Nathan Barley comes to TV

TVGH is funny because it relies on your imagination the TV series sucked, Cunt was funny because of the "the Kilroy team would like to hear from you" bits.

Would he get the financial backing with his record of self-sabotage ("Grade is a...") and tabloid-baiting? Perhaps he would - My Wrongs wasn't cheap. I don't really know whether he's capable of developing a feature on his own. Perhaps he could team up with Richard Curtis - Hugh Grant and Mark Heap both fall in love with the same American movie star, but she has the body of a Hoover and they're wheelchair-bound mesogleal tripeds who can only communicate in supra-aural square waves. Features Rowan Atkinson as a funny vicar (who burns penguins).

Still, nothing.

at first i thought that it was an invented Chris Morris character.

http://www.trashbat.co.ck/images/barley/gallery/large_covers/bkg_eph_4_large.jpg

which bit?

Dean Lerner and the bloke from Boosh bodes well. looked all a bit like that soap set in a web design office. can't remember the name now...

the very first tv trailer was based on manic miner loading screen. = good.

"They don't realise it's not good cos it's rude, yeah?"
"Yeah, it's good because it looks like it's good because it's rude." (the lazy-gobbed questioning-intonation is a bonus)

I had to install QT* to watch that again, which meant I had to install iTunes. I'm LIVING IN THE FUTURE.

(Funny cos I had to deliver a project in QT last week and I couldn't even watch the finished article at my desk.)

"Once the idiots were just fools gawping in through the windows. Now they've entered the building..."

I think a lot of the comedy in the print version came from the unhinged, psychopathic overstatement of the narrator's hatred of Barley for relatively trivial crimes against taste and morality. Who was this fellow, if not Barley's repressed, self-hating alter ego? I'll be interested if they show Ashcroft as a 'centre of goodness' – a reasonable and likeable man – or a jittering neurotic Goebbels, full of repressed, passionate, hissing, spitting, volatile-projected self-hatred.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1405547,00.html

key words relate to bleeding-edge 'creatives' being perfectly able to satirize themselves. i always thought the savagery of tvgohome was maxed so that you wdn't confuse it with halfway-house shite like shoreditdch twat -- it isn't comfortable satire, it's flamewar.

hmmmm.

BUT the trailers look good and thinking on it, there's no really new paradigm that's emerged to displace the barleys in "new media" circles, so it can't be that dated.

sleaze nation is still going, right? i love the dnb soundtrack on the trailer, it's exactly right.

also i have a lot invested in barley. my first ever paid piece of writing was on tvgohome, three years back. i got to use 'cunt', 'fuck', and 'pissant' in my maiden piece! woo!

xpost -- watts, say nothing!

i can't remember how i came across tvgohome but i was 18 years old and not living in london -- but anyway, my line was nathan barley helps 'explain' things that normals do know about, in advertising, magazine design, fashion, ect. after all comabat trousers, scooters, trucker caps all ended up quite high street.

i've never been a part of the media-wanker circus but have had first-hand experience of barleys -- it isn't that small a world, perhaps.

I hate to be a hata, but HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=15150907&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=the-man-who-drinks-petrol-name_page.html

sleaze closed last year after a relaunch. i remember reading tvgohome with relish back during my shockingly short stint editing the music section there. there were some great people at the mag, but plenty of nathan barleys too. it didn't seem like satire, more reportage. so i will enjoy the series, i reckon.

also i have a lot invested in barley. my first ever paid piece of writing was on tvgohome, three years back. i got to use 'cunt', 'fuck', and 'pissant' in my maiden piece! woo!

i snuck the word 'pisspoor' into the times, early on in my career. my dad thought it was poor journalism to use the word!

he has a point here but i'll reserve judgement 'til i've seen tonight's episode which i'm really looking forward to!

can't wait for torrents.

1) Who'll turn up in the series first: Kevin Eldon or Mark Heap?
2) Which episode and how long into it will this be?

Winner gets something or other.

he has been involved in just about everything the past 6 years.

tvgohome was intensely vitriolic, but i al ways felt it was the bitter anger of just some old guys who werent really in touch anymore, but just took it out on a bunch of idiots. the "cunt" bits of tvgh were the least funny anyway.

"it became difficult to distinguish between genuine creatives and opportunistic charlatans."

oh yeah real creatives theres a ton of them about, many of them with the surname Boorman, eh neil?

"Why the real players in youth culture are never drafted in to help is a mystery"

hahahaha WTF you mean, like, kids? oh no, you mean NB and a bunch of failures from sleaze. theyre the real players in youth culture.

that article is pathetic

from the stills gallery: is this kevin eldon?

http://www.trashbat.co.ck/images/barley/gallery/programme_stills/still_5.jpg

if it is, then my bet's on him.

-- Markelby

Hata.

I haven't seen even a trailer for the show, but I imagine this idea of casting to be the truth.

I think the Daily Mail thing was suggesting that a young Rik Mayall (bear in mind this is the Daily Mail and they aren't quite au fait with the current times) could be the stereotypical obnoxious arsehole, and that Dylan Moran has the cynical world-weariness to play Dan Ashcroft.

Anyway, I am not defending the daily mail, but, as you were...

I didn't realise, not having read (read?) 'shoreditch twat', that morris had spawned a band of this kind of neologistic followers but I got the broad generalities.

the nathan barley charater/actor was completely unconvincing

he seemed pretty much in keeping with the TVGH character

I think the point of the character was "Hi, I'm popular TV critic Charlie Brooker, and man do I meet some foolish people in my ever-so-rivetting life".

That wasn't even Chris Morris' "Max And Paddy". It was Chris Morris' Tony Ferrino.

(xpost)

the scene with the Weekend On Sunday editor...maybe lacking the poise of The office but reminded me of it a lot

i liked it when he joined in 'cock muff bumhole' at the end too, the sense of hopelessness and resignation was well captured.

They humour is that they're idiots. We are supposed to identify with the Ashcrofts here. But seriously, I don't really, to be honest. The real bite would have been the rage of 'AND THESE FUCKHEADS ACTUALLY EXIST AND GET PAID AND ARE UTTER CUNTS' but actually, they're all on the dole because their dotcoms crashed and it's all a huge case of missing your moment. The TVGH show should have been this. The time was right then.

Clapham seems to be a major gathering place for these people now, though.

Well, only in the way the best lyrics are the ones we mishear and turn out to have made up ourselves. The headline was actually "Tom Paulin: Haunted By Rumour". Which I think is funnier.

i'm not sure - i thought so at first but it soon became clear that he was a pitiful character, somewhere between David Brent and Tim for me. actually that's me in a nutshell, maybe. ack.

the timing thing isn't so relevant for me because of this 'nostalgia' aspect mentioned upthread, plus the humour relying a great deal on just the absurd exaggeration of it all. i can enjoy it whilst thinking back to my own experiences as a numeeja design underling and personal hatred/envy conflicts re Hoxditch hype.

I'm bored to the back teeth of the SOTCAA/NotBBC/Cook'd and Bomb'd crowd - those forums were always like the most soul-sapping aspects of ILX and it's no surprise that they loathe this. Imagine an ILM where all the threads were about much worse everything is getting and how even the bands we liked have lost it. Oh, wait...

Morris is stuck with being lorded as the undisputed heavyweight comic genius of our time so if he turns something out that's slightly to the left of the money, or three-fifths as good as Peep Show or whatever, it's a calamity and a Slade musical written with Richard Stilgoe can only be round the corner.

The reviewers who've said it gets uncomfortably close to The Office are right; it's The Office transplanted to a loft where The Play Ethic has gone mad. But I think that's okay; The Office was simply the precursor of a new school of 'embarrassment comedy', and Morris and Brooker are big enough not to stand in its shadow. What's good about this embarrassment comedy thing is that it really makes you feel with the characters. That keeps it from being a Vanity Fair or Rake's Progress or Beggar's Opera-style ensemble piece, just a parade of unsympathetic fops and bullies.

And I have to say I was snorting with embarrassed laughter at scenes like the one where Nathan goes into an Asian newsagent and calls the owner 'my nigga'. Horrific, yes. Over the top, well, not really; I know people who would almost do that.

There's a constant stream of references to massacres, exploitation, atrocities... 9/11, Mai Lai, Hitler, 'that cool e mail of a woman being bummed by a wolf...' These events are all trivialised by Barley for the sake of some kind of banal 'normative aggression', and seen as essentially no different from the pranks he plagues his shy, sensitive assistant with. Or perhaps the pranks are just massacres and atrocities scaled down to chick-pea size, web dimensions. The thing I'm wondering, though, is whether the reverse situation wouldn't be worse. If The Idiots made no reference to Vietnam, Hitler, gangsta rap etc and were simply privileged white kids in a playpen, would they be exonerated? In other words, what is the function of this constant transpostion of their antics with atrocity? And if they were no longer pedalling along the streets on tiny bicycles, the cars would have the street to themselves, right? And that would be better... how?

I haven't seen much Morris stuff, but what I have seen made lots of references to atrocities of one kind or another (dog bomb, spot the assassin or something). In fact, that was why I didn't like him.

Very poor.

I guess maybe it would be different for me if I could experience it from the Class Envy aspect, with an edge of schadenfreude but I just don't. I just feel sorry for the Trustafarians because I know too many of them and know how empty their emotional lives are, so I can't see them as figures of fun or hate, just of pity. [/poor little rich girl routine]

I'm not really sure who this programme is supposed to be aimed at. Not me, I guess. Are those ads in the tube actually ads for those silly phones, or are they some kind of weird guerilla advertising for NB? That confuses me.

If you would actually care to look, there isn't a consensus on those boards. Some liked it, some hated it, some expressed mild apathy. I didn't care for it, but then I was expecting some comedy rather than one extended media in-joke. Nice use of Broadcast, though.

I predict Pingu will crack and attempt to kill Nathan by episode six.

i quite enjoyed it, from the TCP joke at the beginning onwards. it is rather officey, but i think momus is right about the comedy of embarrassment thing.

also if arsehole beats muff, then muff must beat cock and cock must beat arsehole, which i'm sure you could get a psychology dissertation out of...

that one of morris's touchstone themes seems to be "fuck the world for it is infested w.ppl self-convinced they're at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at but not (=A), at the expense of the ppl who ARE at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at (=B)" - but actually the overlooked victims are all the ppl nowhere near the CEoWIA (i mean, whether or not you grant this mythical beast walks the earth anyway, or is worth seekin out) (=C)

ie it (unintentionally) fosters a dubious gradient B » A » C

peel is an interesting person to mention in ref this, since HIS moral gradient (i think always) made a link between A and C: momus and i (and lots of others) had a big fight abt this years ago, where i wz confusedly arguing that Peel saw Ivor Cutler and "Home Truths" as equivalents, not opposites (not to deify particularly: i just mean that for him a similar rule-of-thumb caused him to gravitate to these apparently difft cultural areas where)

anyway, switching randomly across TV in the last two weeks, I arrived at some former scriptwriter/comedy maven - a retired old guy - being interviewed abt the "state of things", and CEoWIA (to me rather charmingly i must say, bz SO off the map of all possible ) declaring that the funniest thing on television at the moment as the talkin baby in MY HERO!

the point i'm makin might be clearer if i could remember who/what this guy actually was/had been, obv - i find a year of writin a book and lookin after ailin parents has FUCKED w.my cuttin-edge-of-where-it-used-to-be-at memorybanks (i had to hunt for jennifer saunders' name in conversation a few days back: as in, "dawn french but the other one, you know")

the point i spose is that morrisism not-entirely-inadvertently fosters a shinin ideal of media-meritocracy - a fuzzin utopia of the in-the-know - but the effect of pushin so relentlessly for this is actually to ENABLE the Bs of the world

hmmmm, is a single word of what i just wrote clear? i didn't actually watch NB (i watched the simpsons) (haha i shd have said i watched "according to bex")

ps i think this is a complicated conundrum btw
pps = i think lady-one-question IS FUNNY and so do you

Nathan Barley followed The Simpsons on Ch4.

That must have been the bit where Alan Partridge shouted 'AHA!' for the first time. Or perhaps the bit where the molasses spilled all over Stan Laurel's dungarees...

The TV Nathan Barley did come across like a harmless Partridge/Brent deluded fool type for his sensible-like-us stooges (Ascroft, Tim etc) to roll eyes at, but as a charecter he paled next to those, therefore it dissapointed me.

I mean, the crueller it is, the funnier it will be. What I liked about Cunt in TVGH was how it quickly built itself up into an apoplectic fury at it's subject, which was largely missing from the TV version. Pile on the spite and the righteous, bordering-on-unhinged anger and we'll have something special.

9.00pm Cunt
Nathan Barley perches on a bench in Battersea Park fiddling with the special effects settings on an achingly futuristic Sony digital camera, taking motion-blurred monochrome snaps of his old schoolfriend Crispin, who needs a portrait for the opening page of a website showcasing his own downloadable garage MP3s, and is currently standing in front of the Peace Pagoda, sucking his cheeks in and staring at a tree in the distance.
Do you think you're some kind of fucking Renaissance man just because you've got a few ostensibly creative applications and a shitload of money to spend on high-tech gagetry? Do you have any idea how many other fuckheads all over the world are, right at this very minute, using precisly the same technology to produce precisly the same pedestrian results as you? Why don't you just take all your software, all your gadgets, all your pointless digital fuckery-foo and hurl the lot of it right into the fucking sea? You're using it to churn out shit. Get a fucking grip. You're a cunt; you have always HAVE been a cunt and you always WILL be a cunt - a useless, artless, soulless, worthless, hateful, sickening, handful-of-you-own-shit-fucking, cunt-chewing, cunt-eyed cunt. And your lazy, delusional stabs at creativity aren't fooling anyone, so stop trying. Prick. Our research team would like to talk to you: call 020 7656 7018
Producer Lo-Slung Denim

"I imagined the dreadful day when I can no longer derive the faintest pleasure from my Paul Smith polished berunia condom applicator. But, then again, I might be rapturously anticipating my life as a sunbeam, singing tra-las to the season of mists and kissing the pates of the ludicrous. Or what if I've been run over, pierced by a spear of frozen piss from a passing airliner, or stabbed by one of The Observer weirdos who've set up a daily Geefe vigil in the pub on the corner?

In turmoil, I faxed the editor a selection of starts for my column for 22 August. He hated them all. `… what the fuck's this: "I've been wondering this week whether sharble should be the word for a grain of instant coffee that hasn't dissolved by the time you drink it"?' I told him that would be what I'd write if I'd come to terms with my death to the extent that I no longer bothered to mention it at all."

It's funny and it's bewildering. And it's hard to say that The Idiots, with their unpredictable new fads and foibles, aren't just as funny and just as fruitfully brow-furrowing. Or am I mixing up Mark S's As and Bs? Is it always clear which is which? Which is good bewilderment and which bad? Which deserves BAFTAs and which bullets?

(i mean maybe the above: i'm not saying it's an iron law) (i kinda think it is but i wouldn't know how to prove this)

i think i wz actually watching futurama on DVD: the second simpsons wz v.poor and i needed cheerin up)

* = iain lee

That's fair comment - I became so exasperated with various exchanges on those boards 2-3 years ago that I now have a tendency to tar everyone with the same broad brush of disdain; SOTCAA seemed to have been set up with the premise that everything was going to rubbish and no one else would say so (but here are some nice downloads/articles/edit logs) and I was never very comfortable with that. It's rather like when someone 'leaves' ILX - "Why did you stop posting?" "Cos they're all wankers." Not remotely true but you can kinda see their point...

("Actually caring to look" would unfortunately involve scanning down page after page of commentary on various threads some possibly started months and months ago; it's not really worth the effort once you've left that circle. I was really reacting to the front page editorial piece).

I do feel like I've semi-arbitrarily decided to stick up for NB, or at least give it a go, because of the assumed comedy-webgeek negative consensus, but the points made above are good (and some actually sting. "Bubble"?)

many xposts

Also see Barley and the idiots chuckling over, bigging up and claiming Dan Ashcroft's The Rise of The Idiots piece, which they somehow didn't realise was an attack on them - they liked it because it was 'cool' or whatever. That can't be helped, it seems. Yeah? Totally.

the unclarity of the line is what makes the comedy, or something? when does "you"ll always be a cunt" stop being pitilessly OTM and start being a bit fascist? depends on who's saying it, and what their access to power and airwave-policing is: ricky gervaise = someone (for me) who keeps stepping back and forth over the line (consciously: i mean, its the line he's playing with, the line that makes him funny - and the fact that it unsettles me rather than makes me complacent is what i like abt it - but to do this it has to risk being actual real bullyboy stuff)

(x-post because I haven't got a television, Stevem)

OTM. Homer was always lovably stupid, but there was a point when the writers decided to make him a jerk. It seems they were trying to catch up with South Park by injecting some cruelty, but Homer isn't Cartman. The heart has gone from these episodes and the jokes aren't all that great either.

out of the recent C4 run two or three (out of what, ten?) have been pretty funny (eg i quite liked run lisa run) (tho actually i wz on the phone for half of it), but this just sets you up for sadness :(

what i disliked abt ned's themepark to maude wz that misplaced "heart" rather than the absence of it

Dan Ashcroft is obviously the raging voice in Cunt, hopefully we'll see him blow up properly at some point. Pingu could be a good character as well but they just need to slow it the fuck down.

disagree somewhat and would cite Dan's slow agonising 'death' at the meeting with the Weekend On Sunday - and we know Nathan is all about the non-stop babble so the comparisons to The Office can't stretch too far because it's a totally different situation

haven't seen enough of morris's MEAN SPIRITED side yet, though.

Just like those 1980s yoof shows that flashed tons of text on the screen for a second, encouraging otaku viewers to freeze frame the (analogue) video afterwards and read it all, "Nathan Barley" has a wealth of satirical graphic design just begging to be (digitally) pause buttoned: magazine articles, posters, T shirt slogans... It also has an audience (well, if they're like me, anyway) which cares enough about such things to freeze a frame to read the 'Anorexic Bitch' T shirt or check whether Pingu is wearing Bathing Ape.

Personally, I thought the first ep of 'Nathan Barley' was pretty good. Wasn't quite as vitriolic as I was expecting, but I guess the 'Cunt' listings from TVGoHome wouldn't really translate to broadcast telly that well.

That one-second shot of the guy wearing the miniscule hat was the biggest laugh I've had from TV from quite a few years.

Well sort of, the key theme of all this would seem to be the conflict between stupidly high expectations and less impreesive reality. If I didn't know Morris and Brooker were behind it I'm not sure how I would feel about it, as I sid the more I think about it the worse it seems.

The Nathan Barley piece in yesterday's Guardian Guide featured lots of characters that weren't in episode one, which doesn't bode well for it from this aspect.

I think Armando Ianucci's stuff is similar on the not-lol-funny thing, his stuff's just compelling as a sort of mixture of absurd/chuckle-funny/oddly poignant.

the show reminded me of the Sleazenation offices so badly i thought i was living through a flashback.

why? the Broadcast was being, er, broadcast by Pingu, the only sympathetic character in the whole thing.

are Banksy and the rathergood videos people going to be happy being lumped in with this lot? do you think they agreed to it or is it just another case of NB stealing / doing bad versions of things that are (were) innovative?

(teardrop explodes' sleeping gas in there right at the very end too.)

that one of morris's touchstone themes seems to be "fuck the world for it is infested w.ppl self-convinced they're at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at but not (=A), at the expense of the ppl who ARE at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at (=B)" - but actually the overlooked victims are all the ppl nowhere near the CEoWIA (i mean, whether or not you grant this mythical beast walks the earth anyway, or is worth seekin out) (=C)

ie it (unintentionally) fosters a dubious gradient B » A » C

otm, but isn't the gradient is more c>b>a??

and class is seemingly absent from this series. everyone has a normal south eastern accent, not really posh, not really not; just that some of them mysteriously have more money than others. so straight away the great big thumps morris throws in the direction of barley are great big thumps at nothing very substantial.

the bikes were good though

Then I thought about Ashcroft. He's also bored with his life - surrounded by fevered egos, yet a fevered ego himself. The only difference is that he's aware of it, which makes it more tragic. The boredom of his own existence saps his energy, making it impossible for him to leave, yet loathing himself since he has to stay. He lurches from vitriolic attacks at everyone around him, to BECOMING like those around him.

And then I thought about NB. He's bored, so he tries to make everyone's life more interesting, including his own. He's in a state of blissful ignorance, and sees himself as above the grey soup he looks down upon, not realising that it's just greyness that he spits out himself.

Momus makes a point about there being so much going on in the frames - the clever little design points, the split-second in-jokes. Now imagine if your whole life was like that - everything you saw, heard or did was loaded and marked for your attention. In the same way that if everything is marked in Bold, nothing is highlighted, if everything is interesting, nothing interests you. Which can only lead to boredom. Maybe that's at the heart of it all.

Or maybe they are just caricatures of 5yr old stereotypes, monkey-dancing for our amusement in a tirade of cheap shots and barely funny metaphors, looking up from a mud splattered face as the dotcom-bashing zeitgeist zooms into the past. I guess time will tell.

i didn't want this to be dark and scary, agreed, that is quickly becoming very undergraduate. i thought it might be more of a chance for some good satirical class war, though, which it wasn't. i have a feeling the character of barley will become increasingly objectionable as the series goes on, though.

I didn't think he came across as likeable at all on the TV.

People have talked on this thread about his "banging his head against the glass ceiling" or brought up class issues or whatever. And I'm sure that Ashcroft went away from his Weekend on Sunday "death" with the same ideas that ILXors have about what caused his downfall - when really, it was nothing to do with the Class Ceiling or whathaveyou at all - it was his own bloody hubris! Going in to an interview woefully unprepared, as if all he has to do to get a job is Make The Decision To Sell Out - and his reputation from his column/blog/fanzine and the Powers That Be will just Be Recognised as genius.

Rather than that he was asked to Pitch, and he just *couldn't*. Even a media dummy like me knows that going to a paper or magazine interview without a Pitch is like going to an office job interview and refusing to take a test in Excel. What did he expect?

So without anyone to actually empathise with in the experience, it just becomes like The Office - an exercise in pointless cruelty which just isn't particularly funny or enjoyable to me.

I don't see the class thing at all, with regard to Dan Ashcroft - why are people assuming is he a more working class character, just because he has a Northern accent?!?!??!

this was the disappointing thing about her, that she seemed to fall for NB's self promotion and sub-dirty sanchez japes.

> it just becomes like The Office - an exercise in pointless cruelty

i saw it as someone who was so cocksure of himself getting hoist by his own petard. comeuppance rather than cruelty. the whole series seems to be full of people full of themselves and oblivious to how people outside their small social groups see them.

the pinball machine / office chaos thing hit a nerve - every hour or so someone here will start throwing foam footballs around. nothing more disturbing than things flying through your peripheral vision when you're trying to concentrate.

xpost

She's off the mark in comparing NB to The Office as "an excercise in pointless cruelty". The Office wasn't pointless cruelty, it was perfectly emotionally pitched, you found yourself really caring about these atrocious or pathetic characters - Brent finally getting the sack dressed as an emu etc.

Ditto Spaced, possibly a better reference point here - I watched the opening, scene-setting epsiode of that yesterday and it was a great example of how to move all the main characters into position and yet do it properly. You had a handle on the characters from day one - I'm none the wiser about some of the people in NB - especially the women who have next to no personality. Likewise the episode where Daisy has the interview at Flaps magazine, and they go to Vulva's performance art thing = better satire than anything in the first episode of NB. Modifying the Nipper's OTM comment upthread, its also a bit like an episode of Spaced where everyone is Twist (the worst character in that series by some way).

Dada - no, you're not supposed care about anyone or anything in the Day Today or Brasseye, and both programmes are far the better for that, because they are not character-led sitcom. NB defineably is, satirical or otherwise, and I'm not convinced Morris is any good at it.

I've got a bit of a bone to pick with the 'Dan as viewer identification character' thing as well. Perhaps, in that NB is 'Losing My Edge' satire, its designed to appeal to the very people its satirising. All the Idiots think Dan's 'Idiots' piece is wonderful, oblivious to the fact its them he's attacking. But the fact is that the Idiots piece is rubbish, its lame student comment section quality at best - Dan is a pretty talentless hack as clearly shown by the interview scene (best bit of the episode I thought). He has nothing to offer the world other than his opposition to it, this mix of bitterness and ill-deserved conceit. He's not much better than the people he's surrounded by - playing Cock Muff Bumhole after a couple of drinks etc.

Did I say anything about this? I'm all sixes and sevens today.

Spot on. As much as the Nathan Barleys are stereotype of the whole meeja scene, so are the Dan Ashcrofts - so WAY above it all... and equally as tragic.

Another thing just occurred to me. There are black characters in this, but no gay characters. How would the satire be different if, say, Nathan Barley were gay?

yeh but unlike Warhol there is nothing at all clever about these Idiots (stating the obvious here?)

the two things continue to be bugbears - attention is drawn to the ethnicity thing only because of Nathan's use of 'my nigga' on anyone (regardless of their ethnicity), otherwise it would be completely irrelevant i think. i expect there will be some sort of 'faux pas' re homosexuality/phobia to come that will draw the second thing to attention also (as with The Office et al).

I suspect that even two nothing sacred 'comedy terrorists' like Brooker and Morris will not go there. It's a lot more acceptable to 'bash' hipsters in a sitcom than it is to bash obviously gay characters. Hipsters have been designated 'okay to hate' in our culture.

The shot near the beginning of episode one, where Dan looks up the street and sees a guy with flip flops on his ears. Dan looks with withering scorn. Now, what if Flip Flop Guy were mincing, or butch or some other gay signifier (a 'big ole bear')? Dan's withering scorn would be... well, simple homophobia, wouldn't it?

these comments on 'NB' are considerably more interesting and entertaining than the show itself.

re peretti -- i said that!

wait, that black guy with the little hat isn't gay?

you are ALL going to watch every episode, whether you've said you like it or hated it upthread.

http://www.imomus.com/skishades.jpg

http://www.cucamonga.be/afbeeldingen/DevendraBanhart0504.jpg

it takes place in williamsburg, brooklyn and VICE magazine is SUGARAPE.

momus have a walk-on cameo as flip flop ears.

You're also maybe making the mistake that people who don't look 'smart' don't care what they look like, when usually they care at least enough to not want to look 'smart'.

(I still haven't seen the episode, though I have it on tape somewhere)

(cue the fashion cognoscenti telling me that actually PornStar was around ten years before TVGH, and people have been wearing low-slung trews since 1929)

http://www.imomus.com/slipperyears.jpg

I mean fair play. The last time I went out was to a bar near Old Street decked out in Communist kitsch, with a DJ who veered between undi hip-hop and George Formby where they served Polish beer at £2.80 a bottle. But I'm no media wanker, trust.

http://pzat.meep.org/cunt/tvgohome16062000.jpg

-- stevie

See, I thought it looked like The Face offices pre-Shaftesbury Avenue.

I find Dan very sympathetic, yet agree with all Matt's points against this upthread. I found the Sugar Ape meeting and Weekend on Sunday scenes both very funny and beyond painful, but then perhaps this is a little too close to the bone for me.

What it has done is created labels. I can easily see "he's got this Dan Ashcroft thing" or "he was totally Jonatton Yeah?" being thrown around as descriptions.

"Peace and fucking, keep chopping them out, my nigga."

Well, the thing about Pat Bateman is not that he's good because he's rude, yeah? It's that he's good because he looks like he's good because he's rude, Yeah?

http://pzat.meep.org/cunt/

Steve I thought the BoC track was something off MHTRTC - I'd know it if I heard it again.

how did the guy at SugarApe (he looks 'senior' i.e. around the same age as Dan if not older) find out about the 'southern French' thing so quickly do you suppose? given the only way was for WoS bloke to tell him about it? it was mildly amusing but totally unlikely.

i keep thinking back to the bit where he joins in the CMB game in the pub and how much i like it, almost as if i liked the fact that he was enjoying the game, this almost being heart-warming, that here's where rather than revealing himself to be a fellow Idiot he reveals himself to be a fellow...human? not sure, but it seems like a fun variant on RockPaperScissors i.e. harmless fun. what was interesting was when the receptionist girl (why is she the coolest person in the programme? is she completely together and smarter than everyone else? then why is she 'just' the receptionist etc.? age old device but intriguing in this context) told him off for doing this he immediately stopped. so it seems Dan is saved yet stifled by the girl and what appears to be an unrequited crush on her. also intriguing.

i'm surprised how much i enjoyed it based on these thoughts.

has there been this kind of discussion with According To Bex?

What is up with the song choices for this?

Don't tell anyone, but Momus is generally OTM throughout the thread.

rather gentle example of him refusing to make his assistant coffee

And not-so-gentle example of him demanding credit for the animation.

(when he laughs at the end of this scene, he's the spitting image of Ricky T)

why didn't Dan's sister walk horrified out of Trashbat Towers after seeing poor Pingu electrocuted is what i'm wondering

Because she's a more interesting character if she has a weakness for one of Nathan's more acceptable evils, and because he (and the assistant) are standing there and because she's beholden to him. And because otherwise she'd just be a copy of the receptionist.

You don't actually see her face in that scene past the initial reaction shot.

An interesting thing not so far mentioned is that the first episode is completely neutral as regards whether Nathan is helping Claire because he fancies her, or because she's Dan's sister, or just because she is "creative" and he's overprovisioned. Apart from - the splitsecond in Place where it becomes clear that he's lying about his offer.

In intonation and general facial features, Jonnaton Yeah? reminds me of Armando Ianucci. Himself and the guy with the afro + the lines make me laugh most of the time.

I assumed that watching the first episode would make it clear what the noise maker was doing in Dan & Claire's flat. I was wrong.

Is there an actual attempt to get us disgusted at ourselves by becoming emotionally involved in the tramp races? Are we supposed (if it wasn't sped-up to fuck) to share Dan's focus on how many teeth are pulled?

The Nathan Barley question: Does he produce rubbish because of his priveledged background, and its effect on his relationship to his life and the world (basivally: a giant toybox), or because he's just no fucking good?

Dear god, that "you're playing rubbish!" "what?" exchange was terrible.

The 8-Mile sequence was a bit fun though. Loved that line about "tending the garden", or whatever it was. I was high on honey and lemon and St John's Wort.

My main problem with this programme is that they're all cunts (I'm not sure Chris Morris or Charlie Brooker knows how to write anyone that isn't), which is fine if that's the statement you're making, but I think that in order to sustain a sitcom over a whole series, you need at least some measure of sympathy for at least one of the main characters, and I can't see how you can have any sympathy for any one of those guys. I've given this a two-episode chance now, I don't think I'll bother with the third.

(Barley voice over, reading from Ashcroft's terribly stilted and banal article) They use the word 'cool', it is their favourite word. The idiot doesn't think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish. And rubbish isn't cool. Stuff and shit is cool.

Barley aloud, admiringly Oh Ashcroft, Ashcroft!

http://18hz.deid.net/sugarape/res/fountain.jpg

Momus, I'm sure I've seen a few different 'welcome to our newest user...' things on UkNova recently, are you sure it's not just that you have to keep checking back until the membership's dropped below 25,000? They've been kicking off people who never upload recently so it ought to drop fairly often.

the junkie singing songs to little kids?

Things I did like: when Dan called his sis 'fat arms' during their argument - about the only thing that suggested real emotion; the junkie choir guy's song - XL or Rough Trade should sign him now.

Peep Show satirised this scene a lot better, and it wasn't even the main focus of that show. In Peep Show Jeremy and Super Hands' 'band' was more convincingly lame, and, especially, there was Super Hands getting addicted to crack to look cool ("Mmmm, this crack is so moreish".)

(wasn't the prisoner theme part of the mashup in the club? had all sorts of things in there that i remember from my youth. blancmange?)

With respect, Mr Raw, convincing plot and real emotions is not the point of NB. Is it convincing that Dan Ashcroft has had Pete's Dragon out for seven years and owes £2492 and has to play Russian Tramp Racing to earn the money back? Of course it's not. But is it convincing that I went to my local video store on Avenue A on September 12th, 2001, only to be told that, even though they'd closed on 9/11, I still had to pay a fine? Would you believe that if you saw it in Nathan Barley? You probably wouldn't, it would just sound like typical farcical Brooker/Morris atrocity hokum. But it happened. It's 4 Real. Life has also lost the plot, which is why plot is irrelevant. What matters in satire is that we recognise our folly and laugh at ourselves. And, you know, writing for Vice magazine, do I recognise it when the Sugarape editor says to Dan "Stupid people think it's cool, smart people think it's a joke, also cool"? Yes, I do. Verifuckingsimilitude, right there, dude. I also think the hipster vocab is terrific, approaching Burgess and Orwell in its inventiveness:

"Hey you should come, dollsnatch, it's going to be totally fucking Mexico."

"Check this, m'niggas, online tramp racing from Russia, totally de-reg, yeah?"

"I'm going to sleep
Oh yeah, respect for that. Catch some susans.
Yeah, break a Chinaman, yeah?"

Lines like these aren't just funny and inventive, they tie hipsterism in to zones of disorder (Mexico, Russia, China), and that's been a crucial element to every subculture. The atrocity and poverty of these zones of disorder both offsets the privilege of the bourgeois kids who buy into them (by, for instance, gambling on tramp teeth-pulling) by making them seem worldly, and shows them up the moral abyss they live in. I'd put it to you that the verisimilitude of satire works at that kind of level, and not at the level of "Would he really have pulled out the plug just when he won all the money?"

I'll carry on watching though and maybe it'll come clear later on.

yeah, jacques peretti, basically. sleaze nation (latterly the guardian) put this no-mark on an absurd pedestal based on his ability to hate on his peers.

NB works the same way. It may not be big on belly laughs but since when has Chris Morris gone out just to do that? It's usually just a side-effect of all the other stuff he's trying to do. I think a re-assessment of Brass Eye and all Morris output of the last eight years may be worthwhile now. It's him that has been chalked up as a preacher man of sorts himself with the hype and 'media terrorist' persona. In one Guardian interview way back he revealed how the only reason he hardly ever gave interviews is because people just ASSUMED he wouldn't want to (possibly untrue but I liked it).

"You can come, you can come, you can come multiple times" - that's like watching a 13 year old get his kicks.
that's because Nathan is 13 years old - do you see. Also this is exactly the kind of crap you hear some guys saying here and there so as reflection, however overstated, of real situations it's fair enough.

Ashcroft is indeed just as hateable as Barley at the moment. I'm not sure whether this is really intentional on Morris/Brooker's part but I wouldn't be surprised either way.

Yeh, but I was a 13 year-old schoolboy when this was at it's height and I'd never met a sloan-ranger. I just didn't get the humour or the references to LaCroix etc at all. I remember finding the whole AbFab experience to be rather painful tbh.

that's because Nathan is 13 years old - do you see. Also this is exactly the kind of crap you hear some guys saying here and there so as reflection, however overstated, of real situations it's fair enough.

I do understand this but I don't really find it funny when some goon in my office says stuff like this so why should I find it funny when it's on telly? It's a really obvious pun (and yes, that's the point) but what's it doing in a sitcom anyway? David Brent could have pulled it off because he's a man who's been put in a position of authority and he's acting like a child and that's funny because of the bemused silence and the way he digs himself further into a ditch. Something about the joke just fell flat. If there was a sitcom about chavs in Newcastle that relied mostly on them throwing kebabs at Pakistanis and generally being obnoxious, I don't think that would be very funny either because you can see this kind of behaviour simply by going out on the street. It's not even an exaggeration.

who says you're meant to find it funny? i think too much of is made of the 'Morris is here primarily to amuse' idea! this stopped being the case long ago for me.

erm, so was i! but i could see it was a well written show that did it's job well. some great turns from bit-players too including June Whitfield and Jane Horrocks obv. it wasn't complicated stuff humour-wise despite the world they inhabited seeming rather alien.

A six part comedy series written by Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris.

Hats off to channel 4 for providing us with more friday filthy tv greatness.

oh well if Channel 4 say it's comedy than it must be...

...i'm also not sure about the "political" NB, the enron and george bush mentions in the rap were a little perplexing

of course NB's 'political' rants were empty, but you can bet your ass apathy would have been just as mercilessly pilloried if that were fashionable (ie as it was in the tvgohome versh -- the tv show has been faithful to the times).

x-post

caitlin right, me wrong about prisoner ringtone.

other things i recognised mixed into that piece at the party:
'einstein a go go'
'i won't let the sun go down on me'
'it's in the trees, it's coming' from that kate bush song (hounds of love?) (although sample is from 'night of the demon' i think)
something by tears for fears
'centrefold' (j geils band?)
totp theme tune (thin lizzy? the one after?)

the 9/11 stuff used for shock seemed horribly dated already.

Would you stop rapping!! Argh!

2 was disgusting.

3 was not as bad as 2.

15peter20 was ridiculous and i loved that. i love any scene with jonathan yeah (dan's boss).

and nathan would have almost banged claire if he didn't start dancehall mc'ing!

I'm downloading them with bittorrent
do you find my repeated viewings abhorrent?

The Dan character...maybe it's charlie brooker putting himself in there, so that he can cover his own back a bit. Writing a sitcom about nathans is a totally nathan thing to do, and he probably knows that, so by putting a nathan who hates the other nathans (but writes about them) into the show itself, he's trying to distance himself from them without actually denying he's just as bad as they are.

People I know who live outside london and think londoners are cunts seem to find this funnier than I do.

And Morris voice over, obv.

Oh, we don't just "think" Londoners are cunts. ;-)

i don't really want to see Nathan humiliated, i just want him to stop being a 'cunt'. but of course that would go against the premise of the show. neither route is REALLY satisfying though (satisfying != funny necessarily), so what i end up appreciating about this show is really just that there's nothing else quite like it on TV and it's doing something akin to what The Office and a few other programmes have done, troubling and saddening as much as amusing, and playing around with your reactions and attitudes to the characters in interesting and relatively novel ways.

this week Dan scored a 'victory' over Nathan - but Nathan somehow scored a 'victory' of his own away from everyone else, which perhaps settles the score in his own mind. so next week will he still idolise Dan or has the relationship changed forever? soapy indeed...

ha, it was just...silly. the scissors could surely never penetrate a cat's head after falling from that brief a height! this has ruined the entire series for me far more than anything else...

and for some reason, dan drinking a pint on the street, in clement weather, with short hair, it seemed really london.

a soap opera that's only 6 shows long.

it's good when things are funny but it's not the be all and end all.

are you kidding? The fact the scene had Kevin Eldon in was suggesting right away that this was going to be great. It was a breath of fresh air in what is slowly becoming, for a country bumpkin like me, a very alien sit-com.

what else in this episode was actually worth viewing?

The ultimate insult? The Japanese really love his hair! That mock tv show during the credits killed me. I eagerly await Momus's interpretation.

The scissors-in-cat's-head was funny, but rather childish. What really irked me about this episode, though, was the bad faith around the haircut theme. The Office elements of social embarrassment were very much at odds with the Rake's Progress elements of fop satire, and The Office won. Brentism banished Hogarthian satire, which depends on a certain amount of verisimiltude. Morris and Brooker showed themselves more familiar with embarrassment than with fashion. They went for cheap laughs at other people's humiliation rather than looking at how dandyism and fashion work. A real hipster with the balls to try an outrageous hairstyle would not so quickly go from arrogance to shame, and a real hipster milieu would not be so unanimous in its ridicule or its praise. There's a liminal zone between cool and uncool, and it's perhaps the most interesting place, that zone of uncertainty between style hero and prat. That liminal zone was completely elided in this episode's rush to show pride coming before a fall.

The Japanese TV thing at the end was actually a silly racist stereotype as bad as anything in Lost in Translation. There are no shows like that on Japanese TV. It looked like a cross between a purikkura (print club) machine and 1980s UK yoof TV. They should've got Magenta Devine and members of Sigue Sigue Sputnik to celebrate and rehabilitate Nathan's hairstyle instead.

it just didn't make any sense that the baghat was more acceptable than the paint hair though.

I think that it had Nathan down perfectly in his reaction to his hair. He's not a *true* Dandy (ridicule is nothing to be scared of) but a Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, a trend-follower rather than setter. He is arrogant and confident enough when he thinks that his hair is based on some accepted and approved and "cool" hipster style, but the moment that he has to defend his actual stylistic choice, he is totally unable to think or act or express aesthetic opinions of his own.

This is *so* absolutely spot on for the Hoxton herd mentality.

Well, you're right, Mark. The Gervaisian and the Hogarthian modes of British comedy both do require verisimilitude to work. I suppose what I'm really saying is what I say later in the post, that Morris and Brooker seem more familiar with embarrassment than with fashion. When they look at the world, they seem to see it populated by dunces rather than dandies. They seem to have been dunces, and been amongst dunces, and feared being dunces, much more than they've been dandies, or been amongst dandies, or feared being seen as dandies. So the scenes of searing embarrassment and self-loathing self-recognition ring true, but the fashion stuff just doesn't. Dandies, for M&B, are just another category of dunce. Whereas for the dedicated follower of fashion, a dunce is just another category of dandy, and one who might well be thanked and honoured for lending us his garb. A stalk of straw protruding from the mouth? How original! Why not? Some paint tangled up in the hair? Why not?

The motto of some of the Sugarape staff is "Keep it foolish", and it's actually a perfectly reasonable slogan if you prize originality over sanity (as many artists, for instance, do), and being interesting over being right (as just about everyone in the media does). The inventive foolishness of this series is why I'm watching it, not to see Barleys get their comeuppance. The beauty of the series really is in the invention of a mad, flamboyant, wasteful parallel world where people make records called "A4 Sounds" about paper, and where, in that mysterious liminal zone between cool and fool, anything might happen. I do think that, at its best, the series is celebrating that tension between attraction and repulsion. I think Morris and Brooker, as writers, use their unconscious a lot, and have learned to listen to the insanity of some of their ideas (the crazy TV programme ideas of TVGoHome, for instance). So although they seem to be condemning the world of trendy foppery, they're also investing it with some of their best ideas, and they have to respect the world they're making because they clearly respect their own creativity. Even at its most foolish, this world is an extremely inventive one, able to match M&B's own inventiveness pretty closely. In the end, they resemble each other quite a bit.

Dan Ashcroft in a nutshell basically

He emerged that way in episode 4, and I thought that was a weakness. Because he's been shown so far to possess elephant-thick skin when it comes to ridicule -- to be completely blind to it, completely un-selfconscious, no matter who disapproves. That's been rather charming, actually.

I guess Nathan's not really a provocateur or a creator, though. The closest we've got to seeing creators are the cynical Jonnaton Yeah? and 15Peter20. And Doug Rocket, I guess. These are the people who mint the memes that speed around Hosegate. And they're motivated by narcissism, cynicism and folly.

But there's surely a good inventiveness, a good creativity in this series. If Morris and Brookner are clever for inventing ludicrous memes -- and they are -- then the people inventing the memes are clever for inventing them too. The very existence of Nathan Barley shows that TV itself is just one step behind TVGoHome, and speaks the same language. And I'd say that Hoxton is really not behind Hosegate at all. Hoxton and Hosegate also speak the same language. To satirize TV is to invent TV. To satirize fashion is to invent fashion. Just as you should always be careful what you wish for, you should always be careful what you satirize. The dangers are that you will become part of what you disdain, or it will outstrip you. Or both.

this is why i dont think NB works for me. for good satire* to work those doign the satirisinig must be within the world they are laughing at, or they must be very well acquainted with it. The office works because Gervais and the other guy have obiously had experience of office life (and one office is pretty interchangeable with many others, regardless of the industry). likewise. Some parts of Private Eyes jokes are very funny, but others are just a little tragic. (this is also why I dont like Heaths cartoons)**.
Morris and Brooker just dotn seem to know anythign about the world they are lampooning. They think they do, they had an idea bout it 5 years ago or so, they were still in touch with it, but now they are behind the curve, they are no longer in touch with the world they seek to satirise. The [print adverts for this made me feel sad because it seemed painfully obvious, that Morris and Brooker were no more clued up about what they were doing than your dad when he makes jokes about rap music "just people shouting".

*ok maybe it isnt satire, but it doesnt work as anythign else for either, and the temptation to view it as such is overwhelming)

**see also Yes Minister which i think does work becuase the writers are so intimiately acquainted with the world which they are writing about. I ghuess then its a no-brainer to say "know your material".

True, it all went a little bit primary school with everyone laughing at Nathan for his hair, yet somehow no one laughed at Dan (okay, he was refused a loan but that's fair dos).

erm, yes -- this is the point. they're a bunch of twats, we're supposed to hate them, and there's no distinction between dunce and dandy. it's you who've decided to value dandyism here.

Even at its most foolish, this world is an extremely inventive one, able to match M&B's own inventiveness pretty closely. In the end, they resemble each other quite a bit.

i don't get this from the show: surely what nosegate 'invents' is crap. 15peter is a bibble.

My point is that whatever one thinks of those inventions, one also must think of Morris and Brooker's inventions. If it's pointless creating things like the Wasp Speechtool or A4 Sounds or an animation of planes slamming into the WTC and couples "fucking on the way down", it's just as pointless to regurgitate them in satire, and possibly more so. If you looked a bit like an ape, and I danced about behind you looking even more like an ape to mock you, which of us would look more like an ape? Conversely, if you were an angel and I emulated you and exaggerated your virtues, I'd be the more angelic, wouldn't I?

*™e.padgett :'(

but to say brooker and morris go wrong by saying all dandies are dunces when their own inventions rival those of the real nosegate is a bit like saying rik mayall's 'new statesman' was a viable tory manifesto isn't it? mayall had to think up absurd tory ideas in order to show the ugliness of the real tory ideas.

IMO Nathan Barley isn't a satirisation of the creative impulse, but then i guess i have less invested in the creative impulse being a certain way than our man momus.

Some of it seems to have rubbed off -- check Mayall's appearance as Hitler in this anti-Euro film.

in the process there is considerable invention if only because to satirize something you have to know about it in depth, to care about it in some way.

I see a deep ambivalence at the heart of satire -- I see it very much as a way to confer fuzzy status on the things considered, and to express mixed feelings, albeit vehemently. I think Nathan Barley exhibits the "fuzziness" of the most interesting satire, and for that reason it's possible for dunce-haters to read it as a condemnation of Nosegate, while dandy-lovers can read it as a celebration.

"something the satirist obsessively despises" = "something the satirist is repeatedly drawn to (if only as a despoiled version of something he loves) (or something he hates himself for secretly admiring)" (or something)

i think momus is totally correct abt some morris-memes being strong the way the thing satitrsed is in fact strong (eg the idents in brass eye are the BEST NEWS IDENTS EVER) (the ppl who composes and animate real news ident wd have been watchin brass eye and shouting IF ONLY!! then weeping)

(i still haven't watched a second of nathan barley that wasn't part of a trailer so cannot support momus in any concrete way)

why do they include something horrible like a cat with scissors in its head in each ep?

interestingly(?) last night's South Bank Show seemed to touch on this:

Music and Arts
The South Bank Show
11:05pm - 12:05am

Adam Phillips - Going Sane

The renowned and controversial psychotherapist Adam Phillips argues that rather than seeing sanity as normal, sensible or conformist we need a completely new vision of what it means to be sane. His inquiry leads us on a colourful journey through madness in life, art and literature, from Hamlet and King Lear to Alice in Wonderland and Freud. On the way, Adam meets a consultant from Broadmoor and visits the Bethlem Hospital museum.

but i only caught the last 3 minutes having spent my time watching the swearing on Ch4.

"I Don't Beige"

he'd have totally gotten away with that hair if it wasn't for the paint pot lids.

bumphUK would be a great name for a magazine

The first-person narrator in those radio pieces was a damaged, confused, socially-miscued individual being variously shredded by terrible encounters with amoral media goons. I think perhaps Morris has brought a little bit of this My Wrongs character to Ashcroft.

I thought #4 was rather weak, though the low-angle shot of the cat-with-scissors was masterful.

I happened to hear that (and you have to listen quite hard to catch it) immediately after I'd sampled the chorus of David Bowie's Move On and played it backwards, after reading somewhere that it was All The Young Dudes reversed. Lo and behold, it was. Not quite palindromic, but in the same ballpark. Now, personally I'm just very interested in the idea of an album that plays the same backwards as it does forwards. I take that idea just as seriously if I come across it in Nathan Barley as I would if I read it in some essay by Cornelius Cardew. Sure, Claire immediately proclaims Rocket a "prannet", but it's boring to condemn ideas without offering something in their stead. Barley's suggestion that "we chop some sense into that bollock" at least has the virtue of being a creative solution (even if he never gets round to it).

That little scene outlines the problems the satirist faces. To dismiss the enemy as a "prannock" might just be rather boring if you're not offering anything as colourful (Claire). To fight editing with editing (Nathan) puts you on the same page as your opponent. And to give any kind of attention to attention-seekers already puts them on a pedestal. It's a no-win situation, zugzwang. You move, you lose. Morris and Brooker are already courtiers at the Hoxton court. They're making media about the media that makes media about media.

Is it on E4 tonight? Perhaps my mother-in-law would like it.

I take that idea just as seriously if I come across it in Nathan Barley as I would if I read it in some essay by Cornelius Cardew.

So do I. If Cardew made an effort of it and did it well, excellent. But this is one of those ideas that is much, much more likely to create something unlistenable or at least boring. The Doug Rocket character isn't going to create anything that's of value to anyone outside of his clique at this point in the game.

I took Barley's "let's chop some sense into that bollock" to mean "let's take bits of him saying his detached observations, chop it into jerky video bits, and cut the whole thing to some wild glitchy music." Basically the same impulse he seemed to have when he offered to use some of Claire's footage at his party. I'd imagine Claire would just put footage together to portray her subject in the best possible light, etc.

Has anyone else noticed that Claire's junkie choir thing is horrible, but in a completely perpendicular way to Barley's horribleness? The video of the junkie singing and playing guitar was a hint of Morris humor, I think.

The mutely furious cod-Orlando in bumphUK was great as well. The name of the shop is part of what Momus was talking about: it's clever ("bumph = stuff, junk" is pretty widely spread slang, yes?) and it's where satire tries to have its cake and eat it: cleverer than vice, but worse than them, but it knows it, yeah? (If this series leaves nothing else behind it, it may add ", yeah?" to the end of more ridiculous statements/straw men).

the tramp racing, the junkie choir/junkie song, the porno video nathan and his roommate were watching, the tokyo fashion thing, and the majority of the doug rocket stuff...

Dan and Nathan are in different sitcoms - when confronted with adversity, Dan blathers and fucks up, like Ronnie Corbett in Sorry, whereas Nathan is just gormless, but the world revolves in such a way that this doesn't hurt him "Los Banditos Boleros". Or perhaps it's a comment on how low the bar is set.

Somewhat of a surprise when the payoff shot is actually, funny, though. And shortly afterwards, kind of sweet.

Late in his interview, Zengotita talks about the things that can knock a self-mediator back towards some kind of "reality": accident, disease, death, and having children. So I'd like to ask people to speculate on what might happen to Barley in episode 6... or later in his life. Does he get hit by a car, become paralysed, and find himself terribly grateful when people visit him in hospital? Does he marry Claire and have kids and become responsible? Does he become some sort of Bono figure, and transform his self-mediation skills into a political quest for third world debt relief? Or does he just become some sort of locust with a camcorder, pillaging the world of its last resources and videoing himself as he goes?

Sure, RJG, the address is momus at t-online.de

Andrew, this was the essence of most of the scenes from the Big Train series, I recall.

Looking back over this thread (and, compared with the kind of debate about this going on elsewhere, it's been a delight) I realise that the connection in my mind between NB and Patrick Bateman had struck a few other people. The original NB is presented as a winner - venal, small-minded, blinkered and often plain evil but ultimately a sucess in his own little milieu. It's the moral sense of horror at this sucess that seems to be missing on the screen.

but he does win on TV as well, see the Japan TV thing last week. the horror is there too - for anything he does or says there is at one person in the same scene looking aghast or bewildered.

yes

.
.
.

It was amoebas.

By the way, this thread has now fuelled no less than two blog entries (one for each of my headset cellphones) elsewhere: on Click Opera and on Design Observer. Waste not, want not, as we say in Scotland.

Possibly the real-life 'coolness'/connectedness/Primrose Hillness of the band is what the have in mind.

Sorry, I'm not accepting any new applicants just now.

hahaha and vice got pwned! michael fuckin' jackson.

Dan's position, stuck in a world he hates, has been untenable from the start. But we have no clue how low he'll go. In the first episode we see him torn between scorn and collusion with "the idiots". He seems like he's going to be the John Wayne character. But soon we see he's no John Wayne. He's not even the Preacherman the idiots take him for. He's weak, fatally flawed by lack of money, lack of knowledge, lack of pride.

Dan's face has been the barometer of his conflicted emotions, and has twitched and sneered and cringed and looked baleful (the most brilliant acting of the series has been the gamut of negative feelings expressed by that face). But as he's jerking off the builder everything is running across that face at double speed and double strength: Dan is pained, embarrassed, humiliated, bewildered. HE IS JERKING OFF A BUILDER FOR MONEY.

The series could be called "Six Episodes In Search of Character". By the look of the trailer for Episode 6, though, it's more of a moral "Battle Royale", an elimination game with Dan and Nathan battling it out to be the "winner" in a world where only the pathetic survive.

Did anyone else like that song of Mandy's? "Bad... to have a bad uncle..." Delivered rather like Sarah Nixey on top of a particularly shivery Soft Cell chord sequence.

Morris can always generally be relied upon to use diegetic (and indeed non, c.f. "Blue Jam"/"Jam") music well; just the background songs seem chosen to jarring perfection - "Harvest for the World" and "Alright" in that family pub; "Stool Pigeon" IIRC earlier in the unspecified cafe.

I was actually glad when Claire's cracks showed, because it made her more an actual whole, rounded character, rather than just an empty shell for expressing disgust at Nathan and Dan.

Any idea what they are?

the resolution was all wrong - 6 characters at 6 pixels a piece > 32 columns the spectrum had.

And Dan Ashcroft - when will he get hold of a gun? I liked how he used his initiative and wore TWO gloves (and was still somewhat foiled even in that). He's like the further demoralised incarnation of Julian Barratt's char on The Mighty Boosh.

i think ashcroft WILL get a gun next episode... and possibly shoot nathan?

Down to 700,000 for the third episode, the second worst Friday night viewing figures Channel 4 has had in a decade. It's not even making the top 30 most viewed on C4.

someone on tv listing / review pages was also postulating about a second series and what it would contain - librarian chic was the only thing i remember.

target audience all out djing?

Still, they're down the pub before that, they're hardly hanging around watching TV.

ahhhhh, you may be right!

Nathan Barley's not really Friday night telly, is it?

What's the worst? I actually feel a bit guilty about this, since I suspect a pretty large proportion of us are going out on fridays then downloading NBs on saturday mornings...

I *was* wondering how Nick was going to react to this episode.

I think it captures the rivalries and one-ups that you get in the creative side of the media pretty well perfectly. There is a Barley in every office and he's always busking others' ideas, he KNOWS he's a wanker and his method of ascendancy is to play off everyone who finds him repellent against each other because that will leave him enough leeway to get the ear of the big boss, who the Ashcrofts in any given situation also have identified as a wanker in extremis.

haha, i did this for the first time last Saturday only to find that my housemate had taped it anyway, so we watched the VCR....then danced to '99 Luftballoons', wore shoulder pads, drank Tab Clear etc.

Sending up an alleged global fashion icon/"all-round cool person", with a recently discovered model stepdaughter to boot (as well as someone who mildly irritates me - see also Andre, who I hate more), in a show about the idiocy of posers and trendies makes sense to me. Like, they could replace her "Harajookoo Gurls" fixation with Sugar Ape staff. Or have Momus walk in(I kid, I kid).

Dan reminds me the most of Clerks' Dante Hicks, only even more wet. And instead of Randal Graves, he's got Nathan. And a builder instead of an ex who fucks a dead guy. And no one screaming "Snootchie nootchie bootchies!" in his general area.

Charlie Brooker interviewed Nick once for some BBC internet/computers thing that used to be on Radio 1 around the time of Stars Forever (I was told this when I interviewed CB for TvGoHome book and had moved from 'interview' to 'drink') and pronounced him both nice and interesting. I think Nathan Barley's twattishness comes from a combination of illiteracy, opportunism and Englishness.

BTW there is a 'thinkpiece' about Peter Doherty in the latest issue of Edgy Style Mag which is waaaaay too referential/reverential (did everyone catch the documentary last week?)

::rolls around on the floor in a delight of outrage::

Ste, doesn't the Hoxditch mentality still make room for countrywide/global 'icons'? I think 15Peter20 would agree.

In 1999? The same year he invented Nathan Barley, yeah?

I needed -- needed a friend
To help -- help me to mend
But I found friends could be bad
With this experience I had

"straight on straight gay scene" is a classic Chris Morris line.

Claire's last scene: it's not clear whether she's unaware that her allegation against Nathan is false (if it is), or whether she knows, but is still pissed off at him/the world for ruining her story.

I can't decide whether Morris/Brooker seems to be parodying Morris with Johnathon Yeah?'s prank.

The models are 6 years older than their stated ages. We know and accept Jonatton's explanation on that at this point. Claire knows and accepts this. But because Nathan thought he was having sex with a 13 year-old girl (and actually ejaculated with this thought firmly in mind), Claire decides that, morally, he did have sex with a 13 year old girl.

Actually, this theme runs through the whole series. People only think Sugarape magazine is called Rape (they don't see the "suga" but cos it's small), but it's okay, say the mag people, because it's really called Sugarape. The models only look like they're 13, but it's okay, because they're 18. Even Nathan's haircut only looks like it's messy, in fact it's carefully-wrought and expensive. ("Like it's been done at random," explains Nathan, "but if you look closely, you can see that it hasn't, except, you can't tell that?")

I can't decide whether Morris/Brooker seems to be parodying Morris with Johnathon Yeah?'s prank.

Of course there's a reference to the Brasseye pedophilia special here. Morris sees a spectrum of ways of being wrong in this kind of situation. You can be wrong like "the idiots" and hide behind moronic irony, or you can be wrong like Claire and cling to an idiotic literalness, persecuting people for thought-crime. It's the style press versus the tabloids, in a way. Both are fixated on the virtual rather than the real. Both make realities out of perceptions. The criticism here is somewhat Platonic. The whole of Nathan Barley could be situated in Plato's cave, an extended critique of people who think shadowplay is reality. Media people, people like me. And like Morris and Brooker themselves. So it's certainly auto-critique.

I'm not sure that's clear - he seemed panicked and also past the point of no return. I don't know whether there was an element of Momussian* pleasure in among the actual nervous system stuff.

*is the same sense as Sadistic - described by rather than experienced by.

xpost - It would be great if a broadsheet started printing just under their general readership: Are _you_ one of the Observer 700,000?

Speaking of fucked-up 13 year old girls, that movie from last year was pretty good.

Incidentally, has the "Suga" now been dropped? I'd need to rewatch it to make sure, but I seem to rememeber the mag covers just saying "RAPE" this week. I guess the Suga maybe just got even smaller though.

Enrique - I don't think the staff knew about the 13 thing, because it's not like they're shy about the clever tricks they're playing on everyone ("but because we got to touch them, we kind of are, yeah?"). Also Nathan isn't Sugarape staff.

he was worried at the end when claire started telling everyone he'd got a blowjob off a 13 year old.

"She's only 13-years old!"

"What?"

&

"As far as I'm concerned, Nathan, that was a blowjob off a 13-year old."

"This summer’s must-see is Extras, his barbed view of working actors set in green rooms and on movie sets. “We touch on my favourite sins — desperation and ego,” Gervais says. “I get more material from the egos of actors than anything else. And it has always fascinated me, the way actors talk about themselves. “Actors are usually, on the whole, thick, desperate, untalented and always thinking, ‘What about me? What about me?’” Apart from that, Gervais refuses to be drawn."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/images/bbc/150ricky_yctv_portrait.gif

Nathan's now the central figure at last. In the early episodes they had to try and find something for him to do inbetween the Dan scenes, now it was Dan who had the sub-plot - the wank in the bogs scene was this weeks scissors-in-cat's-head: the gratuitous gross-out big-laugh shot. (and Brooker/Morris stuck to a convential comedic power-of-three with Dan "leaking" sugaRAPE flyers to telegraph a pay-off: dropping them once in the office, next in the caff and then finally in the bogs which then meant the builder could find him at the end of the episode (as if Dan would carry SA flyers with him anyway!?))

Best comedy on TV at the moment.

It was a nice surreal motif, I think, that now he's being pwned by Jonattan, these things appear in his pockets/bag of their own accord.

I don't know what's real life and what's chris morris any more.

Barms, it's next Thursday at Cargo and the lineup is: Lady Sovereign, JME, Crazy Titch, Klashnekoff, Durrty Goodz, Stush, Kano, Demon & Ghetto, Katie Pearl, some folks from Roll Deep, DJ Logan Sama and DJ Ross Allen and MC Riko. All for £5 advance, too.
-- suzy (theartskooldisk...), March 15th, 2005.

the junkie was singing about his slavery to an audience of black people for gods sake...

Sven, how can you say that Nathan isn't cynical after Episode 5? He didn't stumble into the idea that he'd get sex for his money.

I laughed a lot, but I'm not sure I should've been.

though, what is an ending anyway?

The end was very My Wrongs. I don't there's any cliffhanger element to it - the idiots win, Ashcroft is beaten (the degree of his incapacitation kinda irrelevant), the end.

I didn't want to ruin it.

Or do I mean 'Mexico'?

I'll buy this on DVD if it comes out, though.

The hospital bed bit was a bad move too - if it'd've ended on the rewinding tape and Nathan's grinning then we'd've got the point and we'd've had the idiots winning on their terms, making the incident part of Nathan's TV series and getting Dan to sign for it just wasn't needed. It seemed to be there for 2 purposes - one to bring back the rest of the cast and secondly for those "you can be a producer on my show" pronouncements. Fuck knows what conclusion you draw after that. That Morris and Brooker are saying that THEY are Nathan Barley? God knows. Seeing how we knew that Nathan was an idiot, the culture farm is being taken over by the idiots and that Dan was a bit rubbish during the first five minutes of episode one it's no sort of ending.

I can count a hideous amount of elements throughout that are like that - the right elements misplaced, wrong tone at the wrong time. I think when it comes down to it Chris Morris isn't a director. I wonder how script reads? I've already heard someone who worked on the show say they're mystified how such a fantastic script misfired so badly. Brass Eye and The Day Today seem tightly scripted almost to the frame, I'd be interested to see how detailed this one was. I suspect there was some Mike Leigh style "improvise the scene together" stuff involved.

There was a really good TV show in there somewhere, but its just didn't go hard enough in any direction to be anything. Not comedy enough, not comedy-drama enough, not sitcom enough. Too much mish mash. And certainly not hard enough on its targets.

-- why must we cut onions? (pau...), March 1st, 2005 3:29 PM. (Lynskey)

I stand atop the Clever Clog, riding the waves of recognition and respect. I also am aware in the back of my mind that I am now Comic Book Guy. Strangest. Few Seconds. Ever. . . . . Shut up. *falls out of window*

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

Claire should (would?) never have TOLD Nathan about her interview/pitch

Dan should've (would've?) known better than to try and play Nathan at his own game

the end scenes were really disturbing i thought - all throughout the show Dan seemed helpless and unable to control what was happening anyway, so he may as well be in the hospital bed for all the power he has. it was 'awful' to watch but then neither he or Claire were 'strong' enough to just tell The Idiots to stop/make them stop/take a stand - so they don't deserve the sympathy. it's this 'no hero/nobody wins' msg that seemed to emanate from the piece overall that i found unsettling (tho expected, this ain't Gervais & Merchant after all), but pretty fascinating to watch unfold. of course no-one is really satisfied by the end are they? but i don't expect a second series.

did you watch the whole series RJG? despite thinking it was rubbish?

In the TVGoHome version, it was possible to have the apoplectic narrator represent "all right-thinking people" in his condemnations of Barley (although in fact his Hitler-like fury made him sound deranged), but in the TV show the enemies of hipsterism had to be "situated": you had to see what clothes they were wearing. When that meant, in Dan's case, a grunge shirt and grunge hairstyle, it wasn't so obvious that the taste of the accusers was all that much better than the taste of the accused. The sad truth is, people who hate hipsters are usually less adequate human beings than hipsters, and their hate is finally less attractive than hipsters' self-love. What's more, in a couple of years they'll grudgingly embrace many of the Barleyisms they think they disdain. Their rage is just a way of paying attention.

"is something brilliant happening?"

was fucking genius.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha! preach!

I rushed home early from the party in Shoreditch and everything. And now I'll never know how it ended...

I missed episodes 2 and 4, too, but downloaded them.

The trouble is, merchant bankers are in a way the model consumers, early adopters, affluent, working hard on being original, etc. It's impossible to dismiss them, because the general populace will probably be doing versions of the things the merchant bankers are doing a few years down the line. Things merchant bankers were seen doing in NB -- talking loudly on their cellphones in public places, for instance -- are already universals

The Nathan Barley series shows this quite well, I think: you can't win when you hate a group of people who are more affluent than you, more positive than you, early adopters, and creative. The scene of Dan playing "cock muff bumhole" or gambling on Russian tramps shows that "the Idiots" have powerful memes on their side. When Dan wants to attack them, he'll either see his counter-memes enlisted and recruited by the Idiots, or he'll fail to come up with anything as interesting (see his pathetic attempt to dismiss 15Peter20). He ends up joining them, but half-heartedly. They win. His half-hearted passive aggression is puritan, uncreative, dour and doesn't stop him becoming just as pathetic as they are.

As for Henry's merchant bankers point, if only that were the case. If only society were really structured in such a way that we would all become as rich as merchant bankers are now. Surely the point is not that merchant bankers ought to remain a universal hate object just like hipsters (which seems to be Henry's thinking). The point is that there shouldn't be class divisions impossible to cross. Major cataclysms aside, it seems likely that developed nations will continue to double their wealth every few decades. People will advance further into consumer culture, mediation culture, gizmo-friendliness... all the things that we deride the Idiots for. We should work to ensure that these things are available to as many people as possible, not work to discredit them as inherently evil or elitist.

I should add "kidulthood" and "ludic behaviour", two tendencies NB is also satirizing with its scenes of hipsters riding around on tiny, brightly-coloured tractors. It is, inchallah, the fate of all advanced peoples to become ludic kidults.

No, it shows that Dan is too weak to resist trying to join in and get acceptance. If Claire - or, say, the receptionist - had been playing cock muff bumhole too, you might have had a point.

Well, does the future belong to Claire? Let's see, she's from oop north and she's into gritty social realism. That means exposing children to grim realities like heroin addiction, and turning it into entertainment which, inexplicably, everyone down south finds funny. So let's say Claire wins, gets her series. She joins the media elite. She does eventually start doing coke, you know. And that Tiny Tim-type junky gets a record contract and becomes a yuppie too.

That license must be as freely available to the Bangladeshis of Brick Lane as the slumming Home Counties debs.

Yeees, but relying on the free market (or Daddy's money as it is more commonly known) isn't actually going to do much about that.

"Cock Muff Bumhole" isn't much of an example of a powerful meme, anyway: the only originality is a thin layer of "it's not good because it's rude, it's good because it looks like it's good because it's rude", which someone told them once, and they scribbled down (after looking at an older boy for reassurance) in their catechism of "why it's all right to be us".

"Florida has taken something qualitative and turned it into something quantitative. That's what social scientists do. It's their special form of creativity. But in his argument in favor of economic development based on the arts and on businesses favored by the kind of people who enjoy the arts, he seems to have exaggerated either the size or the creativity of his Creative Class. I don't have any more faith in the prevalence of Florida's class than I do in the so-called values voters who cropped up after the elections. Both groups exist in nature but have been somewhat inflated for the sake of argument.

"These days every time I walk down, say, Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn's Park Slope, I notice how the distinctions between the hip places are beginning to blur. One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome."

Dennis Potter did it so much better in Blue Remembered Hills.

Dan was skilled, but not marketable anywhere outside of his niche at SugarApe. He could probably go get an entry-level job elsewhere but he's doing fairly well, so he'd rather play the game and flog himself for it.

That scene with the idiots discussing NB's column, reminded me of some of the Spinal Tapp moments.

erm by carefully dying before the puritans turned up?