Russell Gorman / Dave Brand

If Dave wanted to make a sequel to his current excellent series, I think the perfect title would be: 'Modern Life is Twattish'. That, after all, is the modus operandi by which I go about my everyday life. In my experience, modern life is as far from goodish as Ebola is as far from the everyday sniffle. Modern life is usually painful, vacuous, and, indeed, utterly twattish. Ours is a culture that celebrates the bland and ridicules originality. It lauds the malicious and malevolent and rewards vulgarity and excess.

Whilst there's much that would deserve to be in a series of 'Modern Life is Twattish', I think the first episode should and could be devoted entirely to that hairy wart upon the septic walrus snout of popular entertainment known as Russell Brand. He defines the word 'twattish' in every nuanced way we might want to use that word, up to and including the moment it becomes the unspeakable 'c' word. In that respect, he's the polar opposite to our beloved Dave. Where Dave pretends to be light and trivial but actually makes very profound points, Russell Brands makes very profound statements which disguise the fact that he has the intellectual weight of a stale Ryvita lost down the back of Fern Brittain's sofa the moment she accidentally dropped the remote control and turned over to BBC2 to catch the last moments of a documentary by Brian Cox. Unfortunately, a great many people fall for Brand's shtick. He reminds me of a funny line I once heard said about Stephen Fry: 'I dumb person's idea of an intelligent person' and whilst that's never been my opinion of Fry, it's been a most helpful line whenever I find myself pondering the enigma of Brand and his popularity.

His politics have the intellectual force of an argument over a playroom sandpit but couched in terms that resemble the works of Noam Chomsky put through a shredder. Brand's treatment of the English language is like watching the Brighouse Clog Dancing troupe hammer their way through Swan Lake at Covent Garden. For people who don't have an ear for good writing, Brand's prose resembles something intelligent and well argued. It is, after all, full of long sub-clauses and clever twists that demand that the brain throw cartwheels to keep track of the original subject.  In fact, he's overly verbose and relies on purple extravagance which often makes his sentences unintelligible, abrasive, and utterly self-indulgent. Like his physical manner, in his writing there is something quite ordinary hiding behind the beads and bands and the casually-left-to-run-rampant hair. He embodies everything that makes life twattish. He is modern man. Ecce homo. Ecce the twat.