Nathan Barley

Nathan Barley had a distinctly mixed reception when it originally aired in February 2005. It had a long gestation period, with an unaired pilot shot in 2003 before the full series was filmed in the following year. Perhaps one of the reasons it landed badly was because of the expectations unavoidably set by the mere presence of its prime creative forces Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. Morris, particularly after the controversy around the Brass Eye special Paedogeddon, was notorious as the preeminent satirist of modern times, and it was inevitable that both his admirers and enemies expected more of the same in his next project. Brooker had originated the character of Nathan Barley on his TV Go Home website which featured parody Radio Times listings. One of the fictional programmes – C*** – featured the antics of Barley described via Brooker’s gift for vituperative insults and unfiltered hatred. Given this background, the last thing that the critics and audience were expecting was for Morris and Brooker to deliver a fairly trad sitcom, but then it’s unclear if that’s what the creators themselves were anticipating initially.

The unaired pilot of Nathan Barley is interesting in this regard. The sitcom elements are largely missing from the loosely connected series of vignettes. In the pilot, Claire is not Dan Ashcroft’s sister and is already an insider in the media world rather than the ingenue of the series who acts as the audience identification figure. Dan, arguably the main character, is much more aggressive and self-assured than the broken man seen in the transmitted version of the show. In the pilot, when he goes to the exhibition of 15Peter20’s piss art he openly mocks the man and the work, “Are you actually proud of this bumwash?” and then forces the artist to interview himself on Dan’s Dictaphone. In the series proper, 15Peter20 arrogantly takes the Dictaphone and parades around an - as usual - defeated looking Dan. The pilot is effectively three specific pieces of satire: the art world (15Peter20), embarrassing fashions (Geek Pie haircut), and Vice magazine (Bad Uncle), with the last of these echoing themes from the Paedogeddon.

The changes made after the pilot all more obviously skew the series towards sitcom. Nathan is a milder character and more likeable. He will always win, whereas Dan is a crushed and trapped figure from the outset. As mentioned, Claire is new to the fictional milieu of Hosegate, and we are introduced to the characters through her eyes. This is very much at the expense of her being a rounded and convincing figure, generally reduced to tutting at Nathan and Dan’s antics, which led Caitlin Moran to describe her as “one of the worst TV characters this century.” In the aftermath of the series, Morris bemoaned the fact that Nathan Barley was seen as satirical rather than a sitcom, and it’s worth quoting him at length:

“A sitcom isn’t usually the right tool for satire…When you watched I’m Alan Patridge, 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.”

This raises the question of who the lead is in Nathan Barley. Whether it’s Nathan or Dan is arguable, but I’m not convinced that either character is well enough drawn to have much in the way of interesting psychological flaws to sustain a six-part sitcom. Nathan is not much more than variant of David Brent, whereas Dan is a defeated character from the beginning and barely develops at all. Some critics did recognize what Morris was trying to do, and Karl French commented that “with its theme of Ashcroft being trapped in a situation he despises, it fits into the long tradition of British comedy of misery and claustrophobia going back through Fawlty Towers, Steptoe and Son and beyond.” It’s a valid point, but the comparison with Fawlty Towers doesn’t reflect well on Nathan Barley as it’s largely a laugh-free zone, and invoking the legendary scriptwriting duo Ray Galton and Alan Simpson is even more unfortunate, particularly as they wrote a much more acute and funny piece covering a very similar subject a few decades previously.

At the start of episode three of Nathan Barley, the arts venue “Place” is featured with its guru Douglas Rocket and the artists and hangers-on amusingly parodied. The sequence is remarkably similar to a scene in Galton and Simpson’s Tony Hancock film The Rebel. In the film, Hancock plays a frustrated office worker who decamps to Paris in order to become a full-time artist. He falls in with a bohemian crowd who love his blustering artistic pronouncements and are intrigued by his (terrible) paintings which embody his “Infantile” style. There’s a key scene where Tony attends a very Nathan Barley-ish party held by the “leader of the artistic sect” Jim Smith, so called because he thinks English names are “so mysterious”. Smith sleeps on his bookcase, wears jodhpurs, and has his own house cow. A pale and blue lipsticked Nanette Newman drifts around talking to Hancock - “All my friends are existentialists.” “Well it’s company for you, isn’t it?” – and eventually he leaves after saying goodnight to a man in scuba gear who resides in the fishtank.

Galton and Simpson have great fun in The Rebel taking the mickey out of artists and the world of the arts, just as they did in the brilliant Hancock’s Half Hour episode The Poetry Society, but there’s much more to it than that. The real artist in The Rebel is a character called Paul Ashby who allows Hancock to share his living quarters and studio space. Paul is diffident and makes no grand pronouncements about art, but he’s fascinated by Hancock’s “philosophy” and particularly how he inspires the artistic community. In the end, he’s convinced that he’s not really a true artist, gives his paintings to Hancock, and goes to live in digs with Irene Handl in the UK. Of course, Paul’s art is discovered by a dealer and misattributed to Hancock with, as they say, hilarious consequences. At the end of the film, Hancock seeks Paul out so he can resume his career as an artist, but, in an inspired touch, all of Paul’s new work is in the Infantile style of Hancock. It is as revered as Paul’s earlier work, but his art has developed upon exposure to Hancock’s childlike enthusiasm and improved as a result.

This is quite a sophisticated outcome, and is even more striking when you know that all of the art in the film was painted by Alistair Grant, and the Hancock inspired paintings at the end of the film were taken directly from a show of Grant’s actual work at Zwemmer Gallery, London. Also, according to Galton and Simpson, Lucien Freud stated that The Rebel was “the greatest film ever made about modern art.” It’s a film that’s as funny as it is clever and shows that it is possible to create something that mocks artistic pretensions, but at the same time says something almost profound about the creative impulse. Nathan Barley on the other hand falls between two stools: it gestures clunkily towards sitcom, and features some effective, even prophetic, satire, but it feels unfocussed and, crucially, lacks laughs. It’s perhaps a textbook example of how hard it is to write a successful sitcom, even when you’re a comedy genius.