Russell Brand on Rolf Harris: ‘It makes you feel like you have to revise your own childhood’

The comedian weighs in on the entertainer’s guilty verdict

Russell Brand says Rolf Harris’s guilty verdict yesterday makes him want to revise his childhood.

The former children’s presenter, 84, was found guilty yesterday (30 June) of 12 counts of indecently assaulting four girls dating back more than 40 years, with the youngest of victims aged just seven or eight years old.

One of the victims was a childhood friend of his daughter and another was an autograph hunter.

"It just makes you feel that reality is very muddled and confusing, like you have to revise your own childhood," said Brand on his YouTube channel.

"That's an integral part of your own life you have to look back and go, 'Oh right, so what was going on then then, when I was watching cartoon club and enjoying that stuff?’

"You have to revise your narrative."

He describes the case as a "graffiti over our grasp of what is real".

"On one side of the story you've got the victims, which are obviously human, and real," he said. "And then on the other side you've got Rolf and his family that are human and real.

"With Rolf Harris newly cast as a villain it creates this uneasy moral climate of nihilism. He's like a graffiti over our consciousness, a graffiti over our grasp of what's real."

Harris will be sentenced on Friday 4 July. Brand says that there was always something "inherently comedic about Rolf Harris, who was always seen in such a lighthearted context, those silly shirts, silly instruments, silly frivolous drawings around children and adolescents; novelty songs".

"It contributes to this idea that nothing that we stand on is firm ground," continued Brand. "There’s a horror; an uncanniness to it."