Who is the real Russell Brand? An interview with Gordon Smart
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gordon Smart was the editor of The Scottish Sun, and deputy editor of the Sun. But before that, he was the paper's showbiz editor who got to know very well, among others, Russell Brand. He sits down with Emily and Lewis to talk about the man that's been accused of sexual assault and rape, as well as debauchery in tabloid journalism and showbiz in the 2000s and 2010s.
Russell Brand denies all allegations of sexual impropriety.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Planning Producer: Alex Barnett
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Producer: Will Gibson-Smith
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.9 | We're a week on. A week on from the night that Friday, when the allegations about Russell Brand first emerged via Russell Brand himself, spiking the story from the Sunday Times and |
| 0:22.4 | Channel 4 via his own YouTube channel. A week on, and a Metropolitan Police investigation |
| 0:28.0 | has started and more allegations have surfaced. The BBC reporting on Thursday that they had |
| 0:34.2 | interviewed a woman who alleges that Brand had exposed himself to her and then laughed |
| 0:38.8 | about it on his radio two show. These allegations, like all the allegations, Brand denies. Someone like |
| 0:46.5 | Brand is hard for most of us to ever know, to ever truly begin to understand what is beneath |
| 0:51.9 | the mask. He has been so ubiquitous, lived his life so |
| 0:56.0 | publicly, and yet, partly because self-evidently, his character is confection, or rather |
| 1:02.0 | confection upon confection, onion-like. It is hard to have any sense of who he really is, |
| 1:08.5 | what he's really like, what his mind might truly be. |
| 1:12.7 | Few people have that insight, but if anyone does, it's Gordon Smart. |
| 1:17.2 | He's a man who has spent nearly all his adult life in the world of tabloid journalism, |
| 1:22.3 | one of Rupert Murdoch's protégés. |
| 1:24.4 | He worked his way up with ink-stained fingers through Murdoch's stable of papers, a stint at the news of the world, editor of the Scottish Sun, deputy editor of the Sun, and before that a young Shobies editor of the paper, with the power to make or break celebrity careers. |
| 1:41.6 | He was the one who awarded brand, that now infamous title of Shagga of the |
| 1:46.5 | year, three times before retiring it, saying no one could possibly match his record. In that job, |
| 1:54.0 | Smart became embedded in that lustrous celebrity world. He became close to a whole suite of the |
| 2:00.4 | famous faces who dominated our popular |
| 2:02.7 | culture over the last 15 years, including Brand. It was, let's say, a fast-paced lifestyle. Smart |
| 2:10.4 | seldom talks about it. But given the events of the last week, he came into the newsagent |
... |
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