The first series of Nathan Barley clattered to a close on Channel 4 last weekend, and a quick perusal of the cuttings suggests that the series, written by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, has to date garnered more column inches than the return of Doctor Who. From wild adulation to astonishingly bad-tempered invective, Nathan Barley’s depiction of the excesses of wigged-out nu-media types more than made up for disappointing ratings with its disproportionate social impact.
Online teen chat rooms spotting self-obsessed idiots refer to them instantly as “a bit of a Nathan Barley”, suggesting the phrase will join “Up to a point, Lord Copper” and “It goes up to eleven” in the rich pantheon of catch phrases that American college professors (and Barleys) like to call memes: sampled and sampled until those who use them aren’t entirely sure why. Others have sought to defend Barleyism, among them the anonymous correspondent who angrily found the truth a little close to home: “I am constantly quoting Robin from vintage Batman cartoons, which is a bit Barleyish,” he huffed in a BBC chat room, “but it can be funny (trust me on this one).”
If the series has made it impossible to claim ironic ownership of kitsch, it will have performed an immeasurable service. From the early 1990s, the possibility of mutilating anything of value, then facing criticism with a sneered “whatever”, has become the dominant cultural discourse. At the same time, the series introduced two actors of startling skill: the stand-up comedian Julian Barratt, whose portrayal of the collapsing style writer Dan Ashcroft was understated and powerful; and a newcomer, Nick Burns, as Nathan, who brought an unexpected depth to a character originally conceived as the archetypal prat.
Amid all the debate on the series, the voices of its creators have been hard to hear. Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker created the show out of a character on Brooker’s website, TvGoHome, but have said little about either their intentions or their response to the criticism. In a brief e-mail chat last week, however, they outlined their views with considerable aplomb. It was well bum.
ST: “Some reviewers have said they were surprised they didn’t hate Barley as much as they were meant to.”
Chris Morris: “Well, if they found they didn’t completely hate Barley, why conclude that they were meant to? Alan Partridge was an arsehole, but how many times do you hear people say, ‘I’m worried I don’t hate him enough’? No matter how heinous someone’s behaviour, if you make them a comic character, you can’t expect people to hate them. Jack T Ripper effectively blew up the planet — do you hate him? “When people say ‘love to hate’, they actually mean ‘love to be appalled by’ — if they truly hated them, they’d never repeat a catch phrase.
“Nathan is not al-Zarqawi. He’s a cocky tool who tries too hard. If you really expect that to summon the full force of your hatred, I’d say you were mentally ill. In a sitcom, you travel with the monster — you don’t just see them from the outside. Even on Charlie’s original TvGoHome website, which has a much more exterior viewpoint than a sitcom, the sheer level of psychotic rage spewed at Barley is part of the joke — it’s implicitly unreasonable.”
Charlie Brooker: “The fury vented in the TVGH listings was so patently over the top, only a bastard couldn’t have felt slightly sorry for Nathan even then. Nathans in general don’t strike me as nasty or scheming — they simply display a rather irritating enthusiasm for life, or rather a version of life that’s essentially an imaginary movie starring themselves in the lead role.”
ST: “Some people seem unable to watch the programme without going into neurotic convulsions over whether it is a sitcom or a satire ...”
CM: “A sitcom isn’t usually the right tool for satire... When you watched I’m Alan Partridge, did you really go, ‘Thank God they’re exploding the hideous world of the local-radio DJ in temporary accommodation’? Or The Office, ‘At last someone’s rodding the paper merchants!’? You can have incidentals that are satirical — background jokes, peripheral characters — but mainly you’re concerned with the psychological flaws of your lead.”
ST: “Great sitcoms always have tragedy somewhere at their heart. Do you see tragedy in the characters in Nathan Barley? Is there hope of redemption?”
CM: “Hmm. Not sure how much tragedy there is in Porridge, Yes, Minister or Seinfeld, but both Dan and Nathan have access to desperation. Nathan is certainly headed for a massive crisis — possibly as soon as his next birthday (he is 26), when a party photo reveals a receding hairline, he finds his string vest riding up on his belly and he is struck by his first true insight into his own uselessness. Twenty-seven is the most common age for men to commit suicide.
“For Dan, with his greater self-knowledge, redemption hovers just out of arm’s reach, and I suspect he will make increasingly desperate lunges for it. One reason we couldn’t hate Nathan is because, beneath the honking idiocy, he is desperate. He cares too much what people think, so he can’t be effortlessly cool — he can only try to appear so. And that’s very hard work: studied nonchalance is driven by a turbocharged insecurity. That’s enough empathy to understand his motives, but not enough to excuse him. The pursuit of approval usually ends in disaster.”
CB: “I think Nathan will end up going crazy, simply because he’s got so many inconsequential choices to make, all of which involve the way he’s perceived. Look at the way mobile phones are marketed — apparently, when you buy one, you’re buying something that will “express who you are”, something others will judge you by. If that’s true, society might as well drown itself in a bucket and have done with it. You should only judge someone by their mobile phone if they’ve hand-painted a swastika on it. But even though you know the whole notion of that is ridiculous, the terror’s going to be bubbling away somewhere in your head next time you’re in Carphone Warehouse looking for a new handset.
“Extrapolate from that one example to cover virtually everything you can think of, from the type of trousers you wear to your views on globalisation, and you’ve got a world full of things for Nathan to take sides on, but never personally analyse. His brain’ll revolt in the end.”
