Russell Brand Quits 'The Trews' And Takes A Break From Social Media

Russell Brand is calling time on his YouTube show ‘The Trews’, saying that he has become tired of being the centre of the story when the rest of the media reports on what he says.

“I think we’ve gone as far as we can with ‘The Trews’ for now,” he said in a video posted on Thursday (August 20th) entitled ‘Final Episode Of The Trews – Goodbye, Good Luck’. “I’m not going to be doing the Trews, I’m not going to be on Twitter, or Facebook, I’m going to be learning because I know real change is coming and I want to be part of that,” he said.

With the ‘Trews World Tour’ due to take in Australia and New Zealand in the autumn, it also seems sensible to suggest that Brand simply won’t have time to post as regularly, but he says that the decision has been taken to allow him time “to think” and “to learn”.

“It feels to me like a spiraling sort avalanche and I want to spend some time learning, understanding, developing, living a life outside of a crazy kind of discourse,” the stand-up comic and actor explained.

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The decision seems to be partly motivated by the way the media has targeted him personally when they report back on what he’s been saying in his show. ‘The Trews’ saw Brand regularly comment on the political and social issues of the day, often in a forthright and uncompromising manner that many opponents seized upon and mocked.

Final episode of the Trews - goodbye, also off Twitter for a while https://t.co/HVAul5wfHV

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) August 20, 2015

“Media behaves in a very sort of predicable and formulaic manner,” he says in his final video. “If you speak out about that process you become the recipient the target of such incredible condemnation it’s in a way overwhelming and in others completely understandable.”

Shortly before the British general election in May 2015, his interview with (and subsequent endorsement of) Labour Party leader Ed Miliband attracted 1.3 million views – though many questioned whether that helped or hindered the politician in the immediate run-up to polling day.

More: Russell Brand calls the Queen a Nazi, and predictably gets in trouble