The comedian and self-styled revolutionary Russell Brand has been giving an award from the Plain English Campaign (PEC)… for being incomprehensible. The ‘Foot In Mouth’ award celebrates the public figure who is hardest to understand due to their sloppy English.
The citation from the PEC said: “”e struggle to make sense of most of his comments. We wonder if that might be due to him being more worried about self-promotion than about making sense.” Although they did claim to admire his interest in democratic debate.
In previous years winners have been given the award for one particular comment that made little sense but this year the PEC gave numerous examples to prove their point. They were:
“The internal mayhem I’m feeling is spilling out everywhere. I loved it, and felt very connected to activism – particularly activism that feels loaded with potential. Not the oppositional activism that seems like there’s a stasis around it – earnestly sincere, but a monolith equal to the establishment.”
“I find it (capitalism) hard to understand. It obfuscates truth and I think an economic ideology is oppositional to the spiritual ideologies that are what we need to adopt if we’re to save our planet and humankind. Capitalism, the economic arm of the individualism and materialism ideologies that keep us framed in a narrow bandwidth of consciousness, prevents us from seeing that we’re all connected.”
“This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites.”
The group also said Brand “was way out ahead” of the rest of the nominees. Brand is regularly criticised for trying to sound intellectual and profound, last month Twitter users began replying to everything he said with #ParkLife. They claimed his speaking style was similar to the contribution by Phil Daniels to the song ParkLife by Blur.
Previous winners of the Foot In Mouth Award include Gordon Brown, Tracey Emin and Godfrey Bloom. In 2007 the former England football manager, Steve McClaren, won for the following comment he made to Radio 5 Live about Wayne Rooney: “He is inexperienced, but he’s experienced in terms of what he’s been through”.
London mayor Boris Johnson has also previously won the award for agreeing with a statement by saying: “I couldn’t fail to disagree less.”
The award come in a bad week for Brand, who was widely attacked for complaining about the super-rich pushing up rents in London before being exposed for renting a £2.3m house. When he was asked how much his house was worth by Channel4 he became visibility angry at the journalist.
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