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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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TJ


peet

Quote from: "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.
here

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "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.

I still don't get that though. No matter how irksome the phrase '90% of Python is shit' is to hear, it's clearly an opinion. We know it's an opinion - after all [adopts Jonathan Miller voice], how can the shitness of Python, as it were, ever be quantifiably factual? [Puts hands behind neck and directs an opera]

I homestly can't think of an example where an opinion could be mistaken for a fact, or vice versa. It's nonsense. It just reeks of people who feel they need to constantly apologise for having views on stuff.

butnut

Guardian's pick of the day

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,1410428,00.html

QuoteNathan Barley
10pm, Channel 4
Webmaster of trashbat.co.ck, twentysomething Nathan Barley defines himself as a "self-facilitating media node". Everyone else just thinks Nathan's an idiot, especially Dan Ashcroft, a journalist frustrated with life at style-over-substance mag Sugar Ape. The duo's lives become linked when Nathan offers to help out Dan's sister, aspiring film-maker Claire. Scripted by Chris Morris (Brass Eye) and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker (Screen Burn), a sitcom that takes wickedly accurate potshots at the bright young things of the London media world.

The Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-106-1478359,00.html

QuoteNATHAN 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 stupid monster that he helped to create; the other is twentysomething multimedia wannabe Nathan Barley, a hideous Hoxton variation on Alan Partridge. Satire works only when it knows its target. Morris and his co-writer Charlie Brooker know it far too well, and lay into this world with a ferocious enthusiasm that is not always comfortable to watch.

Labian Quest

Dunno if it's still up, but C4 Teletext had a 5 page review of NB in their telly section, it was surprisingly negative considering the source. It gave a few details about the second episode too, one of which made me laugh (BEWARE, SPOILER) apparently NB goes to a party where everyone starts calling him "the preacherman"

Jemble Fred

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"
Quote from: "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.

I still don't get that though. No matter how irksome the phrase '90% of Python is shit' is to hear, it's clearly an opinion. We know it's an opinion - after all [adopts Jonathan Miller voice], how can the shitness of Python, as it were, ever be quantifiably factual? [Puts hands behind neck and directs an opera]

All I'm saying is, people do continually express their opinions as fact (I used to do it a lot, making up bullshit like 'Did you know that Garry Shandling has an official role as The Biggest Cunt In The World, for which he receives a stipend from the senate?'), and, if it's something I disagree strongly with, I will not be able to stop myself from flying off the handle, posting italicised vitriol, and being in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Call me kooky, but there we are.

rjd2

Page 135 On teletext ITV has a five page preview of Nathan Barley which is worth reading and its not that flattering of the show either.
So does BBC Teletext page 521 or so.


Paaaaul

Today's Sun - "Sara Nathan on What To Watch Tonight"

"BEST SITCOM: Nathan Barley (C4 10pm).
Whatever your feelings about Chris Morris - who shocked Britain with his Brass Eye paedophile stunt - this new comedy is very funny.
Newcomer Nick Burns plays a cocky, vile media bloke. He runs a website called Trashbat and thinks he's so cool. Satirical fun."

Particle Man

The Bruce Dessu article, which popped up on this thread as from the Evening Standard, appears on The Scotsman website. Think it's today's... http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=156722005

It's identical as far as I can see.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Jemble Fred in a bad mood a few years ago"'Did you know that Garry Shandling has an official role as The Biggest Cunt In The World, for which he receives a stipend from the senate?'

That still can't be confused for a fact though - it's just a way of expressing an opinion with humour. I mean it might be annoying, but only if you're a Garry Shandling fan. (What if you said the same thing but replaced 'biggest cunt' with 'best comedian' - is that just as bad?)

It might be an annoying way to write, but then so is saying things like 'I know a lot of people like him, but in my opinion Garry Shandling is someone whose work I personally don't enjoy very much, but I respect the views of those who do, and (etc)'.

biniput

There are articles on both the Goodies and Morris in this months edition of WORD (the one with Joni Mitchell on the cover). Both are ok and the Goodies interview is better than expected.


Emergency Lalla Ward Ten


Neil

QuoteThe rise of the idiots

Fools and chancers at every turn - welcome to the 'well futile' world of Nathan Barley. Creators Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris explain who and what to watch out for

Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian


Nathan Barley: "A bulletproof pebblehead assured of his own brilliance."


Doug Rocket
Founder member of seminal 1980s politi-synth electro rock duo the Veryphonics, Doug Rocket is one of the most important figures to have emerged in the history of clueless self-indulgence. Rocket's latest project is the experimental artsphere Place, a multimillion-pound creative enablement hive, which comprises studios, galleries, minglespace, thoughtcupboards, flotation melds and an Eric Clapton memorial songwriting vineyard. Place is designed to empower anyone who wishes to explore an idea to its full potential (especially if they also declare a need to do this in the foetal position, sustained by empowering wafts of Amazonian oxygen and the jarred farts of Krishnamurti), and might as well be replaced by a gigantic furnace that Rocket can shovel skyscraping piles of banknotes into with spectral, uncomprehending joy in his eyes.

Dan Ashcroft

Thirty-four-year-old shambles who joined Sugar Ape magazine eight years ago to pen a review of a Supergrass single, and whose cynical, vitriolic style has led to him being idolised by precisely the flavour of buffoon he despises - braying, wide-eyed simpletons in dire need of a 20,000-volt DJing accident. The failure to reject the adulation he despises has kept Dan on the Sugar Ape roster, despite the new editor's sustained bids to rob the magazine of whatever frayed tatters of integrity it had in the first place. He is desperate to break free of the increasingly juvenile berk circus he's chained to, but years of heavy idiot bombardment (combined with the unshakeable suspicion that the grown-ups have got it wrong) have left Dan standing on a crumbling pillar of rock in a mile-deep canyon. He knows the idiots are idiots, but unlike them, he suspects he's one too.

Wasp T-12

Nathan's latest gadget ($470, Japan), the Wasp T-12 Speechtool is not so much a phone, more a Fisher-Price Activity Centre for outrageously affluent babies. Designed in Tokyo by a team of boffins hell-bent on pushing the technological envelope far beyond the shores of reason, it brags a sharkproof black-n-yeller shell behind which lurks a nightmarish whirlwind of MP3 decks, text message laser projectors, broadcast-quality video recorders, cross-ply Wi-Fi pixel ennoblement buffers and disco lights. It also doubles as a chillum. Largely used for status radiation and public boasting, the Wasp T-12 is soon to be replaced by the Wasp X-14, which is two-thirds smaller yet 15 times louder, and which, if there were any justice in the universe, would automatically pull its user's head off, kick it down the stairs, crunch it through a waste disposer and broadcast the scene globewide.

Ivan Plapp

In more enlightened times, Ivan's lifetime would be spent polishing coals with his eyes in a trench of lampreys, on behalf of a demented serf rapist. This being 2005, Plapp is Commissioning Head of Spectacular Reality at Channel 7, the cutting-edge TV station at the forefront of knife-in-the-soul television, thanks to a policy that doesn't simply bow down before the most cloud-brained demographic imaginable, but wheedles and begs to be kicked on the bridge of the nose. From "Best Commissioning Newcomer 2002", Plapp proceeded to win 39 awards for his tireless work re-inventing all conceivable notions of television by seizing ideas, plucking out the interesting bits, caking the remains in tinsel and shit and then broadcasting them to massive personal acclaim.

Claire Ashcroft

Idealistic, angered by injustice and dismayed by her brother's spiritual freefall, Claire has arrived in Hosegate determined to secure funding for London Undone and Done In, her heartfelt documentary that will rip open the dark underbelly of urban life. She's already filmed a choir of reformed junkies who sing to schoolchildren about the perils of crack and horse. To Claire, it's a good thing that a roomful of eight-year-olds should watch a mandolin-hammering frailty sing a 29-minute song about three years of injecting smack into his cock. This essential good nature has blinded her to the fact that Nathan's altruistic attention has less to do with his commitment to gritty documentary-making than his commitment to pleasing his testes.

Nathan Barley

A bulletproof pebblehead assured of his own brilliance; a preposterous, swaggering swingcock who spends more time contemplating ringtones than the difference between right or wrong, or even up and down; creator of the virulently asinine Trashbat website; a DJ, a film-maker, a berk, a goon, a nurk, and a great big galloping fartbox - Nathan Barley could be accused of being the principal gushspout of all the world's idiocy, if he were not, alas, merely the principal tool in a shed full of clots. Close equivalents of Barley exist in every walk of life - they are the loudmouthed twits who seem too oafish to do any harm, until you wake up one morning to find one of them has taken your job.

15Peter20


Either a genius or a dazzling genius, depending on which way you look at it, 15Peter20 (real name Ian Phillips) has made his mark in the world of contemporary photography thanks to a series of shocking, gimmick-heavy exhibitions in which the gimmick quickly becomes attached to the underside of the art, then scuttles up its back, hops on its shoulders and screams which direction it should go in, while simultaneously flashing its bum at passers-by. His new collection, Piss Bliss, consists entirely of photographs of celebrities urinating, thereby expertly capturing their animal vulnerability while exquisitely forcing jocular postmodernity to commit taboobicide. These pictures are at once the most revealing portrait photographs ever taken and an absolutely bloody flabbergasting waste of the world's time.

· Nathan Barley, Fri, 10pm, C4 (Ep 1 is repeated tonight, 12.10am)
QuoteNathan keeps it well dusty

Sam Wollaston
Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian

Hosegate is where the idiots are. They work for online urban culture dispatches, and ride children's bicycles in the street and plastic tractors round their offices. Their pubic hair sprouts over the top of their jeans. They speak a strange language, say things like "Keep it dusty" and "Well plastic". Zappuccino is a verb, as in: got to zappuccino. And they babble into hand-held twit machines.
It seems to be Hoxton of a while back, though creators Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker say it has nothing to do with east London and that Nathan Barley (Channel 4) is character-based comedy. Whatever, whether it's satire or sitcom, twatire or twitcom, it doesn't really matter. More important is that it's very good - beautifully observed, written and acted, and very, very funny. Although it's been said that this is a new departure for Morris, and surprisingly gentle for the man behind Brass Eye, he still seems to be doing what he has always done so well: looking around, observing the idiots, then showing them up for what they are: idiots.

It's not just the Hosegate twats who are targeted, either. The next step up the media ladder, the people at Weekend on Sunday magazine, are no better. Tossing their poxy ideas around and writing features on what's on Michael Portillo's iPod. Could be uncomfortable viewing in certain circles.

But the real joy is the title character, an idiot among the idiots. They've created - or breathed life into, as Barley is a character on Brooker's TV Go Home website - a monster to rival Alan Partridge or David Brent. He is, as described on the site, a "swaggering cock-about-town whose very existence indelibly tarnishes the world's already questionable track record", with Bluetooth headsets all over the place and a liking for banging beats and strong sensimilla. Most people know someone with a bit of Nathan Barley about them. You certainly wouldn't want to be sharing the top deck of a bus with him.

There are so many densely packed-in riches in Nathan Barley that it really needs a second viewing to catch everything, on the evidence of the first episode. If I have one criticism, it's that Claire, the main female role, is a bit limp. In every other way, it's brilliant. Keep it chopped out, yeah.

Neil

The Times

NATHAN BARLEY
Channel 4, 10pm

It is difficult to imagine Lord Rees-Mogg setting the video to catch this series. The world of urban cool that it satirises is so full of posturing buffoons that the writers, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, are in danger of being found guilty by association. Trickier still, it is not always easy to tell where their grisly fascination ends and the mockery begins. As a result, the people who are most likely to enjoy this series are the objects of its ridicule, leaving others vaguely uncomfortable. When Caryl Churchill wrote Serious Money, attacking greed in the 1980s, the stalls of the theatre were filled with City traders relishing every moment. DC

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Neil"When Caryl Churchill wrote Serious Money, attacking greed in the 1980s, the stalls of the theatre were filled with City traders relishing every moment. DC

'It's a nicking-quotes-from-Newsnight-Review for the noughties!' - Kwame

Godzilla Bankrolls

QuoteThe rise of the idiots

Fools and chancers at every turn - welcome to the 'well futile' world of Nathan Barley. Creators Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris explain who and what to watch out for

Is that supposed to be a humorous article to accompany the series, a la the TDT feature in Select? Because it seems more like an another attempt to explain the series so that people know why it's funny.

peet

Sunday Times 13/02/05

QuoteSo-so comedy

Nathan Barley (C4, 10pm)

Still no sign that Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris's dramatised jeremiad could become must-see television to rank with the latter's Blue [sic] or Brass Eye. Dan, the testy columnist who is the real central figure, attends a party organised by Barley and is forced to rap with his cretinous host while dressed as a preacher. Intriguing enough as coded autobiography, if you connect Dan and Morris, but the satire is mirthless and narrowly focused.

butnut

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1411723,00.html

QuoteBeyond satire

Chris Morris has raised the bar of cutting-edge comedy so high that his latest offering fails to clear it, while over in Wisteria Lane, one of TV's most entertaining programmes continues to hit heights

Kathry Flett
Sunday February 13, 2005
The Observer

Nathan Barley C4
Desperate HousewivesC4

C4's new sitcom, Nathan Barley, for which the description 'much-heralded' barely begins to hint at the media's thermometer-busting levels of fevered anticipation, is, as you will doubtless already know, if only by osmosis, a collaborative project (with his mate Charlie Brooker, of cult website TVGoHome) from the arch satirist-cum-guerrilla-comedian-cum-whatever, Chris Morris. Who was, in fairness, responsible for precisely none of the relentless pre-publicity.

Morris's last televisual outing was, you will also recall (if only because you've read it somewhere else), the infamous 2001 Brass Eye Special in which a selection of celebrity twits signed up to promote themselves by promoting an alleged charity campaign against paedophilia, but without actually reading the small print.

Indeed, as the likes of Gary Lineker, Neil Fox and Phil Collins (wonder if he kept his Nonce-Sense T-shirt? He'd make a fortune on eBay) earnestly asserted bald-faced rubbish, such as the 'fact' that paedophiles had more genes in common with crabs than humans or that internet grooming may involve projecting poisoned gas through a child's computer keyboard, it was clear that they could just as easily have been duped into promoting a charity campaign in favour of paedophilia.

The Brass Eye Special was both a rather brilliant and brilliantly timed bit of telly, but it aired in July 2001 and the world has changed quite a lot since then. It is a fundamentally less Funny Old World and therefore perhaps a bit harder to satirise, not least because Morris has helped to raise the cutting-edge comedy bar so high he can barely - or should that be Barley? - reach it himself.

Without Morris, there would, arguably, be none of the sweet surrealism of Green Wing (with its visual 'homages' to Morris's Jam ) or the terrifically pleased-with-itself nihilism of Nighty Night, which 'borrowed' ideas from everything Morris has ever done.

Morris has, of course, had a go at satirising the War on Terror - in this newspaper, indeed, where he collaborated with Armando Iannucci to produce a spoof report on the reporting of 9/11, with mixed results, mostly because print isn't really his medium.

Anyway, this is just a preamble to say that I was looking forward to Morris's return to telly as much as the next reviewer.

It's the kind of thing we journalists either really love, because it offers us an opportunity to backslap and feel smug about the fact that, if we have to, we can laugh at ourselves while being held up at comedy pistol point ('BANG!'). Or, for those working on the tabs, it is just a lot of fun to loathe, especially if it's done in a knowing sort of way. And it's only half-an-hour's viewing, so one hardly has to take notes but can still get a lot of posturing copy out of it, ideally by taking a critical stance nobody else has taken.

Mind you, that's a tough call. Even though I don't know the word on the street about Barley, I've got a hunch that it's Morris-critical-backlash time. And the reason I feel this is because I am an awesome pop-cultural zeitgeist-ometer. Which is, of course, how I got a job on The Observer in the first place, all those years ago, when I was cool, before I started popping up on telly talking about the 1970s and how annoying Christmas is.

Funnily enough, Nathan Barley is a complete arse who talks fluent Yoof and thinks he's cool. But as there's always someone further up the slippery ladder of Style, so Barley, who runs an 'online urban culture dispatj [sic]' - a vacuous website called Trashbat.co.ck ('registered in the Cook Islands ... ') - looks to journalist Dan Ashcroft, star columnist on Sugar Ape magazine, for his pop culture cues, though he naturally fails to spot himself in Dan's article 'The Rise of the Idiots'.

Dan, meanwhile, is adrift on a tsunami of self-loathing, killing time writing nonsense for pointless magazines aimed at 500 people in Hoxton while fantasising about a call from the newspaper supplement Weekend on Sunday magazine, which may - please god - want to tap into his urban groove.

The best and most successful scenes in episode one were when Dan (Julian Barratt of BBC3's The Mighty Boosh, a man with whom I once spent an hour in a room roughly 8ft by 10ft without ever receiving the honour of eye-contact. And no, I wasn't paying for the privilege ... ) finally gets an interview at the newspaper and blows it.

It isn't actually possible to care about Dan because he's as much of an arse as Barley, but the creeping knowledge that, though he professes to despise them, his Home Sweet Home is indeed right there in an east London colony with all the other style twats (rather than up west writing a column about his top five supermarket wines for Weekend on Sunday ) has a sort of stinging bathos, if you're looking for stinging bathos in a sitcom.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether Chris Morris's first sitcom is any more than the sum of its funny little details, including the coffee shop called Grind Zero, the framed cover of Tom Paulin on the wall of the Weekend on Sunday office ('Tom Paulin - Haunted by Rumour') and an editorial meeting at Sugar Ape, during which Ashcroft is congratulated on his 'Idiot' article by a colleague:

'That's the best thing I've ever read!'

Ashcroft: 'What's the second best thing you've ever read?'

'I dunno. Books and shit? i-D [magazine]?'

Though maybe I just think that's funny because my first magazine job was at i-D, or because those who work on magazines habitually refer to their product as the 'book', as in: 'That great piece about Bluetooth xylophones is, like, going up the front of the book.'

Whatever; thus far Nathan Barley comes across like a pilot that BBC3 might have turned down for trying too hard. I doubt Morris and Booker are trying too hard; I just know that youth culture is so intrinsically facile that it is virtually (unsati)risible on telly (apart from gadget mania which is, admittedly, a little bit funny), even by Chris Morris. Unlike, for example, my 1980s/1990s generation of vapid style gurus and bubble-headed fashionistas, who were, of course, never remotely facile but always the last word in astutely ironic and self-satirising, and who are now, to a man and a woman, all writing columns for Weekend on Sunday magazine.

Beagle 2

Quote'I dunno. Books and shit? i-D [magazine]?'

Heheh, how embarrassing. I thought that was Heidi.

Also, am I missing the point of something else...

Quote
Dan, meanwhile, is adrift on a tsunami of self-loathing, killing time writing nonsense for pointless magazines aimed at 500 people in Hoxton while fantasising about a call from the newspaper supplement Weekend on Sunday magazine, which may - please god - want to tap into his urban groove.

I thought the little twonk who worked at the paper had been trying to drag him down for an interview for ages but Ashcroft felt like he would be selling out or something, before finally giving in, not that it was his dream to go there?




Ambient Sheep

I heard it as "i-D" as well, and it would make more sense; although "Heidi" would be a damn sight funnier.

I could always check the subtitles as it's still on our Murdoch+ box, always assuming that they exist and can be trusted, that is.

Jemble Fred


alan strang

Quote from: "Jemble Fred"Come on, it was Heidi – a joke's a bloody joke. i-D isn't one.

Watched it again last night and now I've genuinely no idea whether it's 'i-D' or 'Heidi'. Certainly the way Ayoade slurs it suggests the former.

Come to think of it, 'Heidi' works even less as a joke than 'i-D'. Why would Ashcroft follow it up with "Is that a book?", when everyone knows it is.

Oh God, how can I be bothered to be bothered about this!

Jemble Fred

If you're right – as I've never even heard of i-D as a magazine, and I work in magazines, then that's a very good example of a joke that would mean nothing to a huge swathe of the audience.

'Heidi' was the only half-good joke I could recall.

imitationleather

i-D is a Wallpaper-type magazine, isn't it? I always see it when I'm in WHSmiths and think, "Heh, I ain't gettin' that!"

rjd2

ROT ON TV Feb 13 2005
Garry Bushell


Nathan Barley - Chris Morris gives up comedy for Lent... Rebecca Loos...Fat Girls & Feeders - bad enough the first time, who wanted seconds?... Going To Work Naked - cover up, you freaks...and Vanessa Feltz hosting The Wright Stuff - is she there to make Matthew look good?

Ian Hyland

Feb 13 2005

A FEW points about Brass Eye man Chris Morris's new sitcom Nathan Barley (C4, Fri). It's five years too late. BBC2's Attachments did the dotcom thing much better. And in terms of comedy it's more Nathan Barely... Raises A Laugh. Chris Morris? He's the new Harry Enfield.