Last week, Russell Brand was in hot water again after cracking a Nazi joke at the expense of GQ award sponsors, Hugo Boss. Here, he gives his side of the story.I have had the privilege of scuba diving. I did it once on holiday and I'm aware that it's one of those subjects that people can get pretty boring and sincere about, and sincerity, for we British, is no state in which to dwell, so I'll be brief. The scuba dive itself was numenistic enough, a drenched heaven; coastal shelves and their staggering, sub-aquatic architecture, like spilt cathedrals, gormless, ghostly fish gliding by like Jackson Pollock's pets. Silent miracles. What got me though was when I came up for air, at the end. As my head came above water after even a paltry 15 minutes in Davy Jones's Locker, there was something absurd about the surface. How we, the creatures of the land, live our lives, obliviously trundling, flat feet slapping against the dust.
It must have been a while since I've attended a fancy, glitzy event because as soon as I got to the GQ awards I felt like something was up. The usual visual grammar was in place - a carpet in the street, people in paddocks awaiting a brush with something glamorous, blokes with earpieces, birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison. I'm not trying to pass myself off as some kind of Francis of Assisi, Yusuf Islam, man of the people, but I just wasn't feeling it. I ambled into the Opera House across yet more outdoor carpets, boards bearing branding, in this case Hugo Boss, past paparazzi, and began to queue up at the line of journalists and presenters, in a slightly nicer paddock who offer up mics and say stuff like:
"Who are you wearing?"
"I'm not wearing anyone, I went with clobber, I'm not Buffalo Bill."
Comment: See also: dumbed down Time magazine covers