My addiction
My name is Matt and I’m an addict
Yes, I have recently become addicted to YouTube and Googlevideo. Many a small hour has dribbled past as I gawp at that little box of delights. I know what you’re thinking but this is not about sexual content, oh no. There’s no smut allowed on these very decent databases and if some appears it is quickly flagged up by cyber-grasses and booted out. It’s a brave choice by the sites’ owners, as so many new technological endeavours are initially fuelled by the endless ‘demand’ for cyber-rudery; but there’s none of that here and it’s actually better for it. Besides there’s no shortage of that online… so I’ve heard. So what am I watching then? Well, here’s a selection of stuff I’ve watched just today:
• David Lynch describing how he uses transcendental meditation to get all his ideas
• Rare footage of Kurt Cobain• Bagpuss•
A weird mash-up of Star Wars and the Black Knight scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail•
Keith Richards hitting a stage-invader with his guitar•
Old women fighting•.... And TV shows I appeared in but never actually saw (saddest of all, nearly as sad as googling myself, which I’ve done. Strangely though, if you search for ‘Matt Morgan’ there is a WCW wrestler of the same name, his special gimmick is that he has a stutter. I’m not joking. One day perhaps I will be top of the search results over that stammering brute, I can but hope)
Anyway, the addiction problem comes from the feature which cues up similar videos whilst you are watching the current one. As soon as one finishes you click on the next one and thus you spiral off down a glittering video helter-skelter towards morning and you crawl into bed with the sound of birds singing and a thousand images splashing around your mind. I wonder what the effect of all this will be?
Will I start to freak out a little bit in real life because encounters don’t have that little timer bar running along the bottom. ‘Oh God, I don’t know how long this conversation’s gonna go on for, it could be days’, or if something is boring will I be reaching to click a mouse-button that isn’t there? Who knows? Possibly the worst thing that could happen is that I start to talk like the dimwits who leave comments on there. Everything will be ‘gay’ or ‘retarded’ or other politically-incorrect terms, my spelling will erode back to phonetics that look like they were typed by someone operating the keyboard with shoes on their hands and I will end up arguing with anyone and everyone about the most pointless tripe.
God I hope it’s not too late dude. I might unplug my computor... Oh no, I said ‘dude’. Oh no, I spelt ‘computer’ wrong. Heeeellllllllpppppppp!!!!
Strange Bed Fellow
OK, thanks for the support regarding my wearing a hat in bed. As the weather gets colder it grows even more comforting. Russell thinks it’s a bit mad but its hardly as though I’m laying there in a huge floppy cowboy hat or a top-hat with a cuckoo on a spring coming out of it, its just a regular beanie. However this week there has been a development. For reasons best left unexplained, I had a ladies hot-water bottle in my bedroom. It is pink, in a fluffy case and bears the legend ‘Huggable’ on it. Oh how I laughed at it, dismissed it as ridiculous and wedged it into my bookcase where its owner could reclaim it next time she came over. Then a few nights later, as I got into bed (fully hatted-up) I glanced at it and pondered for a moment.
Yes, I’m ashamed to say I went down stairs and put the kettle on. I felt a bit guilty as though the poor, pink, fluffy thing was all innocent and I’d got it drunk on boiling water and dragged it off to bed, but it was purely platonic of course. It was nice too, especially down the foot end.
Now, this is where it gets a bit weirder… I was so warm and cosy I didn’t want to get out of bed to turn the TV off. The remote control was obviously nowhere within easy reach but it was at this point I remembered I had a BB gun under my bed and I fished around under there until I found its cold steel barrel. Ha ha! I then sat up in bed, with a hat on and a pink hot-water bottle on my lap trying to shoot the power switch on my TV to turn it off. After about a minute I mused to myself ‘if someone could see me, they’d think I was eccentric’. Then it dawned on me ‘maybe I am eccentric? Maybe I’m mad? What am I doing? I’m 30 this year. I should be married with children by now, but look at me’. This epiphany jolted me right out of bed; I turned off the TV with my perfectly-functioning human hand, stuck my gun on top of the wardrobe, pulled off my hat and got back into bed, ashamedly pushing the hot-water bottle away like a spurned lover.
'OK, I’m not mad', I reassured myself and started to drift off. About two minutes later I got out of bed and put my hat back on. I don’t know why I’ve told you all this; perhaps this is my very own cry for help. Aaaaaargh, HELP!!!!
View From the Top
We are number One in the podcast charts. Well, we hovered around the number Three spot for a while and briefly flirted with the number Two area (oh come on!) but now we are at the pinnacle, the summit of the podcast chart and we have stuck our flag in it and sat back to admire the view.
When you’re a kid you hope to one day be at the top of a chart. I was always a bit of an underachiever, so were Trevor and Russell. Mainly due to laziness more than any lack of ability of course. Never had the top Natwest Piggy, never got a medal on Sports Day, never got awarded anything in assembly, never got picked for the team, always pretty much came second or nowhere. Actually I did win a two-man Scout Hike once, but only because my partner wet himself in our tent so we got up much earlier than anyone else and set out. He denied it was urine and made a pathetic check of all the bottles in the First-Aid kit to see which one was leaking, but you know when you just know? We got round that Ordnance Survey map fuelled purely by his shame and my resentment.
Yeah, so thanks to everyone who’s downloaded the Russell Brand Show Podcast and thanks for all the congratulatory messages. We did say that if we ever reached number One we would do some mad publicity stunt involving an ice-cream van, so watch out for that. In fact if you remember the details of what we said we’d do, please remind us (we didn’t get to Numero Uno by being professional y’know, remember that kids)
Looking forward to tomorrow’s show, and aiding our beloved listeners with their ‘Cries for Help’ so keep ‘em coming, especially real ones please. Bye , Matt xxx
Russell becoming Jean Claude Van Damme?
Why doesn’t Russell ever write the blog? I hear you ask, or rather I read you asking from time to time on here. Well, as I’ve explained before, he’s a very busy man.
Now, I knew he had a packed schedule but I’ve just found out its not just work he’s busy with. As readers of his Guardian column may be aware, he has gone and got himself a personal trainer. I was on the phone to him earlier and he had to cut me off because his workout was about to begin. I imagined his personal trainer as a moustachioed Russian strongman in a stripy swimsuit with his hairy chest on display and I envisaged this slab of cold-hearted indifference, let’s call him Boris, turning Brandy into a man of iron. Unfortunately this dream was shattered in its infancy by Russell’s description of the routine he was about to launch into. He has dumbbells (so far so good) and (wait for it) he gets onto one of those big gym balls and does his whole workout perched on that like a confused starling sat on a huge egg it couldn’t possibly have laid.
The image of the butch personal trainer shrivels and re-blooms as a lycra-clad gym-bunny and I see Russell with a pink sweatband on his head bearing the legend ‘Get in Shape Girl’ and stripy leg warmers, going “1 and 2 and 1 and 2!” with that determined face that guests on the Jerry Springer show do when they say, "I am ALL that, sugar". A big gym-ball? So many questions, here are just a few I will want answered on next week’s show...
a) Does the personal trainer come to Russell’s door with the giant bauble under his arm?
b) Does Russell usher him in embarrassedly, and maybe suggest he puts a sheet over the gym-ball in public in future (perhaps draw a face on the sheet and pretend it is a person with a condition) i.e. is Russell ashamed of the gym-ball?
c) What does Russell wear in these encounters?
d) Do they workout to 2Unlimited?
e) What things does the trainer say to encourage Russell? (‘feel the burn’, ‘you go girl’, ‘OK, freestyle! Go nuts!’)
I shouldn’t mock - maybe he’ll end up like Jean Claude Van Damme and beat me up?
Pimp My Ride
Thanks for all the words of support about my fear of having eaten mud. I am still very much alive and I’ve actually bought some mud-guards for my steed. In fact I’ve bought massive lights, a pump, a little toolkit and Russell kindly got me a little onboard computer that tells you your speed and distance! The bike is groaning under the weight of all the add-ons and the handlebar is cluttered with gadgets. It looks like Doc Brown out of ‘Back to the Future’ has been at it. ‘Great Scott Matty, we gotta go back! Back to the bike shop, we need more gadgets!”
Yeah, its kind of gone beyond ‘cool’ now and looks like its owned by a sad nerd who’s tried to pimp his ride. Which of course it is. Even more tragically I’ve started to pimp myself up to match, the helmet is now an acceptable safety essential but the special winter cycling gloves, oh God where will this end? I’ll probably be in an accident due to sheer weight of gizmos and they’ll have to rebuild me from the wreckage and I’ll end up half-man/half-bike and I’ll speak with a little bell. Then mud will probably be the only food I need…
Sorry, I lost it there for a minute. Stephen Merchant’s coming on the show this week, ‘Citin, to coin a phrase.
Resolutions
Hello Matt here. Well its 2007 and I’m a cliché. Oh horror of horrors, I’m conforming to the image of the national psyche proffered by items on ‘This Morning’ aimed at housewives worried about their flab…
I made a vow to start going to the gym in the New Year. How desperately unoriginal.
Well anyway, now I can’t go through with it because I can’t bear the thought of those smarmy gym-attendants looking at me and thinking I’m some ‘January Amateur’ there to work off mince-pie guilt, who’s baffled by the machines and who’ll never be seen again come February. No way, instead I’ve been riding my mountain-bike off-road. Yeah baby. In the wind, the rain and the mud and now that my bike’s all dirty no one can tell how long I’ve been doing it for, ‘New Year’s resolution? Are you crazy? I’ve been hitting the trail for years’. Ha-ha, take that Britain.
Anyway, due to a bit of poor time-keeping on my part, I turned up to a meeting with Rusty Brand fresh from a ride. I was covered in mud and the look of disdain on his face was remarkable. He accused me of ‘living in a ditch’ and as the meeting went on and the caked-mud dried and started to fall off, he turned his nose up and swept his Dior jacket away from me. You don’t get covered in shit doing Yoga in Hampstead do ya Brandy? What is it, a little too real for ya? Huh?
(In truth, I can’t wait ‘til February when I can stop this charade; some mud went in my mouth and I’m worried I’ll die)
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