Chris Morris is undoubtedly a satirist gifted with genius, albeit a very dark and anger genius. He found his natural home on Channel 4 with the excellent BRASSEYE, a dead-on spoof of current affairs programmes, which was followed a few years later by the flesh-crawling pitch black sketch series JAM, which outdid its own radio origins simply by adopting a slurred, woozy visual style that perfectly matched the surreal flavour of the sketches and situations. Then, for some bizarre reason, he looked to the internet for inspiration, found Charlie Brooker's scabrous and wildly funny satire on vacuous media types on the TVGoHome website with the titular Barley as the loathsome protagonist, and this is the result.
Laugh? I nearly dug out a Little and Large video.
Save for a brilliantly dead-pan performance from Julian Barratt as the reluctant King of Cool, and some neat background touches (a light Gilbert O'Sullivan song recast as a techno dance track, a magazine cover trumpeting an interview with the minor TV celebrity Nicky Campbell as if it were the long-lost eleventh commandment), NATHAN BARLEY hardly works as satire, as comedy, as social commentary, or as anything rather than a confusing, headache-inducing whimper of impotent rage at the very people who are likely to watch this kind of thing. And there's the rub - satire has to have a target, the bigger the better, and if you restrict your satire to your target audience, it's not likely to have much of an impact. As a previous reviewer noted, punches are indeed pulled, and if there had been an ounce of the throbbing-vein anger and disgust that had made Brooker's website so addictive on display here, NATHAN BARLEY would have been a minor classic. Instead, it's the televisual equivalent of an executive toy, a shiny, modernistic gadget that exists only to occupy vacant mindspace.
A thundering disappointment that should be avoided at all costs.
Laugh? I nearly dug out a Little and Large video.
Save for a brilliantly dead-pan performance from Julian Barratt as the reluctant King of Cool, and some neat background touches (a light Gilbert O'Sullivan song recast as a techno dance track, a magazine cover trumpeting an interview with the minor TV celebrity Nicky Campbell as if it were the long-lost eleventh commandment), NATHAN BARLEY hardly works as satire, as comedy, as social commentary, or as anything rather than a confusing, headache-inducing whimper of impotent rage at the very people who are likely to watch this kind of thing. And there's the rub - satire has to have a target, the bigger the better, and if you restrict your satire to your target audience, it's not likely to have much of an impact. As a previous reviewer noted, punches are indeed pulled, and if there had been an ounce of the throbbing-vein anger and disgust that had made Brooker's website so addictive on display here, NATHAN BARLEY would have been a minor classic. Instead, it's the televisual equivalent of an executive toy, a shiny, modernistic gadget that exists only to occupy vacant mindspace.
A thundering disappointment that should be avoided at all costs.