A "self-facilitating media node"

The second episode of 'Nathan Barley' airs on C4 tonight, so it's perhaps about time I got round to saying something about the first.

Last week I was waiting in eager anticipation, and having read several perspectives on the series, I reserved the right to make up my own mind. One half-hour episode is insufficient evidence on which to base judgement of an entire series, but, nevertheless...

Whilst on the one hand Morris had left his fingerprints on it in several ways (most notably the footage of Barley's techie gimp being electrocuted by a truck battery), there was none of the disorientating visual trickery that we've perhaps come to associate with him since 'Jam'. Instead, it's shot very simply and without any obvious stylistic flourishes.

If that sounds like 'The Office', then there was a definite debt owed for the scene in which the disillusioned Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barrett) went for the job interview at the Sunday supplement, pitching himself as potentially writing the wine column but unable to list his five favourite supermarket wines. The awkward silences, the quizzical looks, the cringeworthiness, the feeling you're going to have to turn away - all present and correct, as I'm sure Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais will have smugly noted if they've seen it.

The real surprise was that the eponymous anti-hero isn't the central character. It's a good thing, too, as if Barley was allowed much more screen time his meaningless yoof culcha babble would wear a little thin and he'd become something of a crude caricature. As it is, he's odious but not too odious to watch - a perfectly ridiculous arsehole spouting off about himself, his website and how Freddie Starr is "sort of like the original Bill Hicks".

The world he and Dan inhabit (one happily, the other not so) is one in which irony has eaten itself, one populated by "cultural shitblisters" (creator Charlie Brooker's term from TV Go Home) cocooned in their own little Shoreditch world who set themselves up against The Man but whose lingo is every bit as puffed up and wanky as that of the sphere of business. Given the obvious relish with which Morris has warped and twisted language in the past, it's not hard to imagine him having a great time behind the scenes.

Neil of Morris fan site Cookd And Bombd might have implied that 'Nathan Barley' is "childish bollocks" on a par with 'Bo Selecta', but that's misses the point entirely. The characters' grotesque infantilism and puerile sense of humour is an important part of what is being satirised. The satire may not be as savage and pointed as, say, in the 'Brass Eye' paedophilia special, but it's the prime mover behind it all.

How the rest of the series will pan out only time will tell. Unusually for Morris's work, there is a narrative connecting the different installments - a tiny part of wanting to tune in tonight is to find out whether Dan can escape the idiots or whether he can bring Sugarape down from the inside.

PS To those people who have arrived at SWSL looking for "cock muff bumhole rules". YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS. FUCK OFF.

Related links:

Trashbat.co.ck, Nathan Barley's website.

Mark Lawson on 'Nathan Barley' in the Guardian - "The moralists who attack Morris fail to realise the extent to which he is a moralist himself.".

Andrew Billen on the series in New Statesman. According to him, Morris is nothing less than "our greatest living Englishman" - amen to that.

Another blogger's view.