COMEDIAN-turned-activist Russell Brand and British film director Michael Winterbottom show the human cost of the growing inequality between rich and poor in this country today in The Emperor’s New Clothes.

It’s a provocative documentary exploring the financial crisis through humour, confrontational stunts, archive footage and interviews with economic experts and low-paid workers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The unlikely pairing expose the reality of how the poor have been crippled by austerity while paying for the luxuries of the rich who have simply got richer.

Brand goes on a fact-finding mission which takes him to his hometown of Grays in Essex, the City of London and on to the Big Apple.

He reminds us how the hundreds jailed in the wake of the 2011 riots in Britain were on the receiving end of justice which was record-breaking in its swiftness while not one banker has been prosecuted for the 2008 financial disaster which brought the economy to its knees.

We are of course still paying for this, with banks bailed out to the tune of £131 billion of taxpayers’ money with no strings attached.

With his sarcastic humour and charismatic “one of the people” persona, Brand delivers a hilarious and entertaining yet easily understandable look at a complex issue thanks in no small part to Winterbottom’s razor-sharp script.

Michael Moore-style, Brand storms into major banks in the City, demanding to speak to the CEOs about their inflated wages and huge bonuses with zero success and, in the process, shames the major tax-evading companies.

And he enlists the help of young primary school kids to illustrate the disparity between the rich — the top 1 per cent in particular — and the poor.

Even so, it’s an uncomfortable thought that Brand is probably a member of that 1 per cent, although he tackles that issue in his own inimitable way.

Though no groundbreaker, this documentary puts a human face to the issues and points up injustice and broken political promises, highlighted in an ingenious rap during the end credits.

Its premises ought certainly to be borne in mind when voting in a few weeks’ time.