Last Tuesday I outlined a long-standing and very frustrating Catch-22 that has been a salient part of my existence. A subsequent conversation with a friend touched on the subject of Nathan Barley. I had caught about three or four of the six episodes of the series when they first aired. However, I missed the first episode. I think this made a significant difference since, although I enjoyed the series, I didn't then recognise it as one of the best things ever broadcast in television history. After the conversation, however, I decided to look the series up again on YouTube and watch it through from the first episode. I realised, when I did so, what I had missed in missing two or three episodes.
Apart from the titular hero, Nathan Barley, a self-serving (or "self-facilitating") idiot who somehow stumbles through to good fortune either through the malice of the gods, or because he is bouyed up by the prevalence in the world of other idiots, one of the main characters is Dan Ashcroft, an embittered journalist who writes an article entitled, 'The Rise of the Idiots', as an indictment of a vain and facile society, and is hailed by the idiots who read the magazine as "the Preacher Man".
The Catch-22 situation that I outlined, as follows:
To be able to show the world that the people on the stage are worthless cunts who have just elbowed their way on to the stage to bathe in limelight, you have to elbow your way onto the stage to bathe in limelight.
could well be called 'the Dan Ashcroft Dilemma'. The dilemma is perhaps best typified by a scene in which Dan Ashcroft is forced, for financial reasons, and against his will, to appear at DJ event organised by Nathan Barley for purposes of self-promotion, dressed in priest's garb, and "doing a turn" as the Preacher Man. The more that Ashcroft, now he has taken the stage (and there must also be some opportunism mixed with his unwilingness, since this is a chance to address the idiots) tells the crowd of idiots before him that he's not the Preacher Man, and that they are idiots, the more fervently they hail him as the Preacher Man.
'Swiftian', I think, is an epithet often misapplied. It was certainly misapplied by someone to Michael Moore, who, in the words of someone I spoke to on the subject, "writes like a six-year-old". The term could certainly be applied with greater appropriateness to Nathan Barley. There is, in fact, a Swift reference, and a very good one, in one of the later episodes. A television mogul is praising the cruel moronic prank clips on Nathan Barley's website, and giving them far too much credit with his analysis: "It's Swift as Jackass," says the mogul. Barley, obviously ignorant of the reference, thinks for a moment and then says, "Or… even faster."
I'm not going to look through all the comments now, but amongst them is a comment that goes something like this: "This television series is actually a carefully researched and well-reasoned argument on the right to kill people." It would be hard to find words that better express the intelligance, accuracy and sting of the satire here. My only fear is that, as with Ashcroft's article, the idiots will love it.
I could say more, I could rave about the attention to detail, such as the book with the title, Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics, lying incidentally by in a scene set in a hairdresser's – a detail easily missed, but which makes the whole scene so much more heartbreaking – and many other such details or moments throughout, but since part of what makes this series great is that these details are not telegraphed, I won't do what most programme makers do, and draw your attention to them with a big, red, pointy arrow. If you have not already discovered Nathan Barley, I would invite you to do so for yourself.
Anonymous writes:I’ll have to watch that series again.Here is the address for Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home website, where the Nathan Barley character first appeared, in case you haven’t seen it yet: http://www.tvgohome.com/TV Go Home is a collection of fake TV listings written mostly by Brooker with contributions by some of his comedian friends (including Jon Blyth, who is quite funny).Nathan Barley appears about halfway through the series in a regular feature called “Cunt”.I think Brooker said in an interview that he toned down Nathan Barley for the TV series and tried to make him a little more likeable.
Justin Isis writes:This show is definitely too complicated for anyone in North America to understand; the idea of becoming what you hate by engaging with it at all (even to oppose it) is something that I doubt any US television writers would even understand, much less be able to portray dramatically as Brooker and Morris have.
Here is the address for Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home website, where the Nathan Barley character first appeared, in case you haven’t seen it yet: http://www.tvgohome.com/Thanks. I think I’ve seen some of the listings excerpted somewhere, but don’t think I’ve browsed the website before. I think my favourite one from that page is It Shouldn’t Happen to a… Blameless Child. I think Brooker said in an interview that he toned down Nathan Barley for the TV series and tried to make him a little more likeable.I think in some ways it makes the satire more effective that he’s partially likeable. I think the series starts out with him looking like a harmless but irritating dick, but it becomes clear that he’s really quite nasty, though he doesn’t have the demeanour of a villain as such, and is probably too idiotic to appreciate himself just how nasty he is.This show is definitely too complicated for anyone in North America to understand; the idea of becoming what you hate by engaging with it at all (even to oppose it) is something that I doubt any US television writers would even understand, much less be able to portray dramatically as Brooker and Morris have.I think John Cleese said something in an interview recently, when asked about the current state of British comedy, that we used to have not-the-worst-TV-in-the-world. I think a lot of British comedy has got pretty lazy. I loved The Fast Show, but since then the template for sketch shows has been that all you need is to repeat the same catch phrases in slightly varied and ‘escalated’ scenarios. Little Britain is a case in point. I think there are some good jokes there, but the guys seem determined to stretch them well beyond snapping point.However, Nathan Barley is certainly an exception here. I think it is an example that British TV can still be amazingly good.I think that one thing that British TV – like British literature – conspicuously lacks is any metaphysical dimension. I mean, that’s rare on TV, anyway, but I don’t think you’d ever get a show like Six Feet Under, for instance, being made in Britain. The British have always been extremely suspicious of metaphysics, or at least, such a suspicion seems to have been fostered in the Brits from the time of Roger Bacon and probably before.
such a suspicion seems to have been fostered in the Brits from the time of Roger Bacon and probably before.I meant Francis Bacon. … You might as well just take it that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Prometheus writes:Justin Isis writes: “This show is definitely too complicated for anyone in North America to understand”Speaking as an American, piss off. I found this show to be absolutely brilliant – painful and terrifying in its scathing depiction of the direction that our culture is taking, and a rousing send up of hipsterism. Frankly, I was curious who this Justin Isis individual was that he would make such an ignorantly generalized comment about the supposed ignorance of Canadians and Americans. After looking through his blog and several interviews, it’s quite clear that Mr. Isis is exactly the type of person this program mocks.
No, you’re mistaken. Justin Isis in not a type of person.