You know what? - Rod Liddle eventually ruined this week. By Tuesday I was looking at everything on television, able only to wonder what Liddle would make of it. I'd been strapped into Liddle-goggles. What, for instance, is Liddle's stance on Russell Brand? Brand is 100 per cent white Anglo-Saxon - which presumably counts for at least ten Liddle points. Additionally, Brand talks like a souped-up Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost - which, in the absence of any more specific examples, one would presume is the kind of traditional, non-immigration-ruined British thing that Liddle would like. There's no modern rap-talk from Brand! It's all "I can't wait for the Great Exhibition of 1851!" this, and "Enjoy Pickwick's Patented Hair Pomade" the other.

However, a quick googling of Liddle's previous columns reveals that, in fact, he is down on Brand, big-time: "Smug, arrogant, over-paid, apparently stupid and not remotely entertaining." A fairly useful indicator to the rest of us that, given that Liddle hates him, Brand is probably awlright.

As the first real televisual access to Brand since last year's omni-demented Sachs-gate affair, The Road to Russell Brand: Skinned was an instructive insight into how Brand had dealt with it. Had he been a butterfly, broken on a wheel? Was he now tremulous, and wary?

"I was like - it's an exciting thing!" he beamed. "I'm in the middle of a storm - and I like it here! This is where I should always be!" Later on - referring to the incident on stage - he pointed out: "The thing is - I do worse than that every day."

Looking - with his big rack of teeth - very much like Mega Shark, the star of the recent B-movie Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Brand spent an hour answering Frank Skinner's questions, intercut with documentary footage of his recent publicity strike in America and appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Jay Leno Show.

Skinner's questioning didn't kick off with immense threat or weight: "I've always thought beautiful people couldn't be funny - but you've proved this wrong," was his first "question" to Brand. Somewhere, Jeremy Paxman must have felt a stabbing pain in his duodenum. But as the hour went on, Skinner lobbed in a couple of interesting observations - not least noting that, "I always found that, in order to be a womaniser, you had to turn down your compassion and humanity to get laid" - a proposition that Brand didn't have any real riposte to.

"It takes a lot of discipline - more than I have - not to go 'I will f*** you, you know'," he beamingly explained, over footage of fans screaming his name.

Perhaps the most amazing revelation in Skinnned, however, was neither sexual nor centred on controversy. Instead, it was that Brand has someone on tour with him to do his hair and make-up. Darling, I adore how you look but, honestly - ratting up your hair and applying two tramlines of kohl like that could just as easily be achieved by someone in security, or catering.

Here, in Russell Brand: Skinned (Channel 4), is another faintly ridic-ulous man. He's being interviewed, rather well, by Frank Skinner, although, to be fair, Frank doesn't have to work hard. It just comes pouring out: drugs (again - shut up about the drugs), the women, Sachsgate (he's both sorry and not sorry), ambition. And it's very good, because Russell Brand is very good - funny, clever, quick, eloquent (he knows how to use words like dichotomy and caveat). Sometimes you have to marvel at the man.

I don't love him, though, wouldn't get into a hot tub with him (very happy to with Frank Skinner, however). Maybe it doesn't matter: you don't need to love someone for them to make you laugh. It's probably for the same reason that lots of men don't love him: he's funnier and more attractive than we are, and he's going to mate with our women. But there's more to it. In spite of his chattiness, his tactile rubberiness, there's something cold about him. Look into his eyes. He's a lizard, that's what he is.

I've always wanted to dislike Russell Brand, but I can't quite do it. That said, I don't know what it is about him that I do like, I just know I can't dislike him as much as many do.

Even after Sachsgate - which demonstrated a level of purile stupidity that I expected from Ross but not Brand - I still can't wholly have an aversion to the man. I suspect it might be nothing more than the fact that he makes me laugh, and it's hard to abhor someone who amuses you.

He's witty, he can - one assumes, given the number of ladies he's been involved with - be charming and he can be self-deprecating when it's required. However, this sit down with Frank Skinner told us nothing we didn't already know and was, to be honest, just a pi**ing contest between the two to see who could be funniest.

We heard from both several tales of how fame had gone to their heads, both the ones they keep on their necks and the other ones, and the effect that something Brand described as "oestrogen mist" had on them. Basically, they have both been offered nookie on a plate from adoring female fans and both have partaken from that bottomless trough often.

Skinner questioned the moral rectitude of doing so and seemed genuinely embarrassed that he'd taken full advantage of that particular form of hero worship, but Brand answered the relatively serious question with jokes, so it lost any depth it might have had.

There was of course lengthy discourse about the Andrew Sachs affair and Brand rather confusingly at once apologised - again - and then refuted that he'd done anything that wrong in the first place. He did however - rightly in my opinion - proffer that much of the fuss wasn't about the incident itself but the wider issue of celebrity salaries and the BBC licence fee.

Overall, this was like Jeremy Paxman interviewing Bungle after a spliff; one didn't expect it to be deeply serious, just somewhat informative in its endeavour, but it just didn't have the energy to get past the giggling stage.

Russell Brand: Skinned was the title of a well-conducted inquisition by Frank Skinner of the wild-haired comedian whose androgyny, priapism and former drug addiction has made him, it seems, no less irresistible to women. Brand prides himself on his love of words, but he is no Will Self. In one excruciating extract from a show, he insisted that an audience member's poster "KAT HEART U" needed an apostrophe. Nor is he as clever as he thinks he is. He jeered at a correspondent who, re Sachsgate, suggested that he had targeted the elderly actor because he was "Spanish", yet as an excuse said that when he made the notorious phone-call he had in his mind that it was "Manuel on the other end". The interview made it clear that Brand's current addiction is not to narcotics or even sex but to fame. In this, he is the perfect comic for our celebrity-greedy age.

There was no danger whatsoever of anyone wresting control of Russell Brand: Skinned from its star, even though the second half of the title referred to Frank Skinner, whose sit-down interview with Brand formed the spine of this shapeless and curiously unrevealing documentary. Or at least it seemed unrevealing, because so much of Brand's life comes pre-revealed. Unfortunately for the programme-makers, their subject has built his stand-up career on confessional routines, so even when he was describing his most private thoughts to his fellow comedian, I felt like I'd heard it all before.

Still, neither man is ever less than engaging, especially when they're talking about themselves. Brand, much of whose recent Scandalous tour revolves around so-called Sachsgate, spoke intelligently about the affair. Clear-eyed when it comes to his own mistakes, he also argued convincingly that they were amplified by the context of the disputed BBC licence fee, Jonathan Ross's salary, and the hammed-up outrage of the press.

The most interesting moments of their conversation came when Skinner paralleled Brand's experiences with his own comparatively sedate career. Skinner admitted to having "done a lot of groupie-ing" in his time, but was troubled by the blot such behaviour might have left on his moral copybook. Brand agreed, but often, he said, he's simply overcome by the "oestrogen-filled mist" that descends on his gigs. He created his womanising, Byronic goth persona, he confessed, partly as a substitute for the drugs and alcohol that once sustained him. Now that it's brought him the fame he craved, he's stuck with it. "My personality does not work without fame," he joked. "Without fame, this haircut just looks like mental illness."

Skinner also praised Brand for having - with his distinctive estuary eloquence - made it cool to be articulate, a fantastic compliment from a comedian who'll probably always be associated with mid-Nineties laddism, which sadly had the opposite effect. At one point, Brand went into lyrical detail about his ritual, pre-gig poo, describing it as a physical and spiritual cleansing that prepares him to meet his adoring public. Hmm, Skinner replied, "Most comedians just call that 'the comedy shit'."

The idea of a "revealing, behind-the-scenes" documentary about Russell Brand is quite an odd one - his whole persona, after all, is one of a person happy to expose and riff on, ad nauseam, his many failings. Here, Frank Skinner inter-views a post-"Sachsgate" Brand, a man who has evidently put in work recently to try to understand and intellectualise his compulsions. More interesting is Brand's sheer drive. Could it be his hair that is responsible? "Without fame," says the comic, "this haircut just looks like mental illness."

Documentary following the controversial comedian on his 2009 Scandalous tour, culminating in a sold-out gig at London's O2 Arena. There's also a candid chat with fellow comic Frank Skinner in which Brand opens up about his drug and sex addictions, and the matter of messages left on actor Andrew Sachs's answering machine.

Don't worry ladies, Russell isn't losing his largest organ. He's being interviewed by Frank Skinner and the programme makers have decided to make a past participle out of his name. Fans of comedy will enjoy the pair bonding in a room (familiar to TV Hacks as The Library at the CG Hotel) over the mechanics and art of being a comedian, but people wanting belly laughs will be disappointed.

The best moment is probably when Skinner tells Brand that he finds his womanising off-putting, because it has unpleasant results and doesn't sit well with his likeable persona. It throws Brand off his stride for an instant and that's when he becomes most interesting.

There's something of the sexy, oversized pixie about Russell Brand, a filthy imp who's infamously priapic yet desperately romantic, profoundly literate and articulate, yet mucky-mouthed. And he loves trouble. Brand hides nothing in this documentary as he talks to Frank Skinner of his former addictions to heroin, crack, cannabis and alcohol and of his realisation that they were killing him. "I used to like being smacked up, out of my mind... it was the annihilation of the self... there was nothing... [Being an addict] was demanding, debilitating and lonely."

I won't apologise for the fact that I love Brand; he's a magnetic, fearless performer with a brilliant wit. But it's when he's at his most introspective that he is at his most interesting. Revisiting his home town of Grays in Essex, he speaks for everyone who ever came from somewhere dull when he says: "My identity was formed by not being part of it."

The world would be a sadder place if Russell Brand quit the public eye - he's scarily intelligent, supremely funny, startlingly honest and can't last a day without pushing buttons. In this documentary, ex-alcoholic Frank Skinner interviews Brand about his wild career, drug addiction, relationship with the media and even his dandy image, which Brand makes sense of using Simpsons creator Matt Groening's maxim that 'good cartoon characters are recognisable in silhouette'. A fascinating account, interspersed with early and recent performance footage.