Nathan Barley comes to TV

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.