"The Idiots are winning" - Brief Retrospective Notes on Nathan Barley

Nathan Barley was a sitcom broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK in February and March 2005 created by Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris. It followed the lives of a few characters involved with the hipster media in London around that period. After intense pre-screening hype, it suffered something of a critical backlash upon transmission and never really found the popular audience it might have done.

- Ridiculously prescient. Frighteningly. About New Media, pop culture, London...watching it now it feels like so much of it came true. The omnipresence of YouTube, most obviously. Mobile phones that do everything.

- The mixed reception it received at the time seems baffling in light of its obvious and outstanding quality. As is so often the case, it may have had much more to do with expectation than actually taking the work on its own terms. Because it was subject to some astonishing hype. Chris Morris, whose importance has been increased by the relative infrequency of his output, was working on a sitcom. This was a big deal. Not only that, but it was being co-written by Charlie Brooker, the hipster's favourite TV critic and creator of hilarious, way-ahead-of-its time website, TvGoHome. How could it go wrong? Surely it would be the funniest thing EVER? Not only that, it would be satirical, darkly political and multi-layered, like all the best Morris material. And splenetic and passionate like Brooker's writing. It was gonna be AMAZING!
And it is amazing. In its small scale, human way. Its focus is precise and right on target - it takes aim at a tiny subculture of hipster Londoners. They existed - back then, at any rate - in Hoxton and Clerkenwell and Shoreditch, they worked in New Media, they were fashion pioneers (skinny jeans, "Hoxton fin" hair etc) and plainly, they were loathed by Brooker and Morris. Because Nathan Barley destroys them. It observes their little world perfectly, mocks their cultural reference-points and lifestyles, and rips them to shreds.

- But it does this through an unexpectedly traditional format. This is a character-based sitcom. Every episode creates a situation and then maneuvers these people through it. There are dilemmas, there is embarrassment, there is humiliation. Nobody really grows or learns a thing. Barley himself only ends one episode as the butt of the joke, and that is forgotten by the next episode, when he is again obliviously incorrigible. Dan's pain, by comparison, builds up as the series continues, driving him more or less insane.



- Ben Wishaw as Pingu delivers a full-on method performance in this day-glo nightmare of a sitcom. He is incredible. Pingu is perhaps the most human element of the show; an open wound of anxiety, shyness and fear, tormented by Nathan, in love with Clare, too weak to do anything about either situation. Wishaw's battery of microscopic winces and barely perceptible grimaces is brilliantly deployed until his few moments of hope and happiness become heartbreaking. I've seen him be great in other things, and I'm sure his career will have its fair share of triumphs, but here he is perfect.

- Dan the Preacherman is Brooker's take on his own persona. Or Morris' take, maybe. A bitter, angry drunk who is trapped in a job he never wanted, surrounded by people he considers "idiots". Whose personal life has already slipped away. Who is having to compromise in his work, to his own disgust. Who has made a brand out of his disgust and then finds it lapped up by those who disgust him.

- A certain tiny slice of London life is generally ignored by the mainstream media, who concentrate upon the middle classes, the working classes, and the upper classes. But these young people, living "media" lives in their funky urban areas, with influence over fashion and music and pop culture in general, they are ignored. Nathan Barley, on the other hand, ignores just about everyone else and concentrates only on a single idea -that these people talk a lot of rubbish, create a lot of rubbish and don't really matter at all. But they are unintentionally funny, in their oblivious solipsism. Their clothes and hair are funny, the music they like, art they patronise, magazines they read - these are funny. The show's parodic versions of music and art aren't even all that parodic - they are so close to what they parody they could almost be real. SugaRape in particular.



- "Well random." "Well Bum," "Peace and fucking," "Michael fucking Jackson," "Later treacletits," "Well brown," "Later sugartits," "Watch the fuck out," etc etc. On an on. Almost the best part of any given episode were Nathan's inane, bizarre catchphrases.

- That cast! Both of the Boosh boys, Wishaw, Matthew Horne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Nina Sosanya and Stephen Mangan among others. Attracted by the Morris name, no doubt, but watching it now it seems (by UK tv sitcom standards) outrageously classy.

- Speaking of the Boosh boys, I've never liked Noel Fielding, since I saw him do stand-up a long time ago. Some aspect of his kooky wannabe rock star persona irritates me. And here he is cast as vaguely unlikable, which pleased me immensely, and works in the programmes favour.

- It makes me miss TVGoHome. Charlie Brooker will never be better than he was then, before he started working for the man. Hes still funny, mind. Especially in his Preacher Man mode.

There is no Spoons

Spoons was a 2005 sketch show screened on Channel 4 and E4. It only got one Series and was, I presume, not a great popular success. I never read any reviews at the time, I only dimly remember any promotional material for it, and it ended without any hype or fanfare. A DVD squeaked out, more or less unannounced, some months later. People I've chatted to about it either remember it only vaguely or not at all.
This seems a massive injustice.

The thing that set Spoons apart from other contemporary sketch shows was its focus on thirtysomething life. It was about the world you face when your twenties recede and you realise you're not really young anymore. When you're settled in a job - possibly not the one you hoped for - and you're in a serious long-term relationship, and commitment is already established and your concerns are mortgages and the possibility of children and getting a pension. When all of your peers seem to be identikit same-people; your friends, your partners friends, your friend's friends. All reading the same papers, liking the same music, going on the same holidays, eating at the same restaurants. This is the terrain of a dozen middling sitcoms, but sketch comedy rarely ventures here, not so consistently at any rate. More or less every single sketch on Spoons was set in and commenting on this world.

But that would be utterly irrelevant if it wasn't funny.
I stumbled across it and the first sketch I saw hooked me instantly. It seemed so universal and truthful it almost wasn't comedy. It was this sketch:



That would go on to be a long-running repeated sketch, more elaborate and involved with each rendition. But the essential power came from the fact that any man in a relationship with a woman of a certain age knew that this was exactly what she was thinking, only her hints would be more subtle, or at least less psychotic. Many of the sketches came from a similar place - male terror at the closing trap of their lives. A man who goes alone to an empty storage unit just for the quiet and the solitude, who resents his wife's phone-calll and lies to her about being at the Supermarket, or stuck in traffic. A man who approaches strangers in public to tell them that the woman hes with has abducted him, taken over his life and is planning for them to get a mortgage: "Please - Call the Police! She chooses my clothes..."

Or the many sketches about life as part of a couple. Like the couple who find themselves gently arguing about who should go to the bar or the popcorn kiosk in the lobby, the man plainly desperate that it should be him. He eventually concedes and as she departs, cannot contain the scream "And try to keep your knickers on this time!" Then he turns to nearby strangers and explains. "She had an affair last year...Its Fine now..."
Or the couple who share variations on this exchange repeatedly:
Him: Is that a new top?
Her: Yeah.
Him: It looks good. It really suits you.
Her: Thanks.
[pause]
Her: So, you obviously think that I dress like your mum's jumble sale the rest of the time.
You really are a fucking cunt!
Or the couple using a Ouija board together. The bloke, of course, is surreptitiously directing the glass. She thinks they’ve contacted her nan.
She says “Nan”, do you think it’s time I had kids?”
He moves the glass to “No”.
She says “Then what will make me happy?”
The glass moves to letters, spelling out: T-R-Y-A-N-A-L.
“Tryanal?” she exclaims quizzically. “What does that mean?”

It was co-written by Charlie Brooker, too, fresh off Nathan Barley, another reason to be surprised by its failure. His style is all over it, most evident in the sketches which lean on long riffs for their power, but also in the dry bitterness of it, in the characters who are obviously miserable misantropes, in the shots at the silly fickleness of popular culture and middle class mores. The cast are generally outstanding, particularly Tom Goodman-Hill, Simon Farnaby and Rosie Cavaliero.

I could go on. I have gone on.
And while it was never the mighty Big Train It was funny, in a terribly bourgeois sort of way. And in a world where the likes of Spoons-lite ManStrokeWoman gets a second series on the BBC and Spoons alumni Kevin Bishop gets two series of his own show, and Little Britain is a commercial behemoth, it just doesn't seem fair that Spoons virtually disappeared without a trace.

There isn't much from the show on YouTube, but there are some gems. Especially the first two sketches here, which make use of Goodman-Hill's Yorkshire accent and warm earnestness: