Please Post Nathan Barley Articles Here - And Add Them To The Database Too If Possible

[biniput]

There is an article in the Daily Tegleraph on P17 in the Arts section entitled "The prankster King: has his bubble burst?". this you would think would be thetone of the entire thing but not so. there should still be time to get a copy (a rare excuse for you lot to actually buy + care for this paper for once).
the main bulk of the thing goes on about what fans would probably know anyway for e.g a small biog and descriptions of why he is notorious with just a few lines of quotes from the said Morris. eventually it goes on to speculate just where he is supposed to go after previous triumphs and that his output recently has been scarce. He is also quoted as saying about the gulf war that "There are many eminently mockable things about it. I'm just not sure what you could do with it all"

It is the last paragraph that is of the Most interest and it states that a lot hangs on Nathan and that it may be too soon to declare Morris's heyday to be over and that "anticipation" surrounds the first broadcast. The last bit is that the "hero-worshipped" Mr Morris may still have a bright future ahead of him but that the word onthe street is that he is fast becoming yesterday's news.

I think that if the output is good then the career of such work stands and gains merrit and appreciation on its own and even if Barley isn't too good he could still produce output in the future and all reputation would be restored simply because of his pat output. How long though can someone remain in the same kind of work though and could he end up like, for instance,  most of the Oxbridge maffia and simply creating a new career in something else.

There may ne more newspaper articles in the next few days surounding Nathan Barley and perhaps they should be in one separate thread so as to keep Forum views of the thing and other analysis apart so the threads do not get too large and impenatrable.

[lazyhour]

He is also quoted as saying about the gulf war that "There are many eminently mockable things about it. I'm just not sure what you could do with it all"

Perhaps he should start watching The Daily Show.  As should anyone with broadband, really.

Thanks for the heads-up!

[greencalx]

Has anyone mentioned the Observer Profile yet (30/1/04)? Says all the usual stuff.

[Joy Nktonga]

That Article:

The prankster king: has his bubble burst?
(Filed: 01/02/2005)

His provocative 'Brass Eye' special on paedophilia made comedian Chris Morris a hate figure and a cult hero. Four years on, his eagerly awaited new sitcom is about to hit our screens. Dominic Cavendish looks at his career

Where do you go as a comedian when you've established yourself as probably the most ruthlessly intelligent prankster in Britain, the object of jaw-agape admiration and vilification, love and loathing?

That's a question that fans of Chris Morris, as well as more disinterested and even downright hostile followers of his career, have been pondering on and off since the summer of 2001 and the notorious special edition - devoted to paedophilia - of his incendiary mock current affairs series Brass Eye. With the broadcast next week on Channel 4 of Nathan Barley (see preview), presented after a longish period of lying-low by Morris, we will begin to have some sort of answer.

The Brass Eye special, which prompted a torrent of complaints from viewers and politicians alike (it was denounced by the Daily Mail as "The Sickest TV Show Ever"), resembled the grand finale of a firework display, in which the outrages and hoaxes of the original series were topped by an all-out assault on the moral confusions and media hypocrisies surrounding a topic generally considered completely off-limits for humour.

The technique of gulling celebrities into making complete asses of themselves - already seen to mesmerising effect on Brass Eye's notorious "drugs" edition, in which the likes of Bernard Manning, Bernard Ingham and Noel Edmonds allowed Morris to guide them into risible denunciations of a made-up drug called "cake" - here reached its disturbingly funny acme.

Phil Collins, Gary Lineker and Sebastian Coe were the most high-profile victims of their own gullibility, with Collins memorably advocating the cause of a bogus child-protection charity while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Nonce Sense".

But what stayed lodged in the mind like a piece of comedy shrapnel was the clip in which Capital Radio DJ Dr Fox explained that "paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you or me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no actual evidence for it, but it is a fact."

After that, what? Looking back, Morris's flamboyantly chequered career seemed to have been building towards that hysteria-generating moment. A brass-necked troublemaker from the moment he stepped into his first job at Radio Cambridge on leaving Bristol University (with a degree in zoology), he hung around long enough to pick up editing skills before being fired for filling a news studio with helium seconds before an announcer reported a motorway pile-up. It was a similar story at Radio Bristol and GLR.

On the Hour, the groundbreaking 1991 BBC Radio 4 comedy series that established a new benchmark for radio news satire, and its sister programme, The Day Today (1994), which did the same for television, enabled him to hone to perfection his skills as a stentorian-voiced, Jeremy Paxmanesque anchorman and roving reporter-cum-wind-up merchant.

he success of those shows, which mercilessly deconstructed the bombastic, patrician conventions of news broadcasting, was clearly a team effort, involving a talent-pool of a kind not seen since the 1960s and Beyond the Fringe. But it was Morris, the son of Cambridgeshire doctors, and the rebellious product of Jesuit boarding school Stonyhurst, who was unmistakably the most dangerous, maverick member of the group.

While the rest of the gang - including rising stars Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber - went off to make Knowing Me, Knowing You, the vehicle for Coogan's idiotic sports presenter Alan Partridge, Morris ploughed his own furrow.

Given his own BBC Radio 1 show, he kept courting trouble, most notoriously by appearing to announce the death of Michael Heseltine and luring Cliff Richard into a chat about the Crucifixion's sadomasochistic potential during a phone-in on Christianity.

Now nearing 40 and a father of two, he could hardly keep this kind of thing going indefinitely. Though he's been singleminded and successful in maintaining his privacy and preserving a degree of anonymity, there are only so many times institutional authority can be acquired and then flagrantly abused in this way.

That said, he himself suggested, in a rare interview, that it would be much easier to carry on than people might imagine: "To be honest, when we were planning the Brass Eye special, I thought that people would be so much more alert and on their guard," he said. "And I was staggered at how gullible they were. It's simply a case of identifying the right blind spot and exploiting it."

For him, the challenge was not to repeat himself: "Once you can operate the levers with an 80 per cent degree of efficiency," he explained, "then there's no point in doing it. You should only do it if you think you're going to fail, otherwise the whole thing becomes depressingly routine."

But in his determination not to be depressingly routine - or heaven forbid, an establishment satirist - Morris has thus far struggled to strike out in directions that would command similar levels of attention or respect. Blue Jam, his late-night, late-1990s BBC Radio 1 series, and its Channel 4 incarnation Jam - batches of warped, pervy sketches conducted to malevolent ambient music - seemed calculated to maintain Morris's cult allure during the long lacuna between the Brass Eye series and special.

His first short film, My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 (2002), in which Morris, still very much in satanically weird mode, featured as a talking dog, may have won a Bafta in 2003 but it was a blink-and-you'll-miss it event, the funniest moment arguably being the credit sequence, which almost lasted as long as the mini-feature itself.

You might have expected Morris to have grasped the nettle provided by 9/11, but with the exception of a tasteless pull-out section conducted for the Observer - following in the footsteps of an equally ill-judged spoof "suicide journalist" column which the paper ran in 1999 - and some half-hearted satire on his own website (www.thesmokehammer.com), he has been openly at a loss as to what to make of the war on terror: "There are many eminently mockable things about it. I'm just not sure what you could do with it all," he has said.

A lot hangs on Nathan Barley. It may be too soon to declare Morris's heyday over but just as much anxiety as eager anticipation surrounds next week's broadcast. The hero-worshipped Day Today man might still have a bright future ahead of him, but - and you may want to look away now - the word on the street suggests that he's fast becoming yesterday's news.

The review that went with it:

Vitriolic and surreal – but just not funny
(Filed: 01/02/2005)

Andrew Pettie previews Chris Morris's new sitcom

The character of Nathan Barley was born in 1999 on a website created by the splenetic journalist and TV critic Charlie Brooker.
   
Nathan Barley
Nathan Barley: in his own words, a 'self-facilitating media node'

Laid out in the style of the Radio Times, www.tvgohome.com published spoof television listings previewing fictitious and frequently surreal programmes including the spiky sporting quiz A Question of Do That Again and I'll Smack You and an educational hip-hop strand entitled We Be Slingin' Grammar at Yo' Ass.

The site developed a cult following and its most popular and vitriolic lampoon was of a fictional documentary following the painfully trendy exploits of the editor of Nowbiter, an equally fictional London style magazine in the navel-gazing mould of i-D or Dazed & Confused. This fly-on-the-wall series was called C***; and Nathan Barley was its titular anti-hero.

Now this deliberately absurd and frequently offensive spoof has been brought to life as a six-part sitcom with the help of Chris Morris (who both co-wrote and directed it) - giving Brooker the presumably unprecedented opportunity to write and then review a TV programme he first previewed six years before it was actually made.

According to Brooker, Barley (played by Nicholas Burns) is "an odious twentysomething upper-middle-class media wannabe" who lives in an utterly fatuous whirl of ultra-hip gadgets, nonsensical buzz-words and almost stupefying shallowness. Barley now runs his own website, www.trashbat.co.uk, offering visitors an urban culture "dispatj" [sic] through the medium of tasteless internet games and Jackass-style home movies of him assaulting brow-beaten colleague Pingu (Ben Whishaw) by, for instance, attaching his earlobes to a car battery.

Nathan, who describes himself as a "self-facilitating media node", has a mobile phone that functions both as a camera and a miniature set of "MP3 turntables" allowing him to mix ringtones ("It's been out for three weeks in Japan; where's yours?"), drinks coffee at Grind Zero, Dutch wine at the Nailgun Arms and eats at the pretentious gastropub Regime, where beer is served in gourds and the food is autocratically chosen for you by a sensor that "assesses the electrolytes in your finger".

Although Nathan and the minutiae of his almost tragically idiotic existence provide much of the comedy, the most engaging character of the series is Dan Ashcroft (played by Julian Barratt, one half of the Perrier Award-winning duo the Mighty Boosh). Dan is a 34-year-old journalist for the style magazine Sugar Ape who, despite being their star writer and idolised by the likes of Nathan, is depressingly aware of the superficial nitwittery he inadvertently champions.

The link between Nathan and Dan is Dan's sister Claire (Claire Keelan), who is herself an aspiring filmmaker trying to raise funds to make a frighteningly earnest documentary about a choir of reformed junkies. Nathan, who fancies Claire, is happy to lend her his editing equipment. Dan, who despises Nathan, is appalled. And although these plotlines are played out in front of a colourful backdrop of minor characters, it is this central trio that drives the narrative forward. Will Dan escape Sugar Ape? Will Claire escape Nathan? Will Nathan get the girl and/or his richly deserved comeuppance?

Unfortunately, however, on the evidence of the first three episodes, it is difficult to believe in most of these characters, and still harder to care what happens to them. Nathan Barley's main target - a smug metropolitan coterie of bubble-headed fashionistas - is a small but valid one.

But in their indecent haste to skewer it, Brooker and Morris are guilty of writing some thuddingly obvious set-pieces. During one of Sugar Ape's asinine editorial meetings, or while Nathan attempts to impress Claire with more of his cocksure media claptrap, you almost expect to see the writers bounding around in the background waving their arms and shouting: "They're all fools! Do you see? Do you see?"

The devil in both Morris and Brooker's best work is in the detail. But by using the same formula of acute observation plus surreal hyperbole that worked so brilliantly in The Day Today and Brass Eye, they have accidentally scuppered their own sitcom.

In series such as The Office and Peep Show, it's the realistic portrayal of the characters and their world that makes the comedy so sharp and excruciating. So perhaps it's not surprising, considering its origins on www.tvgohome.com, that reading a précis of Nathan Barley's preposterous life is far funnier than watching him live it. AP

# Andrew Pettie is entertainment editor at 'Zoo' magazine

[Garfield And Friends]

# Andrew Pettie is entertainment editor at 'Zoo' magazine

I wonder if 'Zoo' will have a similar review...

[A Passing Turk Slipper]

So one review is calling it 'the sitcom to end all sitcoms', while another is calling it 'just not funny'. Hmmm, I know this Andrew Pettie guy is probably a moron ('Zoo' being one of the worst magazines available) but early reviews like that are hardly encouraging.

[Neil]

I've changd the title of this thread in order to try and keep all the article links and pastes from clogging up the whole forum.  If people could please check the Nathan Barley section of the Articles Database before posting then we'd have a lot less duplicates.  Ta.  Anyway, I can't sleep tonight so I'm checking round for reviews in Saturdays papers, and have found another review by Neil Boorman (Shoreditch Twat bloke) in The Times:

Too little, too late
By Neil Boorman
Chris Morris's style mag satire fails to cut it

Writing TV previews is not my normal occupation. My day job is editing style magazines and promoting discos, all based in the so-called creative hub of Shoreditch in East London. I even published a satirical fanzine called Shoreditch Twat. Which is why you find me writing a review of Chris Morris's six-part comedy show Nathan Barley, the focus of which is a style magazine based in Shoreditch.

Central to Morris's sitcom is the eponymous Barley, the sort of hateful creative paradigm that once filled East London's down-at-heel boozers and lofts. A website designer, guerrilla film-maker and DJ, Barley lumbers around town on a customised BMX in a continuing campaign of self promotion. The counterpoint to Barley is Dan Ashcroft, a self-hating style journalist who initiates trends via his Sugar Ape magazine. As soon as he dispenses pearls of wisdom, his idiotic colleagues adopt, misconstrue and then devalue his ideas.

Nathan Barley began life as one of the characters in the online listings satire TV Go Home. Produced in 1999, it was an hilariously astute observation on Shoreditch. But since then, the dot-com bubble has burst, two of the four major "style mags" have folded and Shoreditch is full of suburban hen parties. So the immediate reaction to Nathan Barley is that it arrives long after the fact.

Timing aside, there is much comedic capital to be made out of the creative scene. Ashcroft struggles to work in his zoo-like office as his colleagues regress to childhood on tricycles, games consoles and juvenile websites (working conditions familiar to me from my time editing Sleazenation).

Barley and his pals are humourless chancers obsessed with projects that are baffling to those outside the "scene". Unfortunately, Morris's disdain for creative types oversteps parody into hyper-real lampoon. This is a shame because the real life clichés are no less amusing and infinitely more identifiable to those who work outside the industry. Still, my father used to moan that there weren't any proper boating references on Howard's Way. But that's not why millions watched it, and the same goes for Nathan Barley.

As a contemporary sitcom, Nathan Barley isn't as accurate as Peepshow. As a broad sweep at fashion, Absolutely Fabulous scores more direct hits. But this is Morris we're talking about, and there are inevitable patches of genius here — visual gags and toe-curling moments of cringe that make up for the blunt stereotypes. Considering the time and money spent making this show (it spent three years in development), the results are disappointing, and one wonders what reception it would receive had Morris not put his name to it.

During the production of Nathan Barley, a staff writer at a magazine that surely inspired Sugar Ape expressed some concern about the show, predicting fallout from a nationwide ribbing. After all, style magazines rely on their perceived integrity. With mixed feelings, I have to say there is little for them to worry about.

Nathan Barley, Friday, Channel 4, 10pm.

Neil Boorman is the publisher of Good for Nothing magazine

[Neil]

Today's TV picks for this week froM The Guardian:

TV

Nathan Barley

Get ready to hoot your trap off as Chris Morris and Charlie "Screen Burn" Brooker pour the world of Sugar Ape, trashbat.co.ck and general idiocy into the next six Friday nights. Well weapon.
Friday, 10pm, C4

[Robot Devil]

Die Telegraph's review:

It's been four years since Chris Morris (Brass Eye) made anything for TV, so the return of the scourge of the small-screen watchdog, even if only as writer/director, is notable. Oddly, if today's opener's anything to go by, this new series may please Morris's detractors (it's predictably rude and offensive) but frustrate his fans - hip, drivel-spouting meejah types are in his sights here, not necessarily the hardest of targets, nor perhaps the most interesting. But I was laughing like a drain by the end. Co-written by Charlie Brooker of tvgohome.com fame, it brings its Nathan Barley to life as a babbling, gadget-wielding webmaster and all-round 21st-century twentysomething idiot. Nick Burns (Nathan) and Julian Barratt (as his magazine writer idol, Dan) star; anyone getting past the sensory assault of the first few minutes may be surprised to find there's a (relatively) conventional comedy lurking deep within.

[Hoogstraten'sSmilingUlcer]

Neil wrote:

Neil Boorman is the publisher of Good for Nothing magazine

That sounds dangerously like something Barley would subscribe to. It's fair to say that all the lad's mags will write acres of golden prose about Nathan Barley, as they do everything Morris touches.

[Neil]

Times TV Choice

February 05, 2005

Television: February, Friday 11

TV choice

NATHAN BARLEY
Channel 4, 10pm

The playwright Patrick Marber described Chris Morris as "a satirist in a particularly cruel and English way. He goes way beyond the limits of what's considered acceptable." Morris's latest outing — a six-part series — is a superbly performed satire on the horrid pretensions of urban cool. It focuses largely on two characters; one, a 34-year-old journalist on a trendy style magazine who is being destroyed by the monster that he helped to create; the other is twentysomething Nathan Barley, a hideous Hoxton variation on Alan Partridge. Morris and co-writer Charlie Brooker lay into this world with ferocious enthusiasm. See feature, page 24. DC

Victoria Wood starting now on BBC1!

[Neil]

From the Sunday Times...It'd be nice if the bloke said what he thought of the show.

February 06, 2005

Television: A funny thing happened to the sitcom...
British TV got much better at it. Even Chris Morris is having a go, says Stephen Armstrong

In the 1990s, the British did drama and the Americans did sitcom. From The Simpsons to Seinfeld, there wasn't an aspiring American comic who did not credit the Stateside writing pool as the only way to go in television comedy. Teams of young gagsters sat in a room and shouted the funnies at each other, hoping to get out with a script before they burnt their fragile talent. On Roseanne, the life of a junior writer was sometimes measured in hours.

Now, though, despite its slightly wobbly ratings, Joey is still the strongest new sitcom in the USA, because, for some reason, the once-mighty American networks are struggling to raise so much as a titter. The US industry bible, Variety, recently reported that there were only 33 comedies on the networks last autumn, down by nearly 50% from a high of 62% in 1997. In 1994, there were 13 comedies in the top 20 shows. In the latest season, there were two — Two and a Half Men and Everybody Loves Raymond.

The noughties may have seen the Americans put out vital drama such as 24, Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and The West Wing, but, these days, Britain is making the market in sitcoms — as witnessed by NBC's US version of The Office, which hits their screens soon. Five may be entering the comedy fray with its US acquisitions — Joey and Two and a Half Men — but the big story of 2005 is the hours of new comedy from British talent. January saw the BBC air According to Bex and My Life in Film. Soon, the new Paul Whitehouse project, Help, and Martin Freeman in The Robinsons will join Auntie's roster.

Channel 4 is launching Chris Morris's first-ever sitcom, Nathan Barley, this week, and, later this spring, a comedy based in Glasgow's Sikh community, Meet the Magoons. Five has also commissioned The Office's Mackenzie Crook to produce scripts spoofing a rock group's hapless existence. Even ITV raised eyebrows with a "channel three in not completely dreadful sitcom" shocker when it recruited Johnny Vegas for Dead Man Weds.

Thanks to the Morris connection, the most eagerly anticipated of all these is Nathan Barley. Months ago, the news that Morris was penning a programme with Charlie Brooker, creator of the satirical website TV Go Home, sent comedy and media chat rooms into a frenzy of speculation. While much of it centred on plot details — was the magazine at the heart of the show really called Rape? — others could not understand why the arch satirist Morris was dirtying his hands with character and plot. "Why won't he do another Brass Eye?" one fan raged. "I mean, there's the Iraq war and everything."

It is strange that Morris still trails the clouds of Brass Eye, although since the more hysterical tabloids still have not forgiven him or Channel 4 for the paedophile special, maybe it is not that strange. His work since has been reflective and introverted, such as the sketch show Jam or the short film My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117. Both seemed more concerned with madness than anger. Nathan Barley is a mixture of both.

The lead character was created by Brooker for Zeppotron's TV Go Home. Nathan Barley is an idiot. A twenty-something trustafarian, he dreams of making it in the media. His Friends Reunited entry claims he is working on a collection of short stories set in a dystopian future where hip-hop is banned. He also wants to go to bed with Claire, a rather desperate young film-maker whom he tries to seduce by loaning her his hugely expensive equipment. Her brother, Dan, works on a style mag — called Sugar Ape, but relaunched with the letters S, U, G and A too small to read — although he is now in his thirties and way, way too old to care about fads, fashions and art-house photography. He tries to get a job on a Sunday paper, but fluffs the interview, begging at the end: "Please don't send me back. They ride tricycles in the office."

Nathan Barley is ultimately about the pain of its two central male characters — and that highlights the increasing crossover between comedy and drama. Take Paul Abbott, who actually wrote Shameless at the start of his career and scripted it as a bitter, grim-up-north-style drama called Shame. It failed to get commissioned. After his many triumphs, he rea-lised the way to play it was to spin the script around, change the name and play it for laughs. Even Green Wing, last year's critically acclaimed Channel 4 Friday- nighter from Victoria Pile, was pitched as a dark, dramatic comedy rather than the two-gags-a-minute classic sitcom.

Now the West End is looking to get in on the act. Last week, Acorn Antiques — The Musical opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. It is scripted by Victoria Wood and stars the television favourites Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Josie Lawrence and Neil Morrissey. "I'd always wanted to write a musical," Wood says. "And the piece of my work that people always remember best — whatever age they are — is Acorn Antiques. I figured that if I based the musical on that, it would definitely sell tickets."

Of course, given all this action — and given the idea of a musical based on a sitcom — it might have been more appropriate for Nathan Barley's satirical lance to be tilted at the sitcom set rather than the magazine office. Fortunately, Ricky Gervais has that one covered. This summer's must-see is Extras, his barbed view of working actors set in green rooms and on movie sets. "We touch on my favourite sins — desperation and ego," Gervais says. "I get more material from the egos of actors than anything else. And it has always fascinated me, the way actors talk about themselves.

"Actors are usually, on the whole, thick, desperate, untalented and always thinking, 'What about me? What about me?'" Apart from that, Gervais refuses to be drawn. So, keep an eye on those chat rooms.

Nathan Barley is on Channel 4 from Friday at 10pm.
Acorn Antiques is on now at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1

[Rats]

a comedy based in Glasgow's Sikh community, Meet the Magoons

That has the potential to be brilliant but I'll bet my teeth it'll be a pile of wank a la "my whole family is black" or whatever it's called.

[Neil]

Can't seem to find any more articles, even in the Observer.  Al Murray seems to be standing in for Garry Bushell dot dot dot

Why can't pricks like Stephen Armstrong do the slightest bit of research before writing an article like that?

[weirdbeard]

Sunday Herald online

The face of a new generation

Preview By Damien Love

THAT Chris Morris – whose curse it is to have been the single most influentially creative force in British broadcasting for the past dozen years – is breaking television cover for the first time since the notorious Brasseye paedophile special of 2001 is already enough to have the usual knee-jerkers itching to react. That he's doing so with a piece of work adapted from something called C*** (the word generally regarded as the most offensive in the English language), would seem to confirm such yearningly outraged suspicions. But Nathan Barley, a modestly magnificent sitcom, is stranger, more conventional, sadder and almost sweeter than anyone could have expected.
The brainchild of TV critic Charlie Brooker, Morris's co-writer, C*** was a highlight of Brooker's TVGoHome, a lovingly, hatefully rendered website consisting of fake, fever-dream TV listings. (Brooker came up with the fictional show Vin Diesel's 500 Favourite Tartans; Channel 4 trumped him with the authentic Trains With Pete Waterman.)

In Brooker's mind, C*** was a fly-on- the-wall documentary series about Nathan Barley. Described as " media wannabe who genuinely deserves to die", Barley was a young, moneyed, slavishly stylish web-designer, mash-up-scratch-mix- guerrilla-film-maker and all-round ovine, honking poseur.

Most of all, though, he was focus for Brooker's loathing of people like that. Although his eye for the specific hideousness of the haircuts, T-shirts, hats, trousers, phones, opinions and gadgets the Nathans of the world parade around was deliciously acute, C*** was essentially a one-joke piece, and the joke wasn't about Nathans so much as Brooker's utter, near-paralysing hatred of them.

In translating him to the screen, though, something strange has happened. While Brooker and Morris undoubtedly continue to despise all the other Nathans out there, they seem to have developed a tiny, grudging affection for their own.

Make no mistake, this Nathan remains a complete toad, at times – as when, later in the series, he raps a ragga commentary on his own performance while in bed with a girl – almost too senselessly odious to watch. And yet, purely because of how he's played by relative newcomer Nicholas Burns – fixed, sleepy eyes, gangling gait, rabbity grin – this braying git has also developed a sickly glimmer of something that could almost be mistaken for charm. In acknowledgement, Morris and Brooker have one of the series's few entirely likable characters, Claire Ashcroft (Claire Keelan), an earnest would-be film-maker, actually mistake it for charm – and end up being rapped at in bed as a result.

Disembowelling the tragically trendy isn't new, and fashion-obsessed media clowns are an easy target. Neither of these facts, however, means you shouldn't have a go at them. What pushes Nathan Barley beyond this one joke, however, is a new current of despair mixed among the general, raging, loathing.

At some point, I suspect, Brooker realised a large percentage of his online audience probably consisted of Nathans; indeed, that a website of spoof TV listings was something Nathan might do. (Actually, Nathan's website, trashbat.co.ck – "Dot-cock, right? Registered in the Cook Islands?" – seems to exist primarily to show off his new mobile phone, which resembles something William S Burroughs coughed up.)

Similarly, Morris has seen a generation of pygmies play among the ashes of themes and styles he trailblazed. In any case, a sense of culpable angst seems to have fed the creation of the programme's real hero, Claire's brother Dan, a writer for style-bible magazine Sugar Ape, who has found himself guru to exactly the idiots he despises.

It's Julian Barratt's performance as Ashcroft that really makes me want to go and watch Nathan Barley again right now. Barratt is one half of the wilfully surreal comedy duo The Mighty Boosh. I liked The Boosh, but was held back from loving them by the awareness I could never get as far into their addled fantasyland as they were. Here, though, Barratt is the realest thing in sight. He walks around distracted but acutely aware he's drowning. Wearing a look of perpetual, fearful, bewildered disgust, he's stranded, frozen and baffled. He wants out of the yammering Sugar Ape world, but doubts he's capable of functioning anywhere else. With long black curly hair and an adventurer's moustache, he looks like a dejected musketeer.

Voiceovers collide at one point to highlight the chasm between what Ashcroft thinks he's writing and what the people who read it actually hear. Without sticking it in your face, Nathan Barley is loaded with many more layers of information, aural and visual, than a regular sitcom. Tapestries of music throb constantly. You need freeze-frame eyes to catch all the textural details: Sunday supplements promising stories like "Nicky Campbell: The Curse Of My Brilliance"; warped graffiti graphics; despicable video-art; fly posters advertising performances by "Aborted Tom".

At this level, if you're looking for Morris to be doing this kind of thing, it continues the virtually-real, ridiculously heightened acid-absurd cultural assault of old. But Morris's direction is a step back from that frontline, and a leap away from the intense, slow, sucking, ambient black nightmare of his Jam series. It's surprisingly straight and light – and, for the first time, we have, in Claire and Dan, Morris dealing with characters he might actually care about. This could turn out to be important.

Held up as both God and Satan, Morris has been such an important figure that backlash is inevitable. He's condemned to be accused either of producing more of the same, or of loss of edge, and even those who used to loathe him are lining up to explain why he's not as good as he used to be.

It's the first sitcom adapted from a website, but Nathan Barley is not a zeitgeist-surfing portrait of our age. It's based on something called C***, but it's not going to jam switchboards with complaints. But for anyone who considers it a pleasure to simply be around while someone like Morris is still operating – someone who understands his medium inside out, yet wants to understand it more, and follows no agenda but his own – Nathan Barley is to be explored, perhaps adored. Filled with clowns and crisis, it's, at least, a decent laugh on a Friday night. I suspect Morris wants that as much as anyone.

06 February 2005

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Last paragraph of John Dugdale's review in today's Times:

Viewed as satire, Nathan Barley is both a minor project for Morris and - in seemingly lampooning the Hoxton scene of about five years ago, when Barley first surfaced on Brooker's website TV Go Home - an oddly dated one. The pair have let it be known, however, that the series is character-based comedy: sitcom not Swift. Once the Hosegate milieu has been established, subsequent episodes will no doubt concentrate more on the Dan-Nathan-Claire triangle. But parading a succession of fools is a s peculiar way of persuading the viewer you're not writing satire.

[rjd2]

Their was something in the Daiily Mail TV preview section yesterday it was quite glowing in fact. I didnt have the change to buy the paper anybody here have it?

[Neil]

Can't find it on the Daily Mail website.  Can't find that other one on the Times website either.

[Rubbish Monkey]

Heres the one that was in The Independant Information magazine on Saturday.

Jeers to the style victims

Satire-master Chris Morris taunts urban trendies in his new series on C4

Any new series by Chris Morris, the comedian responsible for such groundbreaking (and headline grabbing) work as On the Hour, The Day Today, Brass Eye and Blue Jam, is rare and substantial enough to interest the most jaded of Journalists. Nathan Barley, Morris's first full TV series in several years, is being anticipated in the media with barely suppressed excitement.

But does this six-part sitcom, co-written by Morris and Charlie Brooker (the mind behind TV Go Home), live up to expectations? Well, more or less. Although Morris himself does not appear in the opening episode, his satirical fingerprints are all over Nathan Barley. Eschewing the spoof currant-affairs formats he has favoured in the past, Morris opts this time a more straightforward sitcom narrative. The series is set in the industrial conversions of the fictional London borough of Hosegate.

Morris pokes fun mercilessly at Barley (Nick Burns) a self-styled "web-master, guerrilla film-maker, screenwriter, DJ and self-facilitating media node", played in suitably self regarding fashion by newcomer Nicolas Burns.

He presides over a supposedly super-maverick website called Trashbat.co.uk. Described by Barley as "an online, urban culture dispatch", it specialises in playing excruciating "pranks".

Given to such nonsensical slogans as "keep it foolish" and "you're rockin' the main stage, dude", Barley and his acolytes are obsessed with novelty and "irony". They ride around on tiny bicycles and skateboards with outsized flip-flops strapped to their heads. They are fixated by trendiness but fail to grasp that what is in fashion this week will almost certainly be out next week. Barley worships the journalist Dan Ashcroft, who pens magazine articles about what's hot.

In this weeks opener, Barley tries to work his charms on Dan's sister, Claire, an earnest documentary-maker seeking funding for her film about a choir of reformed junkies.

You want to keep freeze-framing to soak up the background detail. When Claire is pitching, for example, posters on the commissioning editor's wall advertise programmes such as When Surgeons Crack Up and Nazi Experiments in Colour.

There is a danger that Morris is speaking to a tiny, self-referential audience - and the title character resembles that other "chilled-out entertainer", David Brent from The Office. However, while Nathan Barley may not have the tabloids working themselves up into the sort of lather generated by Morris's "paedophile" episode of Brass Eye, the series should make the mark.

After all, you have got to love any show that sends up über-hip, style-mag pretentiousness. In Nathan Barley, the editor of the aspiring "bible of cool" magazine, Sugar Ape, is called Jonathan Yeah? As his PA explains: "He added the question mark by deed poll".

'Nathan Barley' is on Fri at 10pm on C4

James Rampton

[ColinBradshaw]

From the Radio Times.

This new series from Chris Morris is impossible to classify. Described as a sitcom, there's very little "sit" while the "com" is specific and an acquired taste. But that's Chris Morris, guerrilla comedy genius behind The Day Today, for you. Here he satirises the tediously trendy world of London "fashionistas" and media types. The eponymous Nathan Barley is an idiot who thinks he's deeply cool, as he dresses in urban hip clothes and runs a ridiculous website called Trashbat. He's a buffoon, but his Trashbat antics have won him a firm following among young hip boys who work for absurd magazines. There are moments of Morris madness and it's a welcome comic oddity, though possibly one with limited appeal outside London's media maelstrom.

[Mildly Diverting]

guerrilla comedy genius

At last, a journalist putting some thought into it.

[rjd2]

I got this from the pullout in the mirror on Saturday.

Chris Morris's cracking new comedy takes a vicious swipe at the Internet generation.

From the pen of BrassEye creator Chris Morris comes this horrifying version of the present. Media moron Nathan is a younger, less self-aware version of David Brent who lives for his pointless website.  The show's voice of reason is journo Dan (Mighty Boosh star Julian Baratt), who has just written a scathing attack on Barley types entitled "The Rise Of The Idiots". Trouble is, the very people who Dan despises-with their stupid haircuts and undersize bikes-are also his biggest fans. And none more so than Nathan! Acutely observed, but with Morris's typical twisted exaggeration, this comedy will split the audience-but for some it will be unmissable..

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Ooh, Time Out have given it a bit of a shrug. Mainly for 'the target's too small and pointless' reasons.

They've also done a two-page Morris-for-beginners feature, which is as good as you'd imagine it to be.

I'll get hold of a copy later and type some proper quotes.

[slim]

Thanks to kate, who put a link to this in the Site Updates section.

Can TV's king of satire do sitcom?
8 February 2005

The one thing you can expect from Chris Morris is the unexpected. The merciless comedian best known for whipping up a national controversy with his Brass Eye Paedophile Special in 2001 never fails to surprise. He has done it again twice with his new Channel 4 sitcom, Nathan Barley, which begins on Friday.

The first surprise was that for a while it seemed that the notoriously publicity-shy Morris was going to submit to interviews. Then C4 announced that there would be none after all. As one of the few journalists who has ever interviewed Morris I managed to acquire an email address and he quickly responded by telephone.

He explained at length why he did not want to go on the record. He insists that his London-based sendup on the dotcom-meets-post-Britartmedia-scene - in which he doesn't appear, though he directed, and cowrote with Charlie Brooker - should speak for itself. But his claim that he wants people simply to "bump into" the programme seems disingenuous.

In the absence of interviews, a welter of cut-and-paste profiles and umpteen Channel 4 trailers have ensured that many have already formed an opinion about Nathan Barley before the sitcom has begun. If Morris really wanted to be low-key he should have used a pseudonym.

It is a pity he has demanded that his quotes cannot be used, because he is a fascinating talker, spooling out theories at a rapid rate. He thinks celebrity-fixated PR is one of the worst creations of the modern media. He thinks a lot of comedy is sub-standard because profiteering production companies skimp on development money. And he loved The Office, an obvious influence on Nathan Barley.

The second surprise is that Barley is a straightforward sitcom, completely uncontroversial, with real jokes and believable characters. It revolves around the lives of a colourdigicamful, contrasting trio: Nathan Barley (a website reporter and DJ, played by Nick Burns); Dan Ashcroft (jaded journalist on style magazine Sugar Ape, played by Julian Barratt) and Dan's sister Claire (aspiring filmmaker, played by Claire Keelan). Their situations may be specific but the themes - oneupmanship, vanity, existential angst - are universal.

It has already been called a "Hoxton spoof" - and, moan some critics, rather after the fact, since Hoxton has already become a parody of itself and needs no further mocking.

In fact, it is an old idea - Morris says that he first suggested it in 2001 and made a pilot in 2003. He also vehemently denies that, although it is set in a place called Hosegate, where Textile Street sounds remarkably like the real-life Brick Lane, his sitcom has no connection with east London.

What is undeniable is that what this latterday Swift has created is a brilliant lampoon of shades-wearing, toting, Japanese import-buying-urbanites personified by Nathan Barley, the latest in a long line of great British fall-guys. An iPod Alan Partridge. A Bluetooth David Brent.

Morris has a keen eye for talent. This is stand-up comedian Barratt's first television role since BBC3's lowkey Mighty Boosh; another newcomer is Ben Whishaw, who, since filming, has won acclaim as Hamlet at the Old Vic.

Whishaw plays a computer geek called Pingu, which is far from the most ludicrous name in the programme. Sugar Ape's editor is Jonatton Yeah? - the question mark added by deed poll. Morris is very protective of his cast - another, naive, reason he gives for the press blackout, is that he wants to keep the spotlight off the newcomers.

When it comes to his work Morris is dedicated. Brooker, who originally created Barley on his cult website, TV Go Home, met Morris "through mutual friends at a dinner party, which is very bloody middle-class".

He notes that when Morris has an idea he gives it 100 per cent. "The only thing that is difficult is he is incredibly hard-working and thinks about it all the time, so it's not unusual to get a text at 7am or two in the morning about an idea he's had. He's almost borderline autistic, with the level of commitment he puts into things. But working 24/7 is good because it prompts you to do the same."

IF ALL this makes Morris sound odd, it shouldn't. He is not the recluse that some commentators have suggested. He lives an ordinary life with his partner and two children in south London. In the past, he has been happy to appear on television in character, with make-up covering a distinctive facial birthmark, though he has rarely been photographed offduty. He works just off Oxford Street and if you eat in the right cafés you might even spot him lunching. He is amiable company although prone to running off at intellectual tangents.

Born in 1965, he was educated at the Jesuit boarding school Stonyhurst, before gaining a degree in zoology from Bristol University. He was sacked from an early job as reporter on BBC Radio Bristol after letting off helium in the news booth to give the impression that Pinky and Perky were reading the headlines.

Further stunts at GLR in London saw him move into comedy, first with Radio 4's On the Hour and then on television with The Day Today. Maybe cultural provocation runs in the family. One of Brass Eye's most notorious sketches was a mock report on Sutcliffe - The Musical, starring the Yorkshire Ripper on dayrelease. Morris's younger brother, Tom Morris, nurtured Jerry Springer - The Opera while artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre (he has since moved to the National). Who knows what they'd come up with if they teamed up.

Morris's trend-spotting ability sets him apart from other comedy creators. In Brass Eye he was one of the first to notice the desperation of Z-list celebrities, duped by their own vanity, to appear on camera, too lacking in self-knowledge to realise that they were being sent up.

He also predated the move towards disquieting darker comedy in the 2000 TV version of his cult radio show, Blue Jam, entitled Jam. In one sketch, a grief-stricken mother asks a central heating engineer to "repair" her dead baby. There is a direct line from this to Nighty Night, penned by Morris collaborator Julia Davis. And without Morris would we have Monkey Dust, the BBC's animated adult comedy which features a character called the Paedofinder General?

Last year, playwright Stephen Poliakoff said that no comedy in the theatre was as radical as The Office or Chris Morris. In Nathan Barley, Morris has gone back to basics, yet with his touch of genius, the sitcom feels as radical as ever. He might not want to speak publicly, but Barley sings Morris's praises for him.

I have no idea how to submit articles to the database.


Edit: Don't worry, I think I just figured it out.

Edit2: Ack. No, I didn't. I just had to edit it to remove an erroneous character and now it's disappeared. Presumably waiting for an admin to approve it or something?

[Neil]

You moved it into the Victor Lewis-Smith category slim :-)  I've fixed that for you now.  Thanks for putting in my preferred title layout etc, savesme a bit of time!

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

And he loved The Office

Aww. And I had a glimmer of hope that he might be the *one* media person out there who didn't...

[slim]

You moved it into the Victor Lewis-Smith category slim :-)  I've fixed that for you now.  Thanks for putting in my preferred title layout etc, savesme a bit of time!

Yeah, when I edited there was loads of categories all of a sudden... I think I must have had a stupid moment. Thanks for sorting it out.

[Darrell]

he has demanded that his quotes cannot be used

Anyone else think "for fuck's sake" there? Didn't he used to be an amiable radio comedian who was less likely to 'play the game' than a half-eaten Toffee Crisp? Is this the same person?

What a daft twat.

[Robert Varley]

Yes, it sounds like you're taking what a journalist writes at face value a bit there...
I don't think the man is quite the prima donna that suggests.

[thatmuch]

Can TV's king of satire do sitcom?
But his claim that he wants people simply to "bump into" the programme seems disingenuous.

That would be the ideal though, for all Morris programmes just to appear in the TV listings, with a couple of trailers maybe. The journalists and the comedy nerds on this site may believe that his stuff is directed towards them, but it's pretty clear that Morris would rather just anybody would come across it and react without particular preconceptions. I reckon that worked very well for 'On the Hour'  'Blue Jam' and 'The Day Today'.

In the absence of interviews, a welter of cut-and-paste profiles and umpteen Channel 4 trailers have ensured that many have already formed an opinion about Nathan Barley before the sitcom has begun. If Morris really wanted to be low-key he should have used a pseudonym.

Morris is hardly in control of the cut and paste articles, ( there are kerbillions of people who don't read articles like that anyway) and I find it hard to imagine he's in control of the trailers either.