Nathan Barley comes to TV

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.