Free My Booky Wook 2 by Russell Brand

some new quality is assumed that smoothes you through the evening, relaxed and entertained. Jane will once in a while roll her eyes more deftly than he’ll ever roll an “R” and reminds him that he’s being daft, but they both know it’s thoroughly amusing. Jonathan seemingly himself selects which will be the UK’s next comedy phenomenon, he did it with Vic and Bob, Little Britain, Ricky Gervais, The Mighty Boosh, and now he had chosen me. He has a fine sense of humour – not only is he funny, he also recognises it in others. He has maintained his relevance for decades and, even though he was thought of as cool and edgy when I watched him as a kid, he has now, whilst the country’s most highly paid broadcaster, kept that edge and remained relevant. He is a good bloke. One night after I’d sought sanctuary at his house he gave me a lift home in some daft orange car which, had he not been driving, I’m sure he could’ve worn. The unfamiliar domestic comfort I’d experienced had heightened my awareness of my teetering solitude. For a moment fame felt scary. Jonathan sensed my disease.
    “How you coping with it all?”
    “Yeah. It’s alright. I feel bit lonely sometimes. A bit exposed.” Jonathan employed compassion. As much compassion as a millionaire entertainer in a sports car, puffing on a huge cigar, can ever be expected to show. He exhaled.
    “When you get famous,” he began, “they give you a lot.” The millions, the car, the cigar? I wondered. “But they also take something from you.” He inhaled. “And you don’t ever get it back.” The car then filled with smoke and Jonathan gave me a smile that suggested he’d be there for me if it ever got too tough. I didn’t know just how close.
    The kiss and tells ripened through the summer, and every morning paper brought a new harvest. Barely did I have a kiss that didn’t entail a tell. To me though it didn’t seem pejorative, it merely helped the narrative which they’d concocted, in which I was complicit, that I was a wild man Lothario. These terms were actually used – wild man, oddball, sex insect, spindle-limbed lust merchant, sex inspector; I may’ve invented some of them, but that was very much the tone. It suited me, though; it was a type of notoriety that I enjoyed. The more right-wing papers used me as an icon of moral decline. In the Daily Mail I was second only to immigrants and paedophiles as the most dangerous entity to have breached our shores. “Lock up your daughters,” they bawled. If, when you encounter that kind of hysteria, you’re viewing it through a lens of agonised memories of discontent and rejection, it kind of feels like approval. Bruce Dessau, a respected comedy critic, interviewed me for a proper paper and said, “You realise you’re a phenomenon, don’t you?” I genuinely didn’t. I’d noticed now that my lifelong self-obsession seemed to have crept into a consciousness beyond my skull. But as my life has been a devotional pursuit of success, its arrival is only noticeable piecemeal, or when an icon appeared upon the horizon.
    “Noel Gallagher was here asking for you,” said the ecstatic barman at the pub in the West End of London where I was doing stand-up, almost clambering over to embrace me. “He asked what time the gig was on and if you were definitely performing, then he left.” Noel Gallagher, yob poet, spitting lyrics and epigrams and scoring a decade with what I’d call nonchalance – if it wasn’t so French and he wasn’t so English. David Walliams lives in Noel’s old house in Belsize Park, Celebrity Strasse. When Oasis ruled the world “Supernova Heights” was his Camelot. My drama school was round the corner and at night I’d take penniless romps down that road, sometimes drunk, sometimes tripping, and sometimes I’d not even be high so I’d try and get a buzz off the fumes of his success. I’d look through the wrought-iron gates and imagine what marvellous excesses went on behind