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Guardian: Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true

Started by larrybob, February 11, 2015, 12:18:34 AM

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garbed_attic

I just read this... the article itself is decent, though doesn't say anything particularly new, but it was lovely to see reflections from the cast. I would have liked a little more about "ironic" Internet humour and pranking - I might have mentioned Sam Pepper, for instance.

Glad to see Nathan being reappraised though. I still don't think it's massively funny, but I agree with Harrison that it was very on the money and prescient in many ways. Also, I like the little booklet that comes with the DVD, especially the Banksy-style graffiti.

soraya

Nathan Barley was great,  easily the best thing Morris has ever done. I always thought Barley himself was a really likeable character too, he always means well and is incredibly generous and remains kind and warm towards Dan.

marquis_de_sad

What a controversial opinion. Would you like to write for my magazine?

Noodle Lizard

I think I actually found this forum via DigitalSpy while online lookabouting Nathan Barley.

I really like that show.  It feels pretty fucking angry in a way sitcoms rarely do and there's really no resolution at all.  The ending is like the end of The Devils. 

Sure it's not very balanced and probably appeals to as many Barleys as it condemns, and is perhaps a bit exclusionary in its setting (at least it was back in 2005), but it's definitely its own thing.  And its depiction of the Soho/East London media scene is very well-observed, no doubt condensing months of experience with countless people into just one line from one character.  Jonathan Yeah? and Doug Rocket are full of these.

I need to rewatch it soon.  I have a feeling it becomes more and more prescient as time goes on, and in a way more people can recognise.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

QuoteWhen he startedout, Nathan wasn't what we'd now call a Shoreditch hipster," Brooker says. "I'd never even been to Shoreditch. It was more about moneyed young guys who claimedto be working in television when really they were living off theirparents. He was more of a Made In Chelsea figure, and he kind of morphed into a Hoxton idiotforthe TV show.
I always thought the telly version of the character didn't completely match up with the TV Go Home one. It's nice to see that confirmed, but it's unpleasant to realise that the show was ten years ago.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

G2 is where the Nathan Barleys go when they settle down and have kids.

Black_Bart

Didn't Morris make a statement at the start of Brass Eye, something along the lines of "This should be the last of these types of programmes, but it'll be the start of a load of rip offs"?

Hey ho, that's yer meeed-jaaa for you.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/02/nathan-barley-turns-10.html

This one by the brilliant Cara Ellison also popped up.
I stand by my opinion that Nathan Barley's fifth episode is a very solid episode and works well as a standalone episode with characters making decisions and laughs. Where Ashcroft wanks off a builder with an oven mit in a family pub toilet at lunchtime.

I like its raw anger towards all the characters but it does lack 'something' as a comedy show. It's bold and interestiny but I think it's that I don't believe the characters Dialogue. It's clever dialogue with lots of clever lines but I think it'd work better on the page than out of actors mouths. Like the first act of Four Lions.

Ashcroft's interview at the end of the first episode is a really fantastic scene and Julian Barratt plays it fantastically. It's crushing.

Flawed but prescient. An interesting failure, which is the kind of thing that I respect more than just making a pretty good show. It's tried something in it's own manner and there's a lot of good when you can sift through the undirected shotgun blasts of anger and vitriol at literally everything ever.

BlodwynPig


23 Daves

It was quite badly received on this forum at the time, and defending it felt far too much like hard work - especially as we had loads of posters on here in 2005 who wanted and expected something entirely different, I think. If you regard "Nathan Barley" as a Brooker piece with tinges of Morris about it rather than a fully fledged Morris project, you won't walk in with such high expectations. A common complaint (in the media as well as on here) tended to be that Morris had lost his bite and was focusing his ire on trendy young things in London, which should hardly have been on his top 100 list of subjects, never mind been green lighted.

But... if you take it beyond its "look at the silly Hoxtonites!" premise, Nathan Barley is about a lot of things - the way any fleeting brainfart of an idea can be considered "art" if the person's accent, education and clothes are right, the futility of the creative career choice (Dan Ashcroft's demure and gait resembles Llewyn Davis at times), media exploitation, the list goes on... it's not as cartoonish as people claim. If you want to see it as a piece of work solely mocking trendy East Londoners, that's there, but there's plenty going beneath the surface, debates which have in fact been going on for decades.

The senior figures in "Nathan Barley" in particular (Yeah?, Rocket) aren't hipsters so much as wealthy people with the means to see through their ridiculous ideas to completion. Bill Drummond at his worst can veer close to behaving like both. There are tons of these people in positions of responsibility in the arts. Viewed through a certain prism, there also really isn't that much difference between Oz and Vice beyond style. And there isn't that much difference between the behaviour of Oz's contributors and those at Sugar Ape if this is anything to go by: http://youtu.be/H95Z7tF4FTY The line between hippy and hipster is often a narrow one, it's just that we tend to have collective amnesia about the worst moments of otherwise respected youth movements.

If Barley has faults (and it bloody well does) it's that unlike most Morris associated projects, it really doesn't stand up as well on repeat viewing. What you see first time is what you get. There are very few extra touches or details to spot, and a lot of the character's "reaction to camera" are reminiscent of Gervais/ Merchant's work, the first time we'd seen Morris being involved with something whose style so obviously owed a debt to an inferior present day comic. 

As for prescient... it's partly true, and partly that hipsters haven't really moved on themselves. Beards aside, what they were in 2005 is what they are now - like the left-over hippies littering the streets in 1977, they're a tiresome cliche, and about as tolerated by both the public and mass media. But in themselves they were only a by-product of our age, anyway, which is about instant gratification, self-promotion, arrogance and noise. They didn't start the problem, and not enough people taught them any better.

Also always worth noting that often, Hoxton/Shoreditch in the late 90s/ even very early 00s was just about silliness on a shoestring, and didn't really have many moneyed people involved. If you wanted to house an art project, there were lots of derelict buildings to use. If you wanted to start your own daft theme night, you could. Websites? The internet was a wide open prairie in those days without many major corporates involved, so the world was your oyster provided you had a computer, and the possibilities seemed endless. People like Vic Reeves would have thrived in that environment had they come along later. It got aggravating when the posh young people zoomed in, which is also what happened in Notting Hill much earlier on. That story continues to play out to this day, with the gentrification of many London areas.

Buttress

It's a completely different beast to other Morris stuff but it's also fairly specific for Brooker (who I often take to be more a creative's creative). The production and style of the show actually in some ways makes the zany world of Nathan Barley more palpable with its stupid high-contrasts and sugary colour. The characters, while going through the 'horrors' of their vacuous empty lives are nevertheless impervious to true death (ie. not being funny anymore, or quite literally dying). Which is why the ending needed a death but being Nathan Barley of course its a stupid slight of hand which leaves open the possibility for a season 2 (that never came).

It does have that Brooker satirical voice, but I think production design-wise it has a lot of Morris subtlety and conceptual play that makes the 'world' more fully realised as not simply a comic setting but a 'living' symbolic space. I think it did "stupids culture" a lot better for example than something like Idiocracy, but they're obviously quite different in their own ways.

Yeah it probably doesn't stand up to repeated viewings all that much, but there's stuff here to appreciate, artistically speaking. Even comedically I think the tone is right (that tension between the socially 'funny' and the crippling funny of this tension), but yes its pretty weak to 'just' target hipsters/graphic design wankers but the series doesn't just do this.

garbed_attic

Quote from: Bored of Canada on February 11, 2015, 12:02:32 PM
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/02/nathan-barley-turns-10.html

This one by the brilliant Cara Ellison also popped up.

Well, that's prompted me to write a cringingly fawning comment!

I bloody love Cara Ellison's games journalism.

Black_Bart

Recently I interviewed a local act, it turned out that his "mates" had a nick name for him: Nathan Barley. I questioned him on it, making sure it was "that" NB, he said yes, seemed quite pleased about it.

Well, as long as he's happy, eh?

thenoise

Quote from: soraya on February 11, 2015, 12:42:10 AM
Nathan Barley was great,  easily the best thing Morris has ever done. I always thought Barley himself was a really likeable character too, he always means well and is incredibly generous and remains kind and warm towards Dan.

Nathan Barley wasn't really the villain of the piece was he?  Jonaton Yeah? is far more irritating.  A wonderfully irritating creation.

momatt

My favourite part is where Charlie says of the characters, "They'd all have children with stupid names by now.  What a horrible thought."

His son is called Covey.

backdrifter

Quote from: soraya on February 11, 2015, 12:42:10 AM
Nathan Barley was great,  easily the best thing Morris has ever done. I always thought Barley himself was a really likeable character too, he always means well and is incredibly generous and remains kind and warm towards Dan.

I think you're being a bit generous saying he always means well. Remember all the physically pain, mental distress and humiliation he causes Pingu? How he can't handle the idea of Claire succeeding without him and effectively ruins her big chance? The bragging about boning Claire when it didn't even happen?

greenman

Quote from: 23 Daves on February 11, 2015, 02:18:16 PM
Also always worth noting that often, Hoxton/Shoreditch in the late 90s/ even very early 00s was just about silliness on a shoestring, and didn't really have many moneyed people involved. If you wanted to house an art project, there were lots of derelict buildings to use. If you wanted to start your own daft theme night, you could. Websites? The internet was a wide open prairie in those days without many major corporates involved, so the world was your oyster provided you had a computer, and the possibilities seemed endless. People like Vic Reeves would have thrived in that environment had they come along later. It got aggravating when the posh young people zoomed in, which is also what happened in Notting Hill much earlier on. That story continues to play out to this day, with the gentrification of many London areas.

Which is why I felt the series was still worthwhile even several years after the original TVGH sketches, its less comment on a new scene that it is one in an advanced state of decomposition/commercialisation that we still see today.

Mark Steels Stockbroker

Quote from: thenoise on February 12, 2015, 12:53:56 PM
Nathan Barley wasn't really the villain of the piece was he?  Jonaton Yeah? is far more irritating.  A wonderfully irritating creation.

Charlie Condou wrote a comment article for the Guardian a few years back, about his campaigning in favour of gay couples being able to adopt. One of the BTL comments was simply "Dutch wine?" Somehow, that made me laugh more than it had in the original series.

True fact: CC's first TV acting role was in Robin Of Sherwood, aged about 12.

dr beat

Pretty much agree with everything in 23Daves post except the issue about repeat viewing - we've sat down and watched the whole series a couple of times recently and I would say there's lots to enjoy which I didn't catch initially - lines like 'you're spreading all your cells everywhere' and of course, 'Dutch wine'. 

Mango Chimes

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on February 11, 2015, 03:29:19 AM
I always thought the telly version of the character didn't completely match up with the TV Go Home one.

This is the main reason why the show was such a disappointment.  I 'knew' the character from TVGH – he was a cunt – and the first episode recast him as an 'idiot'.  I hoped it'd develop somehow, but it didn't, and it turns out it WAS ALL CHRIS MORRIS'S FAULT:

Quote"Chris was adamant very early on that there should be a tiny acorn of likability to Nathan, something irrepressible. He does terrible things but he has an endearing sort of rabbity enthusiasm to him. In the fake listings he really was a cunt, whereas in the TV show he's a twat – and there is a difference.

Bizarre you'd go "let's make a show of that Cunt guy, but he can't be a cunt."  I remember them saying at the time that the TVGH was unrealistically harsh or something, but surely its harshness was the entire joke.

This bit in the article is odd:
QuoteBarley aficionados will surely see in Brand some echoes of the show's Preacherman character

That's not spooky prescience – the episode where he goes to wank off someone in a pub for an article is based on Russell Brand doing it for a TV show.

Squink

Quote from: 23 Daves on February 11, 2015, 02:18:16 PMIf you regard "Nathan Barley" as a Brooker piece with tinges of Morris about it rather than a fully fledged Morris project, you won't walk in with such high expectations.

Why would you do that though? Morris directed every episode and co-wrote them all as well. I'd agree if you were talking about the TVGoHome version, but saying this series has only "tinges of Morris about it" is not only wildly inaccurate, it also sounds a bit like you're making excuses for it.

Leo2112

I think it was this forum which unearthed this documentary about 'Super Super Magazine' shown years ago on Channel 4 in 3 minute slots.  It remains the closest thing to Nathan Barley I've seen.  There was some discussion about whether or not it was real (and it's not difficult to see why).  Looks like it was an actual thing though and was published for at least 3 years after the documentary went out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1KT36vgalc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWBLFhaYpKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNje9gKZHnU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ChRWlZ0UoM

Black_Bart

In the back of my mind I have a vague memory of TMWRNJ doing a regular bit on a Super Ape(ish) magazine, Lee played a Idiot Man Child in it, am I right or have I dreamed this?




Mark Steels Stockbroker

The target of The Ironic Review was more pretentious 90s culture mags like The Modern Review, run by Julie Burchill & Toby Young. "Sasha Bedford-Hill", the Jo Unwin character, is a mix of Burchill and Janet Street-Porter. https://www.facebook.com/notes/SPAM/the-ironic-review/10151401181166013

Oops! Wrong Planet

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on February 15, 2015, 10:54:17 AM
The target of The Ironic Review was more pretentious 90s culture mags like The Modern Review, run by Julie Burchill & Toby Young. "Sasha Bedford-Hill", the Jo Unwin character, is a mix of Burchill and Janet Street-Porter. https://www.facebook.com/notes/SPAM/the-ironic-review/10151401181166013

Not on Facebook.  Cut and paste, I prithee.

soraya

QuoteIt's hard to tell if we're back in recession or not. I'm starting to hear off agents that jobs which I was applying for before Christmas are now suddenly "frozen" and might not be available again till the end of the month, pending decisions at remote head offices. On the other hand, the derelict shop premises at the end of Goldhawk Road have finally been refurbished and opened as a hipster coffee bar with full wifi access and outrageous prices. The demolished garage is also continuing in its transformation to luxury flats.

This week the big thing on Twitter was about some comments Suzanne Moore made about trans-sexuals, this was further escalated by a terrible article Julie Burchill wrote in the Observer today, in which she mainly promotes a reissue of her notorious 1989 sex'n'shopping novel Ambition. It was always obscure whether that tome was meant to be a clever postmodern gag, or a sincere but incompetent contribution to 80s kitsch in the mode of Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins. I have read it, or at least as much as anyone could be expected to (a copy found its way in to my college library, possibly someone wanted it for an Eng. Lit. PhD). The most memorable chapter involves the sinister Murdoch-style publisher getting a Labour MP blackmailed so that he won't cause trouble over his latest corporate broadcasting acquisition. The blackmail proceeds on these premises: the MP is a secret homosexual who can't come out because he represents a tough working-class constituency with defunct coalmines. Years earlier he got involved with a rent boy and the novel's heroine helped him out, but now her boss insists she threaten to bring the story in to public view. So the lefty MP caves in, says bland things on Question Time, and the rent boy (a public school drop-out and hopeless Quentin Crisp wannabe) is paid off by fixing for him to get a hi-NRG Eurodisco smash hit single.

All completely absurd, of course. Also memorable is the fact that heroine constantly tries to wave off criticism by citing her own working-class background. The only person this tactic doesn't work on is the tough Australian enforcer that delivers her boss' orders, he's not an effete Oxbridge liberal and isn't taken in by prolier-than-thou mugging.

But it's not all bad. JB was involved in one good thing: the 90s cultural magazine The Modern Review. Of course the stuff that she and Toby Young wrote was rubbish, but if you got past that there were some decent articles about books and films, mostly written by people quite sceptical about cultural theory and waffle about semiotics. It also got revived in the late 90s in a version that also had interesting things in, though Julie turned up again, mostly banging on about Massive Attack 6 years after everyone else had heard them.

The Modern Review will always live on in the memories of thousands of people who never saw a copy, since it was the inspiration for Lee&Herring's pseud mag parody "The Ironic Review". This first appeared as an item in the Fist Of Fun book at the end of 1994, and was a series of sketches in the 1st series of This Morning With Richard Not Judy in 1998. Here is the first sketch, which features Jo Unwin doing a very obvious Julie parody, and Kevin Eldon doing a pastiche of Robert Elms / Toby Young / Tony Parsons. As I can't find a jpeg of any copies of TMR here's an image I created myself:[amazonsearch][/amazonsearch]