07/06/07
Text: Matt Phelan
Photographers: Matt Phelan
At six episodes apiece, the average season of a British comedy series requires the financial commitment of the typical mid-budget indie film, and as a result, they tend to exhibit some of the things you’d expect from one: close-knit troupes of performers and behind-the-scenes creative people, narrative experimentation and, perhaps most shockingly, decent jokes. Their short lifespan has also made them rapidly evolving wit machines, the hilarious bacteria of the British TV petri dish. Unlike U.S. comedy series, these shows find their voice, speak their piece and get off your television before you have a chance to change channels. Also unlike American sitcoms, they’re not forced to whore their mirth for the benefit of corporate sponsors.
Below is a quick, by-no-means-definitive guide to Britain’s post-Office comedy landscape, beginning with Nathan Barley—a show which stands out as the most obvious candidate for syndication on MTV since the cable channel once acquired the BBC’s 1982 off-campus-housing farce The Young Ones. (And it’s a testament to the network’s zeitgeist-fumbling irrelevance that today I can’t even imagine it appearing on the supposedly edgy MTV2.)
Nathan Barley: Piss artists, terrorism comedy and a taxonomy of hiptards
Currently available from U.K.-based web vendors on a universally compliant Region 0 DVD, Nathan Barley follows its titular character, a 20-something DJ, doltishly exuberant clothes pony and “self-facilitating media node.” Barley ruins the life of his involuntary mentor, Dan Ashcroft, a lost and bullshit-weary senior writer for an urban-lifestyle magazine. Ashcroft has just published a screaming jeremiad, “Rise of the Idiots,” targeting exactly the kind of fatuous hiptards (e.g., Barley) who immediately begin lauding his piece’s “awesome fuckin’ opinions.” Plagued by a pervasive distrust of the adult world, Dan lives trapped in a mid-gentrification Never-Never Land surrounded by his idiot fan base, whom he labels, to their rapt adulation, “self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality.” And worse still, as he proceeds on his six-episode descent into hipster hell, Dan Ashcroft becomes increasingly afraid that he might be one of them.
Finally, we have the first sustained critique of youth culture’s devolution into Kevlar post-irony, and, as a bonus, we’re getting it as a hilarious new British sitcom. (Well, factually, it’s already been on DVD for a year.) Where Gawker’s “Blue States Lose” and Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook have thus far provided merely a derisive taxonomy, Nathan Barley models entire ecosystems, comprehensive lifecycles of viral aesthetic trends.
It’s difficult to gauge exactly how America will react when it finally catches on to the existence of this 2005 series. Saddled here with self-satisfied, by-scenesters-for-scenesters fare like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or the online Williamsburg sitcom The Burg (entertainment whose bleakness falls closer to hipster Seinfeld than Swiftian saeva indignatio), the question becomes: is there even a stateside market for sight gags that involve a trust-fund baby wearing a neon-green T-shirt as a pair of pants? Are we ready to laugh at a cocksure twat like Nathan Barley referring to his jailbait pussy score as “technically a Polanski” while riding on a crowded bus? And, mind you, while speaking into a cell phone that folds out into twin mp3 decks?
Hopefully yes, but the initial response could easily be just as bad as Britain’s, where the show garnered only 5% of the available viewers for Channel 4’s Friday-night time slot. (The series ended with under 700,000 viewers by its final episode.) However, as The Sunday Times noted, Barley “more than made up for disappointing ratings with its disproportionate social impact,” having, by series’ end, “garnered more column inches than the return of Doctor Who.” And now Channel 4 has green-lit a second season, tentatively due to air sometime in 2008. “Shooting won’t happen till we’ve completed the scripts,” series co-creator Christopher Morris told me via e-mail, “and we’re working on those around more immediate projects.”
Part of this newfound interest can undoubtedly be attributed to Barley’s generally high quality and its ubiquitous presence on YouTube. The deciding factor for Channel 4’s decision to pursue a second series, however, may have been increased international sales due to the ingenious release of Barley as a Region 0 DVD. When I asked Morris if the station had expressed any piracy concerns over the region-free encoding, the kind of wonderfully forward-thinking journalistic maneuver that could easily get aerosolized into an entire puff piece for Wired, he hazily recalled, “There may have been a stifled bleat.”
It’s a blithe response typical of his casually avant-garde approach to comedy. Routinely described in the British press as a “media terrorist,” Morris began his career in radio, where he repeatedly courted unemployment by conducting pranks (including two fabricated items on the deaths of Top of the Pops host Jimmy Savile and Conservative MP Michael Heseltine) with a War of the Worlds-level verisimilitude. A critically acclaimed TV and radio news satirist throughout the 90s, Morris disappeared for four years prior to Barley, after broadcasting a beyond-controversial satire about “pedophile hysteria” and the salacious current-affairs television feeding it. (“This man is having sex with a 10-year-old girl. In our reconstruction, she’s played by a 25-year-old woman. The breasts are inaccurate.”) Anticipating the furor over the “Paedogeddon!” special, Morris scheduled a holiday in France with his wife and two children coinciding with its 2001 airdate. When news of his involvement with Nathan Barley surfaced, media attention focused on the fact that the comedian the Daily Mail had once called “the most loathed man on TV” was returning with what was ostensibly a conventional sitcom.
As a character, Nathan was originally conceived as the subject of a nonexistent documentary series entitled Cunt, a show that enjoyed recurring capsule reviews at TVGoHome.com, a web-based parody of the Radio Times magazine’s TV listings. (Got all that?) It had been devised and written by the London Guardian’s media critic Charlie Brooker, who explains that the notion of adapting the character for a sitcom occurred when he first met Morris “through mutual friends at a dinner party, which is very bloody middle-class.” After three years of writing about the imaginary Nathan Barley on TVGoHome, Brooker recalls, “[He had] expanded to cover virtually any stripe of modern poseur I could think of. There were lots of different ways you could ‘do’ Nathan. You could easily turn him into a detached Patrick Bateman type, for instance—but the wide-eyed, barging, try-too-hard, insecure-but-over-pleased arsehead was the funniest way to go.” As a script consultant, Morris enlisted the aid of a long-standing writing partner, Peter Baynham, today the Academy Award-nominated co-screenwriter of Borat. He’s someone who “talks as if sticking to the point is pure evil,” according to Morris. Stephen Merchant, co-creator of Extras and The Office, also contributed notes on the material.
Though deflating the pretensions of “an imaginary cocksure twat was satisfying,” Brooker admits that for the early TVGH listings, “the main joke was always the insane degree of anger blasted in Barley’s direction.” (For instance, an average synopsis reports, “Barley […] visits a loud, overpriced South London bar to share wood-fired pizza and smug conversation with an equally vile companion.”) “Re-reading the very first Barley listings,” he says, “it’s really just me getting annoyed at the very notion of upper-middle-class kids slumming it.”
This dangerous roman à clef aspect, which lead some to incorrectly view Dan Ashcroft as a composite of Brooker and Morris themselves, is rumored to have almost cost the show its second season. Still, it’s not hard to see dozens of obvious real-world analogues in Barley’s cast of characters. The series includes a great joke on the logical extremes to celebrity portraiture necessitated by the likes of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Terry Richardson and David LaChapelle. (All three combine in the form of media darling 15Peter20, whose “truly vulnerable” photographs depict celebrities like David Bowie and Kylie Minogue urinating in public.) The show fashions giddily insulting caricatures out of Dazed & Confused cofounder Jefferson Hack and ex-Eurythmic David Stewart, parodies the art-damaged narcissists who star in Burning Angel-style alt-porn and gleefully lampoons radical-chic graffiti bombers like Banksy and the Adbusters’ Culture Jammers. “Incidentally,” Brooker adds, “the Sugar Ape ‘Vice’ issue from Episode 5 wasn’t an assault on Vice magazine—I think it just (understandably) ended up looking that way.”
Perhaps even more so than the piss-poor timeslot, wounding the pride of London’s style-mag tastemakers may have been the deciding factor in the show’s poor ratings and relative anonymity. Early in its run, the series was panned for the Times of London by Neil Boorman, a former editor for the Shoreditch-based Sleazenation. While publicly acknowledging his hopes for Nathan Barley’s success—particularly after the failure of his similarly themed reality pilot Shoreditch Twat TV—Boorman pronounced it “five years late and woefully out of touch.” He might have had a case if the show was meant merely as a play on the (circle one) ür-trendy/so-over Hoxton and Shoreditch districts in northeast London and not something more accessible. As Morris and Brooker emphatically told the press, Hosegate—the fictitious London district of Nathan Barley—could easily have been any place of its kind: Echo Park or Silver Lake in L.A.; Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin; Shibuya in Tokyo; Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; or, of course, Williamsburg.
And Vice itself, unable to risk either popularizing or ignoring the series (ctrl+f “Nathan Barley” at their U.K. message boards to see what I mean), published an utterly inscrutable capsule review that seems to employ all seven types of Empsonian ambiguity in just four sentences:
Nathan Barley Channel 4
Anybody who’s a target of this show either pretends they haven’t seen it or they think it’s boring. Truth is, it’s fucking funny. There’s even a nod to Vice on here, which is not surprising because we’re Charlie Booker’s [sic] favourite magazine. When he’s not propping his half-formed “extreme VIZ” shtick up with Chris Morris’ genius he sits on the bog crying and wanking off at how much funnier/popular we are than him, the fucking miserable cunt who never gets laid.
DAN ASHCROFT
Suffering my attempts to parse the review’s layers of meaning (the use of the show’s protagonist as a pseudonym, the crypto-deferential “cunt” insult, etc.), Brooker concluded it was “sort of handshake and head-butt” but decided to “assume it’s positive, just for the hell of it.” He remains remarkably convivial about the magazine. “We looked at some copies of Vice when developing Nathan and co., and despite expecting to hate it, I found bits of it hilarious. Intentionally, I mean. Some of the writing had a gleefully obnoxious, Jackass-y quality to it.”
Early critics of the series would seem to have been proved wrong by the show’s ever-increasing cult following and rumors of a second series, which Morris personally confirmed this past March during a rare speaking engagement at Bournemouth University. He told the largely student audience that he was working “seven days a week” on writing the second series of Nathan Barley and that shooting would follow work on a larger project that reportedly “would take him back to his current-affairs roots.” (It is allegedly either a spoof of United 93 or a comedy about suicide bombers in London.) He also told Bournemouth that series two of Nathan Barley would feature a largely new cast and explore significantly different situations.
When I pried for season-two news last December, Morris responded with the cryptic e-mail missive, “Nathan has a brother.” Turns out he was being quite literal. Nathan does, indeed, have a sibling, Jason Barley, who will be featured prominently in the upcoming season.
I’m sorry. I’m still too busy fantasizing about a comedy version of United 93 (one that manages to dissect Airplane!-like film parodies and our increasingly surreal War on Terror) to offer a coherent ending to this piece. Just consider buying season one of Nathan Barley now, before the dollar-to-pound exchange rate gets any worse.
