Jonathan Ross moved seats beside Lily Allen in a resurfaced 2007 Noel Fielding Russell Brand clip from The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, after Noel Fielding and Russell Brand joked about rapists and Jack the Ripper. The moment has returned to scrutiny after Russell Brand was found guilty of one charge of rape and three counts of sexual assault.
Allen was 22 in the clip, and Ross told the panel, “Now Lily might go home with her dress still on”. Fielding then added, “If I raped someone, I’d run off with my cape like this.” Those lines, now replayed beside Brand’s conviction, turn a throwaway TV exchange into something harder to dismiss.
The Big Fat Quiz of the Year clip
The clip matters because it shows how casually the exchange unfolded on TV. Ross physically changed his seat to protect Allen from the direction of the jokes, while Fielding and Brand kept pushing at sexual violence as punchline material. That is the sort of on-air framing that can make abuse feel like background noise instead of a line no one should cross.
The resurfacing also sharpens the timeline. Ross later shared the limelight with Brand on Radio 2 phone calls to Andrew Sachs, and Brand bragged on Radio 2 about having slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. The 2007 clip now sits next to that earlier pattern, not as an isolated gag but as part of a culture that kept giving Brand room.
Noel Gallagher and Brand
Noel Gallagher named Brand as his best man at his 2011 wedding, and reports after the 2023 Dispatches and Sunday Times allegations said he had distanced himself from Brand. A source quoted in The Sun said Gallagher “had no idea”. The gap between those two moments is the story’s real tension: the circle around Brand was close enough to celebrate him, then far enough away to avoid the fallout.
Bear Grylls also helped baptise Brand in his recent conversion to evangelical Christianity and said his faith was “genuine”, adding that “it’s part of our calling as men and women of faith to love and serve anyone”. That line now lands differently beside the conviction and the 2007 footage. The obvious question is not whether the clip exists; it is what the people around Brand saw, laughed at, and still chose to overlook.
