UPPER TIERS EXCLUSIVE BLOG: NOT BRAND ECCH

So. The Russell Brand thing.

I met Brand years ago. This was back when I was – for a brief time – hot property in adult TV comedy. 

It seems surreal looking back now, that I might ever have been such a thing, but I was indeed being groomed for success (apologies for the choice of words). The BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky. It felt like everyone wanted to work with me. I was offered all sorts of projects, made a bunch of pilots, and met pretty much everyone who was anyone in British comedy at the time.

“We all know you’re going to be huge,” one script editor once told me, wrongly, neither of us aware that I never had the right sort of drive and appetite for hugeness.

When my pilots didn’t go forward, some of which were due to reasons of timing or politics – literally so when my BBC1 sitcom came within a hair’s breadth of getting turned into a series - I took a left-turn into the cosier world of kids TV, where I felt more at home, and stayed forevermore.

The reason for my BBC1 series not happening was because the BBC had managed to upset the Queen; I got caught up with the #Queengate scandal. BBC1 boss Peter Fincham had verbally green-lit my series literally the day before he was forced to resign, which delayed production for a year, over which time I kind of lost interest in trying to make any more adult comedy.

The good news is that my series did eventually get made; I later met the writer of a short-lived BBC1 family sitcom, who told me she'd been shown my pilot and asked to "Write something like this". 

She was very apologetic, and appalled when she realised.

For the record, the reasons I was given for my other pilots not getting picked up are as follows:

• Now The Weather, allegedly because the producer had erroneously sent an unfinished edit of the pilot to Channel 4 bosses.
• Biffovision, because a show inspired by 1980s kids TV, written by two men in their 30s, wasn’t the sort of thing the youth-skewed BBC Three wanted for their target demographic…
• And Knife & Wife, Is This It? and Biosphere - the latter two were read-throughs, rather than pilots - because they weren’t good enough. Which is true.

These are just the ones that got cast in some way; I've lot count of the other projects I developed, which never got that far. 

All of them had been a struggle in their own way. Sometimes it was a struggle against egos. Sometimes it was the struggle of changing things to fit into a certain box. Other times it was a struggle against my own lack of experience or ability. Ultimately, I was always more driven by making a living, than success for its own sake. 

I probably didn't care enough whether shows got made, so long as I got paid for the development work. 

TIGHT FIT

Whatever the case, even when I was at the very centre of that adult comedy world – or, at least, standing in the open doorway, writing pilot scripts – I didn’t feel I belonged. No; scratch that. I was never sure I wanted to belong to it, despite perhaps not realising this at the time.

Even now, writing this years later, I feel uncomfortable with what I'm recalling. There’s a real cognitive dissonance, because that’s not me.

For a long time now I’ve struggled to work out why that is, and never come up with the definitive answer. I loved the idea of making funny TV shows – but the environment in which I had to do so felt utterly alien. It was such a far cry from the stupid videos I used to make with my mates on a Friday night, after a few beers...

Consequently, I just never kept pushing. I sort of gave up, as soon as I was offered a different path.

I’d been a teenage dad. I never went to university. I was working class. I liked uncool music. These were the obvious differences to everyone else around me at the time, and just some of the areas I ended up becoming self-conscious about. I was surrounded by young, ambitious, ‘cool’ people, who knew how to network. A world where success was so life-changing that it could become all-consuming.

I see now that I was never at ease. I would pretend to be like them, but only succeeded as much as I did because others pushed me for their own ends. I was a young pug surrounded by starving wolves, bouncing along as part of the park on hunt after hunt, without really understanding my reasons for doing so. Their ambition was inexplicable to me.

EGO ON MY FACE

TV was – and still is – a world of determination, ego, and a hunger for success. 

I had my eyes open to that almost immediately, when very early on I had a few producers outright steal my work, or try to take credit for it. Perhaps this coloured how I viewed the industry; I was starting from a foundation of suspicion and resentment, but in terms of work, my ambition was, and still is, simply to keep a roof over my head, while staying creative, and enjoying what I’m doing.

I’d spend the day having meetings with very famous comedians and powerful producers, then come home and make chicken noodles for the kids’ tea. There never seemed like a direct link between home and work. It was like I was jumping between alternate worlds, so removed from one another were they. 

And I also knew which one I felt most at home in; which one was easiest to exist in.

I've seen terrible behaviour at awards ceremonies from unsuccessful nominees - people storming out because somebody else won. I never got it; the awards are meaningless to me, but to others, success is so tied into their identity that they took rejections personally. One producer I worked with told me, with at least some degree of shame, the story of how he was nominated for a BAFTA, and when the winner of his category came up to commiserate, he literally snarled at her to "Fuck off". He said it just came out.

The more it all went on, the longer I was there, the less comfortable I was with it. It became a jarring, incongruous, life. I only stuck with it as long as I did because… “We all know you’re going to be huge”.

I felt I had to live up to those expectations, until I no longer had any desire to.

BRAND ECCH

I can’t remember the precise year, but it was probably early-to-mid 2000s, during Brand’s post-rehab comeback trail, that I met him. He was considered damaged goods at the time, but it was clear that the industry considered him talented, and there was an appetite to give him a second chance.

He came in to audition for one of the many comedy pilots I made, and – as I did at the time – read a scene with him from the pilot (his part eventually went to Matt Berry; pleasant, but guarded).

Brand was polite, seemingly shy, and contrite. It felt like he was going out of his way to assure us he was no longer the chaotic element which had made him infamous. He didn’t get the role. And, frankly, I’d never given him the part even if he was really, really good. Everything I’d seen of him on TV turned my stomach. I never understood the buzz around him. I never found him funny. In all honesty, he creeped me out.

We all knew the heroin stuff, but I’d never heard any of the other rumours, so perhaps I got out of adult TV before they became rife. Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, John Leslie… these were all men I’d heard rumours about years before the papers printed anything about them. I was an up-and-coming writer on the absolute fringes of the industry, so there had to be people who knew more, who must’ve turned a blind eye to the allegations.

But… I continued to be unable to stomach Brand. He was one of those people in the public eye who, though their very existence and continued success, made me angry in a way that probably seemed irrational. 

The more successful he became, the more baffled and annoyed I was. I hadn’t seen any of his disgusting stand-up ‘comedy’ until Saturday night’s documentary – I mean, how did he keep getting work!? Surely it was obvious he was problematic, just from his material…!? – but he always made my skin crawl. I never saw this massive talent; just massive, all-consuming, confidence in his own abilities, and something behind the eyes which set my alarm bells ringing. 

I guess that, sometimes, all-consuming ambition is all people need to succeed on a massive scale (helped by a very powerful agent); and the people around them get swept along by it.

When he took his shift into becoming a wellness and anti-establishment guru some years back, it felt to me like an utterly calculated act of a narcissism. And now look; a cult leader with an army of millions willing to believe him over utterly credible allegations against him. He, like Trump, has weaponized his fanbase, who are so brainwashed against the mainstream, that they refuse to believe anything negative about one of their own.

He may act cleverer than he is, but he wasn’t stupid about that move.

ME TOO?

In all honesty, perhaps because I rarely went to showbiz parties – and when I did get invited, I either didn’t go, left early, or spent the entire time in the corner – I saw very few signs of what might be considered sexual misconduct during my time in adult TV. If it was rife, it was happening away from me.

I never really saw any drugs either, for that matter. At one party, I heard there was a room - guarded by security - set aside for guests to take cocaine, but I certainly never went in. It disturbed me, though. It felt... I dunno. Again, I struggle with the words. But I felt completely out of place.

Obviously, as we know, sexual misconduct goes on in TV, like it does in every industry; and like in every industry, it’s power that gives people the belief they can get away with it.

There’s a real sort of deference towards on-screen talent; an imbalanced prioritisation of them. I got a real sense of people turning a blind eye to behaviour that would be considered a bit weird in the real world, so as to keep the ‘talent’ sweet.

When I say weird, it’s not necessarily anything untoward – just having to tip-toe around a potent mix of ego and insecurity. I've met so many beloved household names who, away from a camera or an audience, are just a bit... odd, and not especially likeable. 

Being a writer, I can believe that some of these big names would resent writers, that they weren't funny without having their jokes written for them, that they didn't want to fully accept that they needed writers. I would be treated with caution, or outright hostility. 

Yet there’s also a real culture of producers slagging off on-screen talent behind-the-scenes, while simultaneously enabling them to feel they’re the only ones who matter.

Obviously, it takes a certain type of person to stand in front of a camera, and show-off in front of an audience of millions. If you haven’t got your shit together already, that can mess you up. At the same time, there’s also something about being applauded, and worshipped, and praised, which seems to attract certain types of people.

For the record, I’ve worked with many performers who I genuinely liked, who seemed rounded and balanced. I’ve worked with some who were very nice, but also seemed a bit, y’know, not entirely 'normal'. And I’ve worked with only one or two who I would never work with again.

In my experience, the people with the real power are those on-screen, and those making the big decisions behind-the-scenes who facilitate them. Everyone else – from writers to sound recordists and camera people; the rank-and-file – aren’t where the problems are. They’re just doing their jobs.

DARK FORCES

First-hand, though, I’ve only ever seen hints of anything darker, and it has always involved those at the top.

I had a female producer who was sometimes a bit too hands-on with me, who would give me unwanted massages, and once pushed her breasts into my back in a way that made me feel  uncomfortable.

I had another producer invite me to her hotel room to “talk about the script”, only to proposition me (she was then let go from the project, over what I’d been told was “a mental breakdown”). I think there were attempts to chat me up by both an established female comedian, and a female producer who was subsequently involved in a tabloid scandal over her relationship with a big name TV presenter.

I only realised either of those last couple with hindsight, but I’ve always been terrible at picking up on such things. And I wonder how it might’ve gone if our genders had been flipped.

I had a male producer who would make constant inappropriate sexual comments in writers’ rooms, which made all of us writers feel awkward. I had another producer who had taken me and an up-and-coming comedian out for the night, with a view to us working together, only to proceed to get absolutely hammered, and spend much of the night asking women to “nosh him off” (while miming said act). 

His employer later supported him to get treatment for alcohol addiction, and by all accounts he is a very different person these days.

I also had a married producer who disappeared from the industry very suddenly, and nobody would tell me why. I was left to fill in the blanks. All I know for certain is that I’d once gone to the pub with him after a day of auditions, and he got talking to two women – one of whom, bizarrely, was the ex-wife of the prog superstar Geoff Downes (he of Yes/Asia/The Buggles). I went home, while he went off to a party with the two of them.

And, as I recounted on Writer’s Club last year, I got asked by the police whether I remembered meeting a certain very high-profile TV figure on a certain date, so that I could potentially be an alibi against very public, and very serious, allegations about him.

Apart from the rumours above, that's the extent of my first-hand experiences really. 

Most people I’ve worked with seemed to be decent human beings. Even most of the men, as hard as that is to believe these days.

But… my experiences, small as they might’ve been, have been enough for me to believe, with absolutely conviction, that the entertainment industry has long been structured to facilitate certain types of men to get away with certain types of behaviour. 

I believe Russell Brand’s accusers 100%, and I pray that he hasn’t become so powerful outside of the mainstream that he can’t be held accountable for his actions while he was part of it.