You may recall that, a few weeks ago, Russell Brand appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, and when the journalists sitting at the table began rudely calling him by the wrong name and/or referring to him in the third person, Brand flipped a switch and absolutely destroyed them in a way that makes even those of us with little use for Russell Brand appreciate and respect him. In an op-ed for The Guardian, Brand finally explained why he acted the way he did in the face of the crew’s rudeness.
It got off to a bad start from the very beginning, he writes.
When I landed in my chair, on camera, and was introduced to the show’s hosts – a typical trident of blonde, brunette and affable chump – it became clear that, in spite of the show’s stated left-leaning inclination, the frequency they were actually broadcasting was the shrill, white noise of dumb current affairs.
He continued, describing what happend to those seemingly nice people once the camera light came on:
One of the things that’s surprising when you go on telly a lot is that often the on-camera “talent” (yuck!) are perfectly amiable when you chat to them normally, but when the red light goes on they immediately transform into shark-eyed Stepford berks talking in a cadence you encounter nowhere else but TV-land – a meter that implies simultaneously carefree whimsy and stifled hysteria.
In describing why the interview went viral, Brand gets philosophical on our asses:
It’s the unreal, sustained glitch in naturalism that makes this genre of TV disturbing to either watch or be on. The Lynchian subjugation of our humanity; warmth and humour, usurped by a sterile, pastel-coloured steel blade benignly thrust again and again into a grey brain.
The rest of the piece is fascinating, too, mostly in describing how politicians on both sides of the pond ascend into powerful positions, not because of intelligence or policy necessarily, but because they are media friendly, better able to hide their true faces. It’s another one of those times — and it’s not the first — where Russell Brand’s own true identity comes out in print better than it does in his movie or television roles, where he mostly plays a drunken twit.
(Source: The Guardian)
