Nathan Barley comes to TV

i'm not sure - i thought so at first but it soon became clear that he was a pitiful character, somewhere between David Brent and Tim for me. actually that's me in a nutshell, maybe. ack.

the timing thing isn't so relevant for me because of this 'nostalgia' aspect mentioned upthread, plus the humour relying a great deal on just the absurd exaggeration of it all. i can enjoy it whilst thinking back to my own experiences as a numeeja design underling and personal hatred/envy conflicts re Hoxditch hype.

I'm bored to the back teeth of the SOTCAA/NotBBC/Cook'd and Bomb'd crowd - those forums were always like the most soul-sapping aspects of ILX and it's no surprise that they loathe this. Imagine an ILM where all the threads were about much worse everything is getting and how even the bands we liked have lost it. Oh, wait...

Morris is stuck with being lorded as the undisputed heavyweight comic genius of our time so if he turns something out that's slightly to the left of the money, or three-fifths as good as Peep Show or whatever, it's a calamity and a Slade musical written with Richard Stilgoe can only be round the corner.

The reviewers who've said it gets uncomfortably close to The Office are right; it's The Office transplanted to a loft where The Play Ethic has gone mad. But I think that's okay; The Office was simply the precursor of a new school of 'embarrassment comedy', and Morris and Brooker are big enough not to stand in its shadow. What's good about this embarrassment comedy thing is that it really makes you feel with the characters. That keeps it from being a Vanity Fair or Rake's Progress or Beggar's Opera-style ensemble piece, just a parade of unsympathetic fops and bullies.

And I have to say I was snorting with embarrassed laughter at scenes like the one where Nathan goes into an Asian newsagent and calls the owner 'my nigga'. Horrific, yes. Over the top, well, not really; I know people who would almost do that.

There's a constant stream of references to massacres, exploitation, atrocities... 9/11, Mai Lai, Hitler, 'that cool e mail of a woman being bummed by a wolf...' These events are all trivialised by Barley for the sake of some kind of banal 'normative aggression', and seen as essentially no different from the pranks he plagues his shy, sensitive assistant with. Or perhaps the pranks are just massacres and atrocities scaled down to chick-pea size, web dimensions. The thing I'm wondering, though, is whether the reverse situation wouldn't be worse. If The Idiots made no reference to Vietnam, Hitler, gangsta rap etc and were simply privileged white kids in a playpen, would they be exonerated? In other words, what is the function of this constant transpostion of their antics with atrocity? And if they were no longer pedalling along the streets on tiny bicycles, the cars would have the street to themselves, right? And that would be better... how?

I haven't seen much Morris stuff, but what I have seen made lots of references to atrocities of one kind or another (dog bomb, spot the assassin or something). In fact, that was why I didn't like him.

Very poor.

I guess maybe it would be different for me if I could experience it from the Class Envy aspect, with an edge of schadenfreude but I just don't. I just feel sorry for the Trustafarians because I know too many of them and know how empty their emotional lives are, so I can't see them as figures of fun or hate, just of pity. [/poor little rich girl routine]

I'm not really sure who this programme is supposed to be aimed at. Not me, I guess. Are those ads in the tube actually ads for those silly phones, or are they some kind of weird guerilla advertising for NB? That confuses me.

If you would actually care to look, there isn't a consensus on those boards. Some liked it, some hated it, some expressed mild apathy. I didn't care for it, but then I was expecting some comedy rather than one extended media in-joke. Nice use of Broadcast, though.

I predict Pingu will crack and attempt to kill Nathan by episode six.

i quite enjoyed it, from the TCP joke at the beginning onwards. it is rather officey, but i think momus is right about the comedy of embarrassment thing.

also if arsehole beats muff, then muff must beat cock and cock must beat arsehole, which i'm sure you could get a psychology dissertation out of...

that one of morris's touchstone themes seems to be "fuck the world for it is infested w.ppl self-convinced they're at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at but not (=A), at the expense of the ppl who ARE at the cutting-edge-of-where-it's-at (=B)" - but actually the overlooked victims are all the ppl nowhere near the CEoWIA (i mean, whether or not you grant this mythical beast walks the earth anyway, or is worth seekin out) (=C)

ie it (unintentionally) fosters a dubious gradient B » A » C

peel is an interesting person to mention in ref this, since HIS moral gradient (i think always) made a link between A and C: momus and i (and lots of others) had a big fight abt this years ago, where i wz confusedly arguing that Peel saw Ivor Cutler and "Home Truths" as equivalents, not opposites (not to deify particularly: i just mean that for him a similar rule-of-thumb caused him to gravitate to these apparently difft cultural areas where)

anyway, switching randomly across TV in the last two weeks, I arrived at some former scriptwriter/comedy maven - a retired old guy - being interviewed abt the "state of things", and CEoWIA (to me rather charmingly i must say, bz SO off the map of all possible ) declaring that the funniest thing on television at the moment as the talkin baby in MY HERO!

the point i'm makin might be clearer if i could remember who/what this guy actually was/had been, obv - i find a year of writin a book and lookin after ailin parents has FUCKED w.my cuttin-edge-of-where-it-used-to-be-at memorybanks (i had to hunt for jennifer saunders' name in conversation a few days back: as in, "dawn french but the other one, you know")

the point i spose is that morrisism not-entirely-inadvertently fosters a shinin ideal of media-meritocracy - a fuzzin utopia of the in-the-know - but the effect of pushin so relentlessly for this is actually to ENABLE the Bs of the world

hmmmm, is a single word of what i just wrote clear? i didn't actually watch NB (i watched the simpsons) (haha i shd have said i watched "according to bex")

ps i think this is a complicated conundrum btw
pps = i think lady-one-question IS FUNNY and so do you

Nathan Barley followed The Simpsons on Ch4.

That must have been the bit where Alan Partridge shouted 'AHA!' for the first time. Or perhaps the bit where the molasses spilled all over Stan Laurel's dungarees...

The TV Nathan Barley did come across like a harmless Partridge/Brent deluded fool type for his sensible-like-us stooges (Ascroft, Tim etc) to roll eyes at, but as a charecter he paled next to those, therefore it dissapointed me.

I mean, the crueller it is, the funnier it will be. What I liked about Cunt in TVGH was how it quickly built itself up into an apoplectic fury at it's subject, which was largely missing from the TV version. Pile on the spite and the righteous, bordering-on-unhinged anger and we'll have something special.

9.00pm Cunt
Nathan Barley perches on a bench in Battersea Park fiddling with the special effects settings on an achingly futuristic Sony digital camera, taking motion-blurred monochrome snaps of his old schoolfriend Crispin, who needs a portrait for the opening page of a website showcasing his own downloadable garage MP3s, and is currently standing in front of the Peace Pagoda, sucking his cheeks in and staring at a tree in the distance.
Do you think you're some kind of fucking Renaissance man just because you've got a few ostensibly creative applications and a shitload of money to spend on high-tech gagetry? Do you have any idea how many other fuckheads all over the world are, right at this very minute, using precisly the same technology to produce precisly the same pedestrian results as you? Why don't you just take all your software, all your gadgets, all your pointless digital fuckery-foo and hurl the lot of it right into the fucking sea? You're using it to churn out shit. Get a fucking grip. You're a cunt; you have always HAVE been a cunt and you always WILL be a cunt - a useless, artless, soulless, worthless, hateful, sickening, handful-of-you-own-shit-fucking, cunt-chewing, cunt-eyed cunt. And your lazy, delusional stabs at creativity aren't fooling anyone, so stop trying. Prick. Our research team would like to talk to you: call 020 7656 7018
Producer Lo-Slung Denim

"I imagined the dreadful day when I can no longer derive the faintest pleasure from my Paul Smith polished berunia condom applicator. But, then again, I might be rapturously anticipating my life as a sunbeam, singing tra-las to the season of mists and kissing the pates of the ludicrous. Or what if I've been run over, pierced by a spear of frozen piss from a passing airliner, or stabbed by one of The Observer weirdos who've set up a daily Geefe vigil in the pub on the corner?

In turmoil, I faxed the editor a selection of starts for my column for 22 August. He hated them all. `… what the fuck's this: "I've been wondering this week whether sharble should be the word for a grain of instant coffee that hasn't dissolved by the time you drink it"?' I told him that would be what I'd write if I'd come to terms with my death to the extent that I no longer bothered to mention it at all."

It's funny and it's bewildering. And it's hard to say that The Idiots, with their unpredictable new fads and foibles, aren't just as funny and just as fruitfully brow-furrowing. Or am I mixing up Mark S's As and Bs? Is it always clear which is which? Which is good bewilderment and which bad? Which deserves BAFTAs and which bullets?

(i mean maybe the above: i'm not saying it's an iron law) (i kinda think it is but i wouldn't know how to prove this)

i think i wz actually watching futurama on DVD: the second simpsons wz v.poor and i needed cheerin up)

* = iain lee

That's fair comment - I became so exasperated with various exchanges on those boards 2-3 years ago that I now have a tendency to tar everyone with the same broad brush of disdain; SOTCAA seemed to have been set up with the premise that everything was going to rubbish and no one else would say so (but here are some nice downloads/articles/edit logs) and I was never very comfortable with that. It's rather like when someone 'leaves' ILX - "Why did you stop posting?" "Cos they're all wankers." Not remotely true but you can kinda see their point...

("Actually caring to look" would unfortunately involve scanning down page after page of commentary on various threads some possibly started months and months ago; it's not really worth the effort once you've left that circle. I was really reacting to the front page editorial piece).

I do feel like I've semi-arbitrarily decided to stick up for NB, or at least give it a go, because of the assumed comedy-webgeek negative consensus, but the points made above are good (and some actually sting. "Bubble"?)

many xposts

Also see Barley and the idiots chuckling over, bigging up and claiming Dan Ashcroft's The Rise of The Idiots piece, which they somehow didn't realise was an attack on them - they liked it because it was 'cool' or whatever. That can't be helped, it seems. Yeah? Totally.

the unclarity of the line is what makes the comedy, or something? when does "you"ll always be a cunt" stop being pitilessly OTM and start being a bit fascist? depends on who's saying it, and what their access to power and airwave-policing is: ricky gervaise = someone (for me) who keeps stepping back and forth over the line (consciously: i mean, its the line he's playing with, the line that makes him funny - and the fact that it unsettles me rather than makes me complacent is what i like abt it - but to do this it has to risk being actual real bullyboy stuff)

(x-post because I haven't got a television, Stevem)

OTM. Homer was always lovably stupid, but there was a point when the writers decided to make him a jerk. It seems they were trying to catch up with South Park by injecting some cruelty, but Homer isn't Cartman. The heart has gone from these episodes and the jokes aren't all that great either.

out of the recent C4 run two or three (out of what, ten?) have been pretty funny (eg i quite liked run lisa run) (tho actually i wz on the phone for half of it), but this just sets you up for sadness :(

what i disliked abt ned's themepark to maude wz that misplaced "heart" rather than the absence of it