Nathan Barley comes to TV

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.