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

Started by biniput, February 01, 2005, 12:48:17 PM

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Darrell

Quote from: "thatmuch"the comedy nerds on this site

*adjusts National Health spectacles and scratches acne*

A-hur hur hur, a-hur hur hur. *snort*

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Bruce Dessau's useless generally. He makes Mark Lawson and Stephen Armstrong look like angry young men.

There's a similarly useless piece in this month's Word, by the way. Lots of Quantick quotes, but otherwise nothing new.  

And the Radio Times gives Show 2 another lukewarm review.

A Passing Turk Slipper

When did Morris become so secretive? Surely he didn't request quotes not to be used in TDT era? Or did he, I have no idea. He can't have always been like this, or is it just because he is a lot more established now as a 'big name'? Was there all this secrecy about, say, Blue Jam, or did the media not really care when it was being made?

Jemble Fred

Quote from: "A Passing Turk Slipper"When did Morris become so secretive? Surely he didn't request quotes not to be used in TDT era? Or did he, I have no idea. He can't have always been like this, or is it just because he is a lot more established now as a 'big name'? Was there all this secrecy about, say, Blue Jam, or did the media not really care when it was being made?

Wasn't it when tossers started saying he was a 'genius', 'comedy guerrilla', etc, as opposed to a talented bloke who'd done some very funny work?

No, actually, perhaps it was when he started to believe the above.

Robert Varley

Don't quite understand how you're so sure of that without knowing the man.

Jemble Fred


Robert Varley

Perhaps indeed. But it sounds like you've rather made up your mind when you say 'Wasn't it when...' as if, perhaps,  you are in agreement with Passing Turk Slipper.

Jemble Fred

That 'perhaps' could equally mean 'perhaps he thinks that' – although I suppose I knew someone would take it as 'perhaps when CM started believing his hype was the point...' etc.

Of course I agree with APTS, he wasn't expressing an opinion, but asking for details connected to a fact.

Robert Varley

Then would it not be more accurate to say 'perhaps it might have been if he had started to believe the above'?

Godzilla Bankrolls

Quote from: "Robert Varley"Then would it not be more accurate to say 'perhaps it might have been if he had started to believe the above'?

Oh, shut up.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Robert Varley"Then would it not be more accurate to say 'perhaps it might have been if he had started to believe the above'?

With 'IMHO' at the end, just in case anyone's still unsure?

Robert Varley

Hey, nothing wrong with being too clear. It isn't a formal competition to be witty and subtle, after all.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Robert Varley"Hey, nothing wrong with being too clear. It isn't a formal competition to be witty and subtle, after all.

I don't know what you mean. If you say something, it's obviously your opinion. Where's the ambiguity?

A Passing Turk Slipper

Everytime I say something I always then state it is my opinion. In my opinion that's clearer. I'm of the opinion that we should all do this. But that's just my opinion.


butnut


Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "A Passing Turk Slipper"Everytime I say something I always then state it is my opinion. In my opinion that's clearer. I'm of the opinion that we should all do this. But that's just my opinion.

Must be tiring surely?

'You're looking nice tonight, dear...in my opinion.'

Robert Varley

'Of course I agree with APTS, he wasn't expressing an opinion, but asking for details connected to a fact.'

I didn't say APTS was expressing an opinion - but I thought Jemble Fred was expressing an opinion.

'Where's the ambiguity?'
That's my point.
When JF says 'No, actually, perhaps it was when he started to believe the above.' I thought that was pretty unambiguous. It sounds like someone who is being pretty bitter actually.

'If you say something it's obviously your opinion'
Well, no actually. Sometimes people do state a 'fact' regardless of their own opinion. And sometimes believe it or not people eschew their personally held belief and endeavour to give a reasoned professional judgement or 'objective' appraisal where they can't give a 'fact'.

Jemble Fred

Quote from: "Robert Varley"'Of course I agree with APTS, he wasn't expressing an opinion, but asking for details connected to a fact.'

I didn't say APTS was expressing an opinion - but I thought Jemble Fred was expressing an opinion.

'Where's the ambiguity?'
That's my point.
When JF says 'No, actually, perhaps it was when he started to believe the above.' I thought that was pretty unambiguous. It sounds like someone who is being pretty bitter actually.

Yes, as I said, I presumed that someone would take it that way. But that's really your prerogative.

And your 'you seem to agree with APTS' post shows that you thought he was expressing an opinion. Whereas it's surely evident that Morris has become increasingly secretive in his career?

Blimey, this is a pointlessly mimsy argument, isn't it?

Quote from: "Robert Varley"'Where's the ambiguity?'
Over there, in a box.

A Passing Turk Slipper

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"
Quote from: "A Passing Turk Slipper"Everytime I say something I always then state it is my opinion. In my opinion that's clearer. I'm of the opinion that we should all do this. But that's just my opinion.

Must be tiring surely?

'You're looking nice tonight, dear...in my opinion.'
Heh, I hate all this opinion stuff. Everyone knows when someone is speaking their opinion, so someone jumping in to tell a person off for 'speaking opinion as fact ' is just unnecessary. I can't stand it when people say 'well that's just your opinion and you're entitled to it'. I'm aware it's my bloody opinion, and cheers for saying I'm allowed to have one. You prick. Respond to what I'm saying rather than telling me that what I was expressing was an opinion. Saying things like 'in my opinion' just seems unnecessary in the majority of cases.

Jemble Fred

In the majority of cases, I totally agree.

But the thing is, if you're expressing a clearly inflammatory opinion ('90% of Python is shit', 'Chris Morris nicked all his jokes from Dustin Gee's coffin', etc) using all the vocabulary of a world-weary professor outlining self-evident truths, then you are asking for it.

Not that that was the case here, but it does happen, and when it does, you're faced with the choice of saying:

"Can you please learn NOT to express your OPINION as FACT!"

Or smashing your computer into a million pieces, tracking down the lazy opinionated poster and shoving the shards of broken plastic and glass in their eyes.

Shaddock

QuoteBut the thing is, if you're expressing a clearly inflammatory opinion ('90% of Python is shit',

I agree this is inflammatory.  Surely it's c.94%?  Unlke Laurel and Hardy, it's not as funny any more.


butnut

Thanks for 'Kate' in the site updates page.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200502140045

QuoteAndrew Billen - Triumph of idiots
Television
Andrew Billen
Monday 14th February 2005

Television - Chris Morris proves why we need him in a yoof-full satire. By Andrew Billen

Nathan Barley (Channel 4)

When did the middle-aged insult "yoof" enter the language? A long time back: 15, maybe 20, years ago. Those it was first used against must be middle-aged themselves by now. Yet despite the admirable efforts of Beavis and Butt-head and South Park, it has taken that long for television to satirise the concept effectively. In Nathan Barley (Fridays, 10pm), Chris Morris and the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker finally do so by pointing their artillery at the factories that create the culture rather than its consumers. After all, as Auberon Waugh once said of the working classes, it is not the people we dislike, but their culture.

Nathan, the nominal hero, is actually the programme's chief villain, a youth superficial all the way down. We meet him skimming along the pavement on a mini-bike on a "fly-op", distributing adverts for his website, Trashbat.co.ck (it's registered in the Cook Islands). "It's well fucking futile," he tells "me n**ger" and the other puzzled citizens at the bus stop. His boast does not mislead. Futile it is. The website is divided into Latest (Damian on webcam addressing us while high, or low, on "colossally concentrated" TCP), Diaree (we have yet to be treated), Pranks (one involves Nathan connecting a lorry battery to the earlobes of a member of his staff) and Other Stuff (cartoons about monkeys).

Nathan wears two Bluetooth ear sets, and in the extremis of sub-musical composition straps himself inside a straitjacket of electronic paraphernalia. His mobile phone is a Waso T-12, a Japanese model that features a larger number-five key "because it's the most common number". He is a Zappuccino-drinking, "self-facilitating, media node", who thinks "credo" is spelt and pronounced "credos". Nick Burns, who plays him, does well not to make him so irritating he is impossible to watch.

His would-be nemesis is the pathetically flawed Dan Ashcroft, who in the opening episode has the misfortune to run into him twice in one morning. Dan works for a Dazed and Confused rip-off called Sugar Ape, currently rebranding itself "suga RAPE" and edited by a guy who calls himself "Jonatton Yeah?". Sugar Ape's target reader is Nathan Barley, and the magazine is written by young men as cretinously neophiliac as he. Dan's mistake is to have turned 30, perhaps even 35, and, in a Damascene moment, to have realised that he is surrounded and read by morons. In a career high, he writes an article about the "triumph of the idiots" aimed at fellow hacks and Nathans, all of whom, naturally, regard it as a masterpiece.

His diatribe is spotted by a middlebrow newspaper called the Weekend on Sunday whose audience consists of slightly older idiots. At first Dan thinks accepting the call to a job interview would be selling out. But after a particularly infantile editorial conference, in which his colleagues play a version of the schoolyard game rock, paper, scissors ("cock, muff, bumhole"), he sees it as his escape route. The problem is that when he is interviewed beneath framed covers of the Weekend on Sunday Magazine (sample cover line - "Tom Paulin: haunted by rumour"), his potential employers quickly discover he doesn't know anything. Dan's one subject is how rubbish his own culture is and, tragically, it is the only culture he has. Julian Barratt portrays Dan raggedly as a Dostoevskian misfit, adrift in his career, betrayed by his own preoccupations. He is not even particularly nice. The quality of niceness is instead awarded to his sister Claire (Claire Keelan), a documentary-maker who vaguely registers that there is a life outside the trendy end of Shoreditch. As we leave her at the end of episode one, it seems she, too, will be seduced by Nathan's know-nothing bumptiousness.

The character of Nathan was created by Brooker on his TV Go Home website, and it is his good fortune to have been teamed up with the perfectionist Morris. There is so much detail to enjoy. You need to freeze-frame to spot a girl wearing a "Stupid Anorexic Bitch" T-shirt, or that the cappuccino comes from Grind Zero. When Claire pitches an idea for a TV documentary, it is to the indie that made Nazi Experiments in Colour. This is a world in which words have ceased to signify thought.

Reviewing this programme gave me an excuse to look again at Morris's previous satires on the media, The Day Today and Brass Eye. Although the former is now a decade old, its parody of TV news conventions remains uncannily accurate. The only surprise is that Jeremy Paxman, spoofed by Morris as a sneering bully, had a career after it. Brass Eye equally repays another viewing. Its controversial 2001 special on the media frenzy over paedophiles has weathered into a classic. Both programmes passed an important test: when I switched off the DVD and turned on the real news, I could barely tell the difference.

The middle-aged in spirit who waited so long for yoof to be tackled will not like Nathan Barley: they will misidentify its language and irreverence as part of the problem. Fans of Morris as an actor will miss him in this sitcom (as do I). Hoxton yoof dotcommers will complain that it is already out of date. But in challenging the bad faith of the media wherever he spots it, Morris demonstrates why we need him. He is the equal of Malcolm Muggeridge in his prime, our greatest living Englishman.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

the lapse

There's review by Pete Clark in the Evening Standards Metro magazine today. I'm afraid  i can't scan it or any of that  useful stuff.   He manages to say its good and bad all in one review, which is a talent no-one can deny.

Neil

The internet is fucking stupid:

Quote from: "[urlhttp://barbelith.com/topic/20270[/url]"]

Very possibly.

Cook'd and Bomb'd is a bit strange anyway. It's basically what would happen if all anyone on Barbelith ever did was say terrible things about George M, Peter Milligan, and possibly Alan Moore. And 'neil' who wrote that review, seems a bit, well, conflicted - the ( hilarious, and well worth going through if you've got the time, ) Geefe articles which Chris Morris wrote for The Observer a few years ago are, on Cook'd and Bomb'd, attributed to neil, he is listed as their author. Which would appear to mean that either neil has serious 'boundary issues,' or that, on the other hand, he is, in fact...

Running a board for years that's ostensibly a fansite, but is in fact a festering pit of bile would be a very Chris Morris thing to do, but as with the VW ads discussed here recently, he can't do everything, surely.

There seems to be a queue to give Nathan Barley a kicking, to say, as a telly reviewer, that you didn't like it first - I'm not totally sure if I haven't got a downer on this already, and it's not even on yet, and won't be for days.

I'll explain here - just in case the knuckle-dragging simpleton who posted that happens to chance upon this thread - that the "author" column is there by default in the knowledge base add-on.  I will now take time out of my busy day to hack the templates and change it to "posted by" just in case more dick-brained fuck-eyed paranoid bloody imbeciles think that I am either: 1) trying to claim I wrote the Geefe Columns, despite having posted a couple of hundred articles to that database and always putting the author in the appropriate field when known, or 2) in actual fact Chris Morris disguising himself as a Northern Irish webmaster who runs his own fan-fucking-site in between doing adverts for Volkswagen.  "Alex is losing his edge", I dub thee lord of all fuckwits.

Hugs and kisses.

To be honest I find this vaguely hilarious and wonder how on earth "Alex Is Losing His Edge" manages to put on a pair of trousers each day without getting confused and giving up.

TJ


slim

I don't often do this, but LOL! at the man's stupidity.

Oh, and I'd just like to add: If one more fucking person fucking states that we, as a fucking collective I fucking mean, suggests we're fucking missing the fucking point of Nathan Barley, or that we fucking are fucking Nathan fucking Barley, I think my fucking head will fuckfuckexplodefuck.

You either find something funny or you don't! There's no "point"! There's no secret fucking meaning. Cock, muff, bumhole is a silly game with a silly twist on an existing game. I GET IT! I DIDN'T MISS THE POINT! AARGRGRGGHHH!


Edit: I was so angry I got my sentence structure all wrong.

Neil

Well to be fair, I did lay awake for a few nights trying to get my head around the complicated and multi-faceted satire that is "cock, muff, bumhole" before eventually giving up, putting on a GLR show and weeping.  Ah, that board is the best laugh of the day.

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Morr....DOH!...that was a close one.