A 2007 clip from The Big Fat Quiz of the Year has resurfaced after Russell Brand was found guilty of one charge of rape and three counts of sexual assault. The scene puts Noel Fielding and Jonathan Ross back under scrutiny too, because the joke landed with Lily Allen sat between them.
Ross moved to sit with Allen
In the clip, Jonathan Ross swapped seats with Lily Allen so he could sit between her and Russell Brand and Noel Fielding. Ross said, “Now Lily might go home with her dress still on.”
Fielding then said, “If I raped someone, I’d run off with my cape like this.” The audience erupted in laughter and applause, which is exactly why the clip has returned as more than a bad joke: it shows how easily sexual violence was treated as material in a mainstream television setting.
Brand, Fielding and Ross
Jonathan Ross later shared the limelight with Brand on Radio 2 in calls to Andrew Sachs, and Noel Gallagher named Brand as his best man at his 2011 wedding. Those links matter because the resurfaced clip is not being read in isolation; it sits inside a long run of public association around Brand.
The article’s sharper point is the silence that followed. None of Ross, Fielding or Gallagher have commented on Brand’s behaviour or conviction, even as reports say Gallagher distanced himself after the Dispatches and Sunday Times allegations surfaced in 2023. A source quoted in The Sun said Gallagher “had no idea,” which leaves the public record looking less like a sudden shock than a chain of men staying close until the pressure became impossible to ignore.
After Brand
Bear Grylls helped baptise Brand in his recent conversion to evangelical Christianity and later said he believed Brand’s faith was “genuine,” adding, “it's part of our calling as men and women of faith to love and serve anyone”. That leaves the present question hanging over Brand’s circle: who had enough distance to speak, and who chose not to.
Noel Fielding and Russell Brand held at HMP Wandsworth sits alongside the clip as part of the same pattern, and the clip is the more revealing artefact. It shows Lily Allen visibly boxed in while two men joked about rape; now the public has to decide whether that was carelessness, complicity, or the culture talking out loud.
