The week in radio: The Russell Brand Podcast; Love + Radio; Afternoon Drama: Monster; Soho Radio

The Russell Brand Podcast | listen

Love + Radio | listen

Afternoon Drama: Monster (R4) | iPlayer

Soho Radio | listen

Russell Brand, the world’s fourth most influential thinker, is discussing the time he pooed in a Jacuzzi. “I was allowing the jet to go near my private parcel, round the rear. It relaxed it eventually: Tuscan bean soup. That tight knot of rage eventually yielded… It was at Champneys spa. I saw Frank Bruno in the lobby. Whether it’s the desperation and failed dreams of a great athlete or human faeces, there’s something for everyone at Champneys.”

Funny? Well, yes, when you hear it. Especially because Brand didn’t initially remember this incident (it happened during his drinking and drug-taking days). He was reminded of it by his longterm sidekick Matt Morgan. It’s a story to make you laugh. But it isn’t the work of a thinker, it isn’t really thought. Brand’s talent isn’t thinking. He’s more instinctive than that. He connects stuff up – words, jokes, memories, opinions – very, very quickly, as quickly as if he were in the grip of madness. His mind pings, and off his mouth goes, tying ideas together in a complicated cats’ cradle of jokes, language and outrageousness. This makes for exhilarating audio. But thoughtful? Not a bit of it.

Anyway, he has a new podcast, with Morgan and Mr Gee (Greg Sekweyama). It’s out on Wednesdays and Sundays and it’s good. Brand’s podcasts are always good, despite their over-familiar format. I’ve become very bored with a couple of funny guys getting in a room with some microphones and expecting us all to enjoy their unedited ramblings. Brand still needs cutting back a bit, but there is always some part of his shows that makes me properly laugh.

The podcasts I prefer are less formulaic; the shows that go where you don’t expect them to, that take a tale and reveal a sudden twist. Love + Radio, part of the Radiotopia group of podcasts, has a good track record with this. Its most recent podcast is about a dominatrix: it’s OK, but honestly, nothing you haven’t heard before, at least if you like out-there documentaries (or really shouting at people you consider inferior). But the one before that, The Living Room by Diane Weipert, was just extraordinary. It’s short, less than half an hour, and the protagonist does precisely nothing at all, but it’s one of the most haunting pieces of audio I’ve heard in a long time. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but if you like Rear Window, this one’s up your boulevard.

The other programme I’d really recommend this week is – who’d have thought? – a Radio 4 play. Monster, written and directed by Tony Pitts, is shocking: partly because it thunders out of Radio 4 like a maniac at a tea party, but mostly because it’s so true. About men, anger, football and kids, Monster bothers to examine the kind of bloke we all want to avoid, the one bellowing on the Saturday touchline, screaming at 10-year-olds. Pitts cares for him, gives him a voice. The language is poetic, the performances (Neil Maskell, Richard Hawley, Shaun Dooley, Rosina Carbone, oh, everyone) as real as life. It was a terrific listen, as insightful as anything you’d get at the Royal Court but more personal, closer to home, because it’s audio and you put yourself right in there.

And as we’re taking a tour round the edges of audio, I’m also going to recommend that you check out Soho Radio. This is a new-ish radio venture based in London’s Soho, on Great Windmill Street (next door to the Windmill Club, you can visit). It’s a bit messy round the edges as yet, but the music is consistently great and the presenters are all proper Soho habitués: Steve Furst, the Cuban Brothers, Eddie Piller, Aldo Zilli, James Meynell. Sometimes the messiness is irritating (Pete Paphides’s excellent show last week, with Alex James and Stephen Duffy, was spoilt by someone failing to check Duffy was sitting near a working microphone), sometimes it’s just music-mad people learning how to present (Simone Marie, who plays bass for Primal Scream, has the makings of an excellent broadcaster). With a few tougher producers, and as the inexperienced presenters get more hours under their belts, this station could be a teeny-tiny rival to 6Music and Resonance.