tea, I maintained.
[00:41:49]  When he asked what I was after, I replied, oh, probably someone in their twenties with massive boobs.
[00:41:55]  And he said inevitably, come with me.
[00:41:58]  I have the perfect thing.
[00:42:00]  She was not a thing, but a person with feelings, and there are always two ways this tale can be told.
[00:42:05]  The first is from the perspective of someone who was a connoisseur of sex in general, but also prostitution.
[00:42:11]  The second is through the eyes of a man who has since awoken from the amoral dream of commodified sex.
[00:42:16]  You'll probably enjoy the whole thing more if I take the former option, so I shall write from the perspective of a man who is unaware that the suffragette movement ever happened.
[00:42:24]  I shall adopt the stance of a man who, if he'd seen Emily Pankhurst chained to some railings, would probably have thought, hello, she looks vulnerable.
[00:42:31]  Get your bloomers off.
[00:42:37]  Yeah, almost like that's the things you actually think, Russell.
[00:42:41]  Almost, almost like that's that's definitely a fucking preference.
[00:42:46]  So Ishmael made a phone call, and the girl then arrived at the club, announcing herself with some ridiculous name for a Turkish woman, Bev.
[00:42:54]  The issue with payment was raised.
[00:42:55]  He said 800 euros or something.
[00:42:58]  It was quite a lot.
[00:42:59]  That is quite a lot.
[00:43:00]  And I didn't have enough cash on me.
[00:43:02]  I don't know much about exchange rates and global finances except for a fierce pride in the strength of the pound.
[00:43:07]  Come on, you pound.
[00:43:09]  I have no interest in it, and I suspect the whole silly business is a ploy to keep us bewitched by numbers.
[00:43:14]  Just basic conspiracy theory, bitch.
[00:43:18]  Ishmael looked at my solo card, this preposterous debit card that I had that only seemed to work inside the confines of my house, and said, well, this is problem.
[00:43:27]  Me, Ishmael and this girl, who looked alright, actually, I'm so glad she meets your approval, set off through the streets of Istanbul in search of a cash point.
[00:43:35]  Eventually, I managed to get the money out, and we arrived at the hotel, and I discreetly handed over my 800 euros to Ishmael, who paid the guy an hour's fee.
[00:43:43]  They obviously had an arrangement.
[00:43:45]  Then he slipped off, and me and Bev went upstairs.
[00:43:49]  As we were going up to the room, she kept taking calls on her mobile.
[00:43:53]  When we got there, I suggested she undress, and she came back from the bathroom completely naked, meaning I missed the Christmas moments of bra and knicker removal.
[00:44:01]  So I asked her if she could put her underwear back on, and she looked at me like I'd asked her to plow a field.
[00:44:07]  Her phone kept ringing every couple of minutes.
[00:44:10]  She just carried on living her life without really acknowledging that she was working as a prostitute.
[00:44:14]  Look, I said, and bear in mind that a substantial sum of money has been paid.
[00:44:19]  Can I have some oral sex on my privates, please?
[00:44:21]  And she said, yuck, I don't do that.
[00:44:24]  I tried to be resourceful, racking my brains for things I'd done or even read about.
[00:44:28]  Felching, bagpiping, donkey biting.
[00:44:31]  There was barely anything she would do, and mine were pretty standard requirements.
[00:44:34]  Frankly, this girl was a sorry fair-weather excuse for a prostitute.
[00:44:39]  Eventually, she agreed to have sex, but a kind of weary, half-hearted, semi-erect, bored, disappointing bit of sex for which I'd paid a lot of money.
[00:44:48]  During this act of tawdry friction, her phone rang again.
[00:44:51]  Could you turn that phone off, I asked.
[00:44:53]  I can't relax.
[00:44:54]  She took the call.
[00:44:55]  I began to wish I hadn't left the boat.
[00:44:57]  Bryden's probably doing Delilah by now, I mused, which actually helped my erection.
[00:45:02]  Jesus Christ.
[00:45:04]  Another 20 seconds of boring rubbish goes past, and then the phone rings again, and I, and this is the worst act of misogyny I've committed since the spitting debacle, took the phone out of her hand and threw it at the wall.
[00:45:17]  Slow motion.
[00:45:18]  It hits the wall and smashes, and she looks at me, the sex stops, and we separate.
[00:45:23]  Silence.
[00:45:24]  Then I say, realizing my position is compromised, for fuck's sake, you kept answering the phone.
[00:45:29]  And she looks at me again, suddenly mortified, and the scene becomes real and awful.
[00:45:35]  And she just starts crying, and now we're two human beings in a room on Earth.
[00:45:40]  Our previous roles, a prostitute and customer, a tourist, a drunk.
[00:45:44]  That's all gone now.
[00:45:45]  The shards of illusion lie shattered amid the pieces of her phone.
[00:45:49]  We're just people, one of whom has behaved atrociously towards the other.
[00:45:53]  I apologise.
[00:45:54]  Look, I'm really sorry.
[00:45:56]  I didn't mean to do that, but the phone kept ringing and I was frustrated.
[00:45:59]  And she says, it's okay, I'm going to go now.
[00:46:01]  She went back into the bathroom and started getting dressed and came out wearing her underwear.
[00:46:05]  I thought, bloody hell, she looks nice.
[00:46:07]  I wonder if there's anything I could say to...
[00:46:09]  But there isn't.
[00:46:10]  As we picked up the bits of her phone, this atmosphere of faint possibility dissipated all too quickly.
[00:46:15]  And by the time we were going downstairs, I was thinking, this is not looking good.
[00:46:19]  I'm going to have to walk past the reception in a minute, five paces behind a crying prostitute.
[00:46:24]  God, this guy's a sack of shit.
[00:46:28]  We both head out into the street.
[00:46:30]  And she goes her way and I go mine.
[00:46:33]  Momentarily, I feel full of pity and regret for myself and the poor girl stranded in the world.
[00:46:38]  I fight back compassionate tears when I think of her situation.
[00:46:41]  Young, beautiful, perhaps in love.
[00:46:43]  Maybe it was her boyfriend on the phone.
[00:46:45]  Or her mother.
[00:46:45]  She does have a mother.
[00:46:47]  I think of my own mother and the times I've let her down and I'm rinsed with pain at the thought of the sun I could have been, the son she deserved.
[00:46:55]  Then I decided to go back to that brothel and get my fucking money back.
[00:47:00]  The absolute balls.
[00:47:04]  Tension, it gets a bit loud and argumentative with Ishmael.
[00:47:08]  All those Turkish blokes in suits start gathering around and I'm thinking, fucking hell, I'm on my own here.
[00:47:13]  But at this point, I call upon the soon-to-be-patented, oh yeah, sexy Turkish boys, you want me to tap my cock on your curly slipper technique?
[00:47:21]  And this quite miraculously secures me a 50% rebate.
[00:47:26]  Okay.
[00:47:28]  Honour satisfied.
[00:47:32]  Honour satisfied, I got into a cab and went back to the boat and went to bed, then woke up terrified in the middle of what was left of the night, just thinking, you did that thing.
[00:47:41]  You smashed the prostitute's phone.
[00:47:43]  You risked getting into the fight at the brothel.
[00:47:45]  What if they find out?
[00:47:46]  You're meant to be here doing this fucking job, you idiot.
[00:47:49]  These are not the actions of a quiet, bookish man who keeps himself to himself.
[00:47:53]  Okay, well, you seem to have got away with it.
[00:47:55]  Just don't do it again.
[00:47:58]  The next day, I woke up feeling so bad and guilty about the whole thing that the only option was to get drunk and pick up where I'd left off.
[00:48:05]  Athens was our next stop, and we disembarked.
[00:48:08]  But I soon got bored in the hotel.
[00:48:09]  Walliams was always in the pool, and this was before he became the world's best swimmer, swimming himself away from his presumed homosexuality.
[00:48:17]  Fuck me.
[00:48:18]  As luck would have it, there was a lap dancing club just down the road.
[00:48:22]  I didn't have loads of money, so I walked.
[00:48:24]  Once you got inside, it was an amazing place, a despicable sexist hell, really.
[00:48:28]  Architecturally, it had the feeling of a world of leather or PC world.
[00:48:33]  There was a vast low ceiling, but the place was full of swirling smoke and dense music and cheap liquor.
[00:48:39]  I got myself properly pissed.
[00:48:42]  I'd always have a bottle of spirits that I'd carry about with me and not so surreptitiously swig from.
[00:48:48]  You know those kind of laser keyrings that shine a red dot?
[00:48:51]  The men that worked there had those.
[00:48:53]  You'd identify a girl who you'd like to do a lap dance for you, and the male staff would shine that pen into their faces and eyes, really startled them, and then lead them to you.
[00:49:03]  If they were stood in the northwest quadrant of that giant warehouse of debauchery and you were in the southeast, they'd have to go, oh, I'm being shined at, and then trace the laser back towards you.
[00:49:13]  A more misogynistic den of iniquity, it would be hard to conceive of, but in one respect, this establishment was special.
[00:49:20]  It turns out that the no-touching rule that applies in most British lap dancing clubs does not apply in Athens.
[00:49:28]  This reckless deregulation enabled me to lose my mind in there with those women.
[00:49:33]  I was wanking and drinking and touching.
[00:49:35]  It was disgusting.
[00:49:36]  I came about three times in there.
[00:49:39]  Mental.
[00:49:40]  The evening rendered by the brush of Hieronymus Bosch.
[00:49:45]  So he's just gotten through saying it's, you know, one of the worst places ever, but oh, fuck, he had a great time.
[00:49:51]  Oh, he loved it.
[00:49:53]  Yeah, you can't tell me how terrible it is and then how much you enjoyed it.
[00:50:00]  Like, uh, of course, I went back straight away and told the others.
[00:50:06]  You won't believe this fucking joint.
[00:50:08]  You've got to get down there.
[00:50:09]  That's why I got in trouble, really, because I couldn't keep my mouth shut.
[00:50:12]  I kept telling everyone all the terrible stuff I'd done in the hope of entertaining people and making them laugh, as a way of compensating for my pitiful inadequacies in more conventional arenas of social interaction.
[00:50:24]  Again, much more self-aware back then.
[00:50:26]  Walliams refused to go back there with me, but I jostled Rob Bryden and a few of the others into giving it a go.
[00:50:32]  None of them liked it, though.
[00:50:33]  They all went home straight away.
[00:50:35]  Everyone was nice.
[00:50:36]  That was the problem, really.
[00:50:37]  I was living in a different lifestyle.
[00:50:39]  I was a petty criminal drug user who was hardened to the minor skirmishes such misdemeanours invariably entail.
[00:50:46]  I went back to the hotel with them to get some more money, and that was the moment Coogan finally arrived.
[00:50:51]  I felt a frisson seeing him go into the hotel, and then I made my way back to the retail park of debauchery for my third and final visit.
[00:51:01]  I'd gone in there hoping to get one of the girls I'd had before, but this time she didn't want me to touch her.
[00:51:06]  I said in that case, I didn't want a lap dance, and she said I'd still have to pay and went off and got some management bloke.
[00:51:12]  I thought, oh, here we go.
[00:51:14]  So I offer off I went out of the club's main entrance.
[00:51:17]  There were two big geezers and one tiny bloke on the door.
[00:51:20]  Night, gents, I said, and walked up the road toward the hotel.
[00:51:25]  I'd gone about a hundred yards when I heard a full-throated cry of rage coming up behind me.
[00:51:30]  I think it was Wanker.
[00:51:32]  I turned round.
[00:51:33]  Even though I've learned in this life that if you ever hear anything like oi or wanker, the best thing to do is keep going.
[00:51:39]  Run, if anything, because it's never going to be good news, is it?
[00:51:41]  No one ever goes, Wanker, you may have already won a million pounds in our cash prize drawer.
[00:51:47]  Or Wanker, would you like to go out with my sister?
[00:51:49]  It's always wanker smack.
[00:51:52]  In this case, when I turned around, it was the little one of the doormen who was racing towards me.
[00:51:56]  He punched me in the mouth really hard.
[00:51:58]  A brief tussle followed.
[00:52:00]  He was a knotted, sinewy little man, beaten hard by ultraviolet rays, a kind of sun-dried Greek fella.
[00:52:07]  My jaw were put out of alignment by the blow.
[00:52:10]  It was uncomfortable for ages afterwards.
[00:52:12]  I staggered back to the hotel, and this is how out of control I was at the time.
[00:52:16]  I was literally fucking sex mad.
[00:52:18]  I think I had a wank next day.
[00:52:22]  I went upstairs.
[00:52:24]  Walliams was in the swimming pool on the roof again.
[00:52:26]  There he was, swimming about again like a pristine amphibian.
[00:52:30]  It was funny because it did strike me at the time that he could be a proper swimmer.
[00:52:33]  I thought, there he is in his white trunks.
[00:52:36]  At this moment, one of the production staff interrupted my Walliams-based reverie by asking if he could have a word with me.
[00:52:42]  All right, he said, we're going to give you a week's shore leave.
[00:52:45]  Better go get your stuff together.
[00:52:47]  I went back to my room and packed up my stuff with faint suspicion that perhaps this was not good.
[00:52:52]  But when you live in the psychological space that I did, life is not about confronting reality, it's about ignoring it.
[00:52:57]  So when someone says, you're getting a week's shore leave, you don't think, hang on a minute, I'm not a sailor.
[00:53:02]  You just go, oh, all right.
[00:53:04]  I got a lift to Athens airport off Brendan Coogan, Steve Coogan's brother, who was also working on the production.
[00:53:10]  What was slightly tragic in retrospect was me going, do you want me to bring any newspapers or baked beans or English things when I come back?
[00:53:17]  He was like, nah, that's all right, mate.
[00:53:20]  When I told Matt this story later, he said, you were like a dog being taken to the vets to be put to sleep that thought he was going to the park to have a run, all excited with your head out the window.

=== Bali Holiday and Prostitution (02:01) ===

[00:53:31]  I got back home and almost as soon as I arrived, Connor called me up from ICM.
[00:53:35]  Russell, he asked in an ominously somber tone, what did you do on that boat?
[00:53:41]  Oh, nothing, I muttered, just the usual.
[00:53:43]  I can't really remember.
[00:53:44]  Well, he said, they've sacked you.
[00:53:46]  I've never had a client sacked before.
[00:53:48]  And the people down there, the producer and the casting director, say they've never in all their careers experienced anything like it.
[00:53:53]  They just think you're an animal.
[00:53:55]  Before I could blurt out, but I just tried my hardest to fit in.
[00:53:59]  I thought I was this bookish sort of fella.
[00:54:01]  Connor said, I'm going to have to talk to you face to face.
[00:54:04]  I realized this was bad.
[00:54:06]  So I went out and bought a load of heroin.
[00:54:10]  I knew I'd really balls things up.
[00:54:13]  It should have been a fucking amazing job, that cruise of the gods.
[00:54:16]  There we were, stopping off at all these gorgeous islands, going to Athens and Istanbul.
[00:54:20]  And look how I, as usual, converted these beautiful experiences into a grimly picaresque ordeal.
[00:54:27]  My mate Jimmy Black said to me when I got back from that holiday to Bali and Thailand with my dad, Fucking hell, Russell, you've been to all these amazing places and all you do is come back after three weeks and go, oh, I fucked some prostitutes.
[00:54:39]  What else have you done?
[00:54:42]  I saw a mongoose fighting a snake.
[00:54:44]  I rode on the back of an elephant.
[00:54:45]  I saw these monks that don't ever talk walking through the city guided by a child.
[00:54:50]  Well, then, why are you only talking about fucking prostitutes?
[00:54:52]  What's wrong with you?
[00:54:54]  Don't open that door.
[00:54:56]  I've always been drawn to the semier side of life.
[00:54:58]  Those are the kind of characters I'm attracted to.
[00:55:00]  There's an energy I get from them that drives a lot of the work I do.
[00:55:04]  At this stage, though, my predilection for decadence and abuse of drink and drugs was threatening to bring my career to an end before it had even properly started.
[00:55:12]  On my way to meet Connor, I saw Johnny Vegas in the back of a cab.
[00:55:16]  Oh, dear God, I thought, and smoked some more smack.
[00:55:19]  By this stage, I was able to use more or less anything as an excuse, even a sighting of another comedian.
[00:55:24]  I finally met Connor in a cafe in Soho Square.
[00:55:27]  It was raining.
[00:55:29]  He said, I'm sorry, Russell, but I've got to let you go.

=== Terrible Stories Anyway (02:20) ===

[00:55:33]  Yeah, I was all too familiar with the feeling that overtook me at this juncture.
[00:55:37]  I've had a lot of sobering thoughts in my life, as Learned Pierce said to Delboy.
[00:55:41]  It was them that started me drinking.
[00:55:44]  I'd felt it when I couldn't go back for second year at Italia Conti, when I was thrown out of Drama Center, when I was sacked from NTV and XFM, and on numerous other occasions when I'd been sacked from jobs.
[00:55:54]  Up until those particular instants of helplessness and despair, I felt myself to be an invincible blur, impervious to any kinds of judgment.
[00:56:02]  Your bullets can't harm me.
[00:56:04]  My wings are like shields of steel.
[00:56:06]  But then, suddenly, like Icarus, I'd clatter back to earth.
[00:56:10]  The difference was, on this occasion, I had no idea how I was ever going to get back up in the sky again.
[00:56:17]  And that is the end of that.
[00:56:20]  And we will have one more part.
[00:56:22]  No, Kaylee, stay off my keypod.
[00:56:24]  Thank you.
[00:56:25]  Love you.
[00:56:25]  Go that way.
[00:56:26]  Good cat.
[00:56:27]  Go that way.
[00:56:28]  Good.
[00:56:29]  Okay.
[00:56:29]  Thank you.
[00:56:30]  Well done.
[00:56:33]  Yeah, that was the end of that part.
[00:56:35]  Anyway, there will be one more and we will have officially rounded off my bookiewok.
[00:56:44]  And I'm pretty sure most of the rest of it's going to be about his time in rehab, which.
[00:56:53]  Yeah, not going to be great.
[00:56:56]  And again, it's again why I'm interested with the second book, particularly as like most of the things he's accused of happen after this point.
[00:57:08]  happen after he gets sober.
[00:57:11]  So I'm like, okay, you know, you were like, yeah, you were a sack of shit beforehand, but all of the worst things that you're accused of happened after you got off the drugs.
[00:57:23]  You know, you can't blame that.
[00:57:28]  Oh, dear.
[00:57:29]  Can we have more stories, please, Al.
[00:57:32]  There will be more stories next time, I promise.
[00:57:35]  Well, more of these stories.
[00:57:36]  Anyway, more of these terrible, terrible stories.
[00:57:40]  You know, we're at two and a half hours now, and I think that's sufficient, Russell, for one evening.
[00:57:47]  All right.
[00:57:48]  I'm going to finish now because I'm hungry and I want to eat something.
[00:57:52]  All right, bye.