Nathan Barley comes to TV

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?

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahling, that's exactly how I was wearing my cape!

There'd be some chunk of editorial up on the front page dissecting I'm Alan Partridge or something and all subsequent chatter would be in the shadow of that. Even if the debate which followed was broadly dissenting wrt the head article there'd always be this funny feeling that..."No, you don't really get it, do you?"

I dunno, I'm probably projecting a bit but it did make me quite cross and I gave up on them.