Russell Brand, 'hunched-over prawn' thankfully not pictured. Photograph: jo Hale/Getty Images
Russell Brand has penis envy. Or, at least, that's the impression he was eager to give us last night in the first episode of his new Channel 4 series Ponderland.
Russell's dad, we learned, has a dusky private part which, as a child, Russell remembers nestling in his pubic undergrowth like some form of "woodland animal". The cockney cavalier, on the other hand, has a pocket rocket which, despite his otherwise manly physique, still resembles "a hunched-over prawn". Keen to get to the bottom of this conundrum, Russell even rang his dad on air, asking him to confirm the colour with the aid of a Dulux paint chart (since you ask, the pair settled on 'Praline Brown').
Welcome, then, to Ponderland, a week long vehicle for Brand's ever-ready wit, where the self-proclaimed S&M Wily Wonka will, erm, tackle a variety of subjects in front of a studio audience. Having kick-started his career with a bravura performance presenting the NME Awards in 2006, Brand has since waged a war on torpor, overshadowing Big Brother with his amphetaminised delivery on Big Brother's Big Mouth and, memorably, even pulling up Noel Gallagher for his monstrous ego on One, Leicester Square.
Yet any hopes that Ponderland might be Brand's equivalent of Bill Hicks' Counts Of the Netherworld - where Hicks planned to dissect popular culture whilst sitting in a Victorian salon, itself doubling as the collective unconscious - vanished with the credits.
Instead, we found Brand -still respelendent in psycehedelic pirate clobber - delivering a monologue on everything from Coco Pops to climate change in an anonymous studio aided by snippets of - you guessed it - archive TV footage.
Funny, unquestionably - Brand could make the Lib Dem leadership spat sound scintillating - but for anyone who regularly tunes into his brilliantly anarchic Saturday night slot on Radio 2, it felt a bit like a comedy straitjacket.
Just as Harry Hill's surrealistic schtick only translated into ratings within the rigid format of TV Burp, so Brand's flights of fancy now come - for this week at least - with the aid of ancient public information films. Does mainstream success always necessitate such a compromise? Now that really is something to ponder.
