HOWZAT

I sit there feeling square. “One thing that has altered since we last spoke,” offers Brand, “is that I no longer have the zeal of the newly anointed in the realm of effortless promiscuity. [This is typical of his speech pattern, teetering between baroque inventiveness and swallowed-a-dictionary verbiage.] I think, well that can happen, but I try not to do it for the sake of it.” Groupies, you mean? “Yeah.” How does that work? “They come to the stage door. They make an effort, like salmon swimming upstream.”

I say I was surprised by how female the audience was in Birmingham. Close on two thirds, by my reckoning, mostly in their twenties, greeting his appearance with wolf whistles, proposals of marriage, and, in one case, bared breasts. “It’s difficult, Robert, not to be dictated to by the oestrogen in the room; they are a potent force, them women.”

What does he think is going on? “Presumably I must represent something they like.” And what’s that? “Well, some of my friends who are analytical and literary say I have become emblematic of a kind of sexual libertarianism that needn’t be pejorative.” Female sexual libertarianism? “Yeah. David Baddiel said this, he said I’d become a safe and acceptable way to express [female] promiscuity.”

Baddiel is a near neighbour in Hampstead. Since he made it big, Brand has been quick to befriend other celebrities. David Walliams is a pal, he isn’t far away either. And, a little further out into the leafy North London suburb, there’s Jonathan Ross. Brand wanted famous friends. He isn’t one of those celebrities who moans about fame as an unwelcome by-product of their job, although, even in Hampstead (“and it’s posh here”), being asked for autographs can get “relentless”. He now sits in a box rather than the stands when he goes to see West Ham. And yet he admits, “I felt the deficit of fame so strongly, I thought [when I became famous], right, thank God!”

His friendship with Ross, of course, gave rise to the Andrew Sachs scandal last autumn, an affair we spend much of our hour together discussing. Ross was a regular guest (as was Baddiel) on Brand’s Saturday night Radio 2 show. The actor Andrew Sachs, 78, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, had been booked to do an interview. When he failed to answer his phone, Brand and Ross, egging each other on, left him a string of messages. The watchdog the BBC Trust later called the prank a “deplorable intrusion”.

The context for the Sachs calls was that Brand had told Ross that he had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter, 23-year-old Georgina Baillie, a dancer with a burlesque troupe called the Satanic Sluts. When Brand was leaving his message, Ross called out, “He f***** your granddaughter.” Ross later speculated that Sachs probably had a photo of Baillie, aged about 9, near the phone. After a huge furore, Brand and Lesley Douglas, the controller of Radio 2, resigned. Ross was suspended for 12 weeks without pay.

There are two interpretations of the incident. On the one hand it was all whipped up by the Daily Mail. This is the way Brand wants to see it, offering the (bad) arguments that the whole thing has been over-analysed, that it was just a silly joke, that nobody much listened to the show anyway, that the press coverage stripped away the nuances of the broadcast. “It’s very easy to apply forensic analysis to something that is trivial,” he says.

And yet the Sachs scandal felt like something more than showbiz trivia. It divided the generations. Older people were appalled, younger ones amused. At 44, I found myself parting company with younger friends and colleagues: the pair’s behaviour, particularly Ross’s, was to my mind obnoxious and unforgivable even if it had been funny, which it wasn’t.

I put it to Brand that the truly offensive stuff came from Ross, the more so because Ross is 48, with a 17-year-old daughter and two other children, while Brand is 33 and childless. On the broadcast he, Brand, sounds like a man who realises his more famous, richer, more powerful buddy has just dumped him in it. “I understand your analysis but I don’t agree with it. I have a relationship on air with Jonathan and also I’ve got a friendship with him. I love him and admire him enormously and will say nothing to condemn him, he’s a lovely, warm, generous bloke, he was just showing off and being a twit.”

A chill descends on Brand’s kitchen when he realises his interviewer disapproves of what he and his mate did. One of the pitfalls of being a celebrity is almost everyone you meet tends either to be a fan, or on your payroll, or another celebrity. Perspective can be lost, although Brand insists he hasn’t lost his. “It’s not inconceivable I could be peeved about, say, a car not being there on time, but I’ve got enough people around me going, ‘Come on mate, it’s not that important, is it?’”

In any event, he doesn’t seem fully able to grasp the idea that people other than those who work for Associated Newspapers or are the wrong side of 75 might think he and Ross got it horribly wrong. “You wouldn’t have heard of it if it wasn’t for the Daily Mail,” he says.

As for intergenerational conflict: “Older people are not my demographic. They might disapprove of me because of my hair! I’m conscious when I’m performing that the audience think what I’m saying is, ‘F*** ’em! Let’s go and smash his [Sachs’s] garden up!’ I feel the energy of that, because people who are younger than me, they want me to say, ‘Good, shall I phone him again? Shall I phone him now?’” Do they? “Yeah, people think, ‘P*** off for being so prescriptive.’”

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