This week I witnessed the bloody, brutal death of mainstream television. It will, I think, go down in media history as one of those ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ moments. The victims were the presenters of a US breakfast television show called Morning Joe; the executioner was Russell Brand.
Russell Brand? No, it’s OK, I’m quite with you: on a bad day he can be the most annoying person on earth, with his swarthy, beardie, slimy, wheedling faux-grandiloquence and even more faux-intellect and that little-puppy-dog-lost way he has of looking you straight in the eye and impudently demanding your forgiveness for having just shagged both your wife and your daughter ‘because, hey, it could have been worse — at least I didn’t do grandma too’.
Problem is, on a good day he’s more or less unbeatable, as he showed with that fantastic piece he wrote for The Spectator on heroin addiction, and as he has demonstrated yet again with his Morning Joe appearance — which has become a massive viral hit on the internet.
Morning Joe (on MSNBC) is like a British breakfast TV show only more stilted, more formal, more painfully insincere. It’s the kind of ordeal you submit to as a guest not because it’s in any way edifying or enjoyable but because you have a product to plug and the audience is too big to ignore.
When a show gets that powerful, its presenters tend to develop a toxic complacency about their own mediocre talents and a casual contempt towards their guests whose job, they begin to imagine, is to sit there making pleasantries while their hosts outshine them with their Gods and Goddesses of Breakfast TV status and their dismal in-jokes. Brand noticed this and wouldn’t play ball.
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