Brand values – the nasty Nineties and Noughties

The grotesque Russell Brand, now accused of sexual assault, has had enough attention already, so I’ll keep the section on him short.

He was never funny and always grim. Edgy Channel 4 made him a star and when in 2008 the BBC fired Brand from a radio show, for leaving disgusting messages on the answer phone of Andrew Sachs, the corporation was presented by cool types as having behaved like a bunch of Tory squares. When he then moved into amateur political philosophy, parts of the Left in Britain, usually men, fawned over the grifting of a tinpot revolutionary. The books sold. Audiences packed out theatres. A Guardian writer hailed him as a “hero of 2014”, the Guardian featured Brand as a columnist on its pages and Owen Jones was an ideological supporter.

A lot has been written about the vulgarity of popular culture in the “Noughties” having made all this possible.

The timeframe should be broader, I think. The roots of it lie in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the popularising of the idea that boundaries must always be pushed, extended or broken, because beyond bourgeois restrictions and the veneer of manners supposedly lay ever greater liberation. That was hardly a new idea. Writers and philosophers had advocated smashing convention long before Pete Townshend of the Who smashed a guitar on stage or Keith Richards of the Stones appeared in front of the magistrate in Chichester in June 1967 on drugs charges. “We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals,” Keith said in court.

Some of what changed as a result of the ensuing social revolution was undoubtedly enormously positive.

Yet in popular entertainment, where there had long been a seedy underside, the trend was in the direction of ever more coarsening. 

In comedy there is a line leading from the 1960s to Brand. The anti-establishment impulse of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore went mainstream yet by the 1970s they were producing the filthy Derek and Clive tapes, outrageous bootlegs that were later sold legitimately. Cook and Moore had a major advantage over Brand, in that they were often very funny.

Even so, it’s not difficult to see how an odious character such as Brand, and his former friends such as Jonathan Ross, who was with him on the Sachs broadcast, could see what they were doing thirty years later in terms of being just the latest groovy types to break boundaries.

Producers and promoters had an obvious motive to go along with it, because by the 1990s there was so much money to be made. And who wanted to object to a comic’s vile material and risk being called a prude?

Simultaneously, the anti-political correctness backlash against feminism in the early 1990s had helped create the licentious “lad” movement. British lad mags – bringing soft porn into the mainstream and mixing it with machismo and Britpop music – sold in vast quantities to young male readers.

This produced another counter backlash, with the emergence of the “ladettes” who could match the “lads” in terms of booze, drugs and sexual appetite. The 1990s media, even at the top end, celebrated this as women getting in on the act. Everyone, do what you want. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout, something was going very wrong indeed in Rotherham where a vast scandal centred on child sexual exploitation was underway. More than 1400 children were groomed and abused. The police wouldn’t listen and the scandal surfaced only because a handful of brave campaigners risked their lives to take on the gangs responsible.

This was the other side of Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s. Into the cultural sewer walked Russell Brand.

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