Even within the culture of casual misogyny and sexism that pervaded the TV world in the mid-noughties, Naomi Harvey and her colleagues concluded they needed to do something about Russell Brand. Harvey was one of a team of researchers tasked with finding fans of Big Brother, Channel 4’s reality TV juggernaut, to appear on the discussion show Big Brother’s Big Mouth, hosted by Brand. They had noticed Brand’s habit of asking a runner, the most junior person on the production, to obtain the phone numbers of female audience members and pass them to him.
But something new had just happened. A distraught audience member had phoned Harvey to complain after being invited for drinks by Brand after the show. The episode is minor when set against the criminality exposed during Brand’s trial.
Yet it is part of a culture that appeared to indulge Brand and fail to confront troubling behaviour. Brand’s case has led to difficult questions for the BBC, Channel 4 and the production companies that worked with him. The TV world is again asking itself whether recent efforts to improve safeguarding will stop similar abuses.
There were several moments during Brand’s trial in which the TV culture that had tolerated his behaviour for so long seemed to be alongside him in the dock. One of Brand’s accusers explained why she had not come forward with her experience earlier. Another woman, an ex-MTV employee, said she did not report an incident at the time because she was scared.
Brand was famous “and a big asset” to the channel. Rumours about Brand’s inappropriate behaviour were circulating within the standup comedy circuit before he ever reached TV screens. Even so, serious allegations about Brand didn’t emerge until 2023 after a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times.
England’s strict defamation laws played a part. While on BBC Radio 2 in 2008, Brand laughed on air about exposing himself moments earlier to a woman who was working in the same building in Los Angeles. He also directed sexualised humour at a newsreader during his Radio 2 show, saying he wanted to “unleash hell” on her thighs, and appeared to make light of requests from production staff to apologise.
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