GFP Note: This is a follow-up to our recent story Russell Brand Works in Wisdom Around Morning Joe Interviewers. You can see the video from that story at the bottom of this page.
The Guardian - Russell Brand, 6/28/13
'We were excited – Question Time, like Match of the Day or Corrie, is a potent piece of living heritage' …Russell Brand, Tessa Jowell, Boris Johnson, David Dimbleby, Ed Davey and Melanie Phillips. Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA
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. There is usually a detachment from the content. "Coming up after the break, we'll be slicing my belly open and watching while smooth black eels loll out in a sinewy cascade of demented horror." This abstraction I think occurs through institutionalisation. If your function is to robotically report a pre-existing agenda, you needn't directly interface with the content. I was surprised when the Morning Joe clip "went viral" (I have parenthesised a sexist joke here: "Many of my casual transactions with daft blondes go viral – I put penicillin on me Frosties"; don't read this if you are offended by that sort of thing) because a lot of my promotional interviews or appearances on these kind of shows have the odd "cuckoo" ambience that defines this transient slice of pop cultural life. 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.
As we all sit behind the desk and the theme tune begins to play, I regard the faces of my fellow panellists. Apprehensive, like me. In makeup, like me. Whenever we see David Cameron or Barack Obama on the box – knitted brows, index finger and thumb of dominant hand pinched in that contemporary rhetorical fist, powerful but not too powerful – they, in spite of what they're telling us, are always covering something up: their true faces.
More: The Guardian
