Origin Story: Russell Brand – Confidence Man (Podmasters)
Lost Notes: Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip from the Pill to Punk (KCRW)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wonder (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Origin Story, a podcast about understanding politics (topics covered: centrism, George Orwell, No 10, among others), has just launched its sixth series. The opening episode is a 90-minute show on that renowned political powerhouse Russell Brand. Which may seem odd, but hosts Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey use Brand in a way, you could argue, that Brand has used others: as a means of getting somewhere. They look at his slide from darling of the left into gesticulating, never-off, “just asking questions” internet charlatan, and draw conclusions about why politics (big politics, presidential politics) has ended up splashing about with the conspiracy theorists.
They go through Brand’s career. Their careful reporting – which, says Dunt, he hated doing – reveals someone with, as Lynskey says, “nuclear” charisma, “like a physical heat rising off him”, but also an almost psychic ability to move into places and spaces that celebrate him. Brand slides from MTV host to standup to radio presenter to Hollywood actor to practically a national hero. He was part of the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony, dressed as Willy Wonka, singing a Beatles song (I’d forgotten this). A couple of years later he became what we might loosely call political, starting as a “dowhatchalike” thorn in the side of the establishment: pro-Extinction Rebellion, pro-immigration, anti-“war on drugs”. Last year he was accused by several women of rape and sexual assault (he denies these charges), and lost what was left of his mainstream career, ending up slap-bang in the centre of the new paranoid. Recently, he’s become a born-again Christian (baptised by Bear Grylls) and a Trump endorser. His views are clearly not what they once were.
As someone who loved Brand’s radio show and enjoyed interviewing him a couple of times, the early part of Dunt and Lynskey’s reporting makes for uncomfortable listening. They highlight how he was let off by the media for years, partly because he was seen as eloquent and madcap and sexually honest. But that’s not really what the show is about. Lynskey identifies the new political divisions as not left v right but paranoid v not. There are so many ways to get upset about Brand, but using him as an example of where charismatic, politically interested people can end up is enlightening. Brand is now in hock to his nutso supporters. “You have to keep feeding the beast, you need new material almost daily, and you can’t be that fussy,” says Lynskey. “Because if you dismiss something as… bullshit then you’re losing people… You could call it crank capture.”
Origin Story’s tone is moral and informed. The latest series of KCRW’s Lost Notes is… not. Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip from the Pill to Punk is fun but that strapline makes it sound more revealing than it really is. The story is told entirely from the groupies’ point of view – the first two episodes are Lori Lightning and Pamela Des Barres – and they are huge fun, and clearly love telling their tales. But at no point does the host ask them about the power balance between them and the bands, and you may well find this uncomfortable (I did). Lines such as “She was left in their dust, abandoned in Sunset Boulevard. Feeling suddenly like the past. As she watched the future get kidnapped into the Slutmobile” are delivered with no irony at all. And the first episode, about Lori Lightning, has an opening anecdote told for fun that is, quite frankly, chilling: she is grabbed from a nightclub by Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant and another henchman, separated from her friends, shoved into a limo and taken up to Jimmy Page’s room. She was 14.
How about something a little less dark? The fantastic writer Katherine Rundell had an essay series on Radio 4 last week about children’s books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wonder (she wrote the brilliant Rooftoppers, so she knows what she’s talking about). Initially, I found her cool tone a little off-putting, but every episode offered some fantastic little nuggets. She described Tolstoy’s terrible attempts at writing children’s stories – all of them are riddled with dying animals – and went back to the very first books for youngsters, which date from the 1400s and are all about how to behave properly, with particular emphasis on not picking your nose or wiping it on clean tablecloths.
The third episode, on the fundamental elements of the best children’s tales, was just great. I hadn’t realised how much food was a part of good storytelling for kids; how it stood in for delight and desire. And I also hadn’t clocked how universal a great children’s book is, how its appeal is generous and communal. “The great discipline of children’s literature is that it has to be written for everyone,” said Rundell. “Because if it’s not for everyone, then it’s not for anyone at all… We can all meet on the pages of AA Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.”
To that end, Rundell points out that when she talks in schools, the young pupils she talks to are often children of colour, with English as their second language. And yet when she asks them to write a story together, their heroes and heroines have names “that are always the same: Elizabeth, Henry, Jack”. That is changing, but that universality needs some adjustment so that children’s books really do welcome everyone in.
