Russell Brand and Philip Schofield: striving for redemption

'Celebrity rehabilitation’ used to mean a well-known personality was spending some time in some sort of clinic. These days it is more likely to mean that they are making a new TV show, or just making headlines, often with some kind of redemptive narrative arc. 

The latest celebrity to attempt it is Philip Schofield, popping up with Cast Away on Channel 5. He has had a period away from the cameras he so loves after the revelation of his affair with a much younger and junior male runner at This Morning, who he met when the runner was just 15, and the lies he spun to conceal it. Here we have Schofield making a TV programme on a deserted island… to tell us how he doesn’t want to be on TV anymore?

He blames his departure from ITV on ‘homophobia,’ then blames his brother claiming he was ‘fired for the bad publicity for someone else’s crime’.  Redemption might be what he wants, but he seems unwilling or unable to accept responsibility to achieve it. He calls what he did ‘unwise’ and ‘unprofessional’; podcaster Marina Hyde called this attempt to rehabilitate himself a ‘picnic of narcissism’. Instead of admitting wrong, or even doing something good for someone else, the whole enterprise merely calls more attention to himself, and none of it is flattering. TV’s former Mr Nice Guy now comes across as bitter as the unripe mangoes he is trying to eat on his desert island, and his ‘brand’ arguably now more besmirched than ever.  What rehabilitation, redemption or even reconciliation is here?

But what about when faith is brought into the equation? Recently, Russell Brand performing a baptism in his underpants made all sort of headlines, in all sorts of papers. Over the last year he has been increasingly outspoken about his conversion to Christianity, and as result of his complicated history and his celebrity, coverage of it has been pretty ubiquitous. From his baptism by Bear Grylls, to commenting that in England somehow we manage to make Christianity sound ‘boring’, it’s all no holds barred stuff.

Brand has asked in his videos why so many people are currently coming to faith, while church leaders including J. John have been positive about Brand’s own new found faith. Meanwhile Pippa Bailey in The New Statesman was more cynical, suggesting that ‘Brand’s conversion is not really a conversion at all, but an attempt to wash himself clean of the multiple accusations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse made against him in a September 2023 episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches.’ 

There is no doubting that his public persona has shifted significantly from former Buddhist and The Sun’s ‘shagger of the year’. Now, talking to Tucker Carlson, he speaks of how ‘Christ chooses us. We have been chosen. I wish I had known earlier’. Waxing lyrical about the Bible, he calls the audience to awareness of its ‘profundity, depth, the beauty, the deep truth available to all of us… it is transforming me’. We cannot transform ourselves alone, but God can transform anyone.  

He is still Russell Brand, of course. After critique of his undergarments for the baptism last week, he captioned a tweet: ‘Are these tighty-whities satanic?!?’ But alongside it he acknowledges he remains ‘a little bit of a show-off, but it is for Him that I am showing off now, not for me’. And more than that, he went on to quote a decent chunk of Philippians 1. 

In among the ‘celebrity rehabilitation’ we get presented with, maybe he has a point. ‘The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.' (Philippians 1:18)