Joey Sarajevo Reviews His Christmas Presents - Vol. One: Nathan Barley
Well, back again as promised with another column on schedule, raising the interesting philosophical question of whether the title of this one is:
a) no longer accurate,
b) more accurate than ever or,
c) not the kind of thing I should be thinking about given that I’m still feeling rough from Sin City at the Electric Ballroom on Friday
In any case, a break from the rights and wrongs of sexual peccadilloes (we’ll return to the subject in two weeks) this time out, in favour of a cheery review-style look at some of the various bits of entertainment media I’ve acquired over the last month or so (NOTE: very few are actually things I got for Christmas, but the title seemed kinda apposite for a January column, so I kept it).
First up is the collected series of Channel 4’s Nathan Barley on DVD. For those of you who haven’t heard of this little gem of a series, here’s a quick précis:
The show is a collaboration between two of the indisputably finest comedy talents of our time: Chris Morris, the satirist best known for his work on spoof current affairs series The Day Today and Brass Eye; and Charlie Brooker, creator of the sick, surreal and quite brilliant TVGoHome and writer of Screen Burn, the Guardian Guide’s TV column and a major influence on our own sad, substandard pop weekly The Hit Parade. They had previously worked together on the infamous Brass Eye ‘Paedophile Special’, the second most complained about programme ever aired on British TV after Jerry Springer: The Opera. Enough has been written already about how this shows the British public up for the dribbling cretinous scum that they are, so I’ll spare you my thoughts on the matter - go here if you like, the guy pretty much nails it.
Originally, Nathan Barley was the protagonist of a fictional series on TVGoHome entitled simply ‘Cunt’; an outlet for Brooker’s rabid distaste for New Media, style magazines and generally anyone who makes a living from fashionable irony (he’s also used ‘Nathan’ as a kind of abusive shorthand for just this type of person in Screen Burn). Obviously, even Channel Four wouldn’t go so far as to actually make a series called ‘Cunt’ (although if they did, as we shall see, Nathan Barley would probably find it hilarious – or at least think it was ‘cool’ to describe it as such), so the name became the title for a six-episode sitcom ostensibly satirising style magazines (SugarApe, around which the programme centres, is a dead ringer for Dazed and Confused), shitty websites (ahem) and vacuous fashionista celebrity. If that makes the whole thing sound like a waste of time in satirical terms (after all, targets don’t come much easier), think again.
There are jokes aimed at this constituency, to be sure – principal character Dan Ashcroft writes a well-received (but by whom? ah, there’s the rub) article for SugarApe in the very first episode entitled The Rise of the Idiots which pretty much sums up the show’s entire gripe with it’s ostensible targets, whilst his cohorts on the magazine, Nathan Barley himself and risible minor plotlings like VJ Dajve Bikinus and ‘inventor of world music’ Doug Rockit (a thinly-veiled Dave Stewart) provide a lot of the cheaper laughs. There’s also plenty of Morris’s trademark comedy of extreme disquiet, which has moved over the years from surrealist to downright disturbing., although there’s nothing to match Jam’s infamous dead baby/plumber sketch (a scene involving the peerless Kevin Eldon, a cat and a pair of barbershop scissors comes pretty close, as does the Russian website where Ashcroft gambles on tramps ‘racing’ to pull out their own teeth).
But Nathan Barley’s real genius lies in flaunting Swift’s famous description of satire as “ a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own” (ooh, I bet you didn’t know how edifying this whole reading my columns lark could bem didja?) since, arguably, the more you ‘get’ it, the more it’s actually satirising you.
After all, who enjoyed the Brass Eye paedophile special more than value-free, image-obsessed shitbags like Barley himself? Who is it laughing at a former homeless KGB man – fictional or not – wrenching at his molars with a pair of pliers? There was quite a bit of (probably erroneous) speculation on popbitch that ‘trashbat.co.ck’ (Barley’s website) was based on the infamous gossip engine – but you know that Barley and his idiot cronies log on, and that they would’ve creamed themselves over TVGoHome as well. It’s easy to read Dan Ashcroft as a cipher for Morris and Brooker, hating their constituent audience but unable to appeal to anyone else, and unable to convince them just who it is they mean when they talk about ‘idiots’ (the ‘coffee with smoked salmon and scrambled egg’ scene in the final episode is a case in point). There’s also a palpable sense of self-loathing in any of the scenes dealing with the broadcast media, not to mention undisguised hatred of TV producers (not that surprising if you ever read any of rooker’s columns).
And where does that leave your poor old columnist here, writing about the show on a shitty website (sorry Liam) and only just about edging out the temptation to mention Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses and Aaron (oh fuck)? Well, may just be my overdeveloped Catholic-educated guilt, but I think that even if you work out just who Nathan Barley is satirising, the more it’s kind of about you in the first place. On reflection, they should’ve kept the original title, since it pretty much makes cunts of us all.
Genius.