Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

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steve otm

this happened in the show except he thought she turned out not be under-age (at which point NB thinking it now okay to pretend she WAS under-age was actually quite a clever little point about...something or other).

i did hate NB but yes no less than anyone else around him.

Actually, scratch that, that's not the idea at all. It's funny caricatures falling into situations and scrambling to return to the status quo whilst simultaneously being trapped; a very old-fashioned sitcom thread. I certainly didn't feel that is was trying to make a big insightful statement about something, at least, nothing larger than "it's better to like something than to dislike something."

'THIR-FUCKING-TEEN'.

In fairness, I guess originally Barley wasn't really a character, just a cipher, and in making him human Morriss and Brooker made him more, er, human. I just don't think that made for great comedy. It wasn't sharp enough to be genuine satire and it wasn't silly enough to be knockabout comedy. It was just 'dark'.

I doubt whether Channel 4 enforced any 'nicening'.
You know, maybe Barley always looked like that in Brooker's head, and if you boil the actions in any of the episodes down to the kind of 3-sentence description that you would find in TV Go Home, it wouldn't be that different. But TVGH gave the impression that Barley was a cartoonishly horrible amoral grotesque, and that's not what we got in the TV show. We got 'idiots'. I hoped it would be either venemous or ridiculous and it was neither.

pt. I

pt. II

i lolled?

Oh okay, I didn't read the website so I didn't know what was supposed to happen, I only saw (and liked) what did.

'TDT' radio show was 1992. he was doing big things on london radio about then too.

'blue jam' dropped at the arse-end of '97 and was hot into the double-nine.

for me it went bad with 'jam' but then i was a student contrarian at the time, maybe i missed out.

it's just that there was a looong hiatus between the underwhelming 'brass eye '01' and 'nathan barley'.

ie 'on the hour' (in b4 sotcaa smackdown).

ie 'on the hour' (in b4 sotcaa smackdown).

on which Morris had only as much if not less input than Lee, Herring, Marber, Baynham etc. [/sotcaa swot]

fig 1
the day today = bends
brass eye = ok computer
blue jam = kid a
jam = amnesiac
BES = hail to the thief
nathan barley / it crowd = the eraser

as a team they really were a 90s Python only with a much more 'subliminal' influence on everything after (they're all known but not really as celebrated as Python gang were after they disbanded). i know the comparisons only stretch so far.

After Python there seemed to be quite a gap between something like that and early 80s 'alternative' 'edgy' stuff (Comic Strip etc.), only a handful of decent well crafted sitcoms in the 70s - which seems stranger and stranger looking back. perhaps we're seeing a similar effect even now with Whitehouse having killed laughtrack sketchom only for it's reanimated corpse to stalk the lands taller than ever before in Little Britain and Tate. Gervais is an anomaly with ridiculous carte blanche but can take 'credit' for pushing 'reality comedy' into mainstream. The conventional sitcoms remains thwarted, no show in that vein unable to command mass appeal of even mid 90s predecessors.

i think you're gonna have a very different perspective than me tbh, my dad knew about him before i did via radio 4 and he basically made me watch 'the day today', and then there was the radio one music show which was a revelation -- but also not infallible. so yeah the post-jam mystique is a bit lame, but it really is a recent development within his career, and arguably it ended with 'nathan barley' anyway.

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or the Mel C.

Yes, his very best work is probably behind him but I have a lot of time for most of his stuff post-BE. It was the "utter shit"/"I turned it off during the ad break" reaction of many posters on the SOTCAA/NotBBC/CaB forums to the BE P43d0 Special back in 2001 that made me realise that I just wasn't going to hack it as one of that crowd. Maybe I'm too easily amused.

cook - morris
miller - marber
moore - coogan (ok it breaks down a bit here)
bennett - iannucci (wheels: off)

but he's still sort of otm.