‘Nathan Barley’: the British comedy that foresaw the future of culture
With two maestros of British comedy at the helm in Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris, the 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley was bound to be dripping in hilarity and satire in equal measure. Arriving on Channel 4 halfway through the first decade of the 21st century and starring Nicholas Burns, Julian Barratt, Claire Keelan, Richard Ayoade and Ben Wishaw, the series cast a wry glance on the emerging digital culture of the new millennium and foresaw the “rise of the idiots” that would pervade much of the proceeding years.
Nathan Barley depicts the self-absorption of East London, where vapid hipsters and narcissistic media online personalities run amok amid a new age of journalism. The titular character, a true buffoon of a man, is a self-aggrandising young man, a “self-facilitating media node” utterly oblivious to the idiocy of both his friends and their relentless pursuit of validation from his online followers.
Nathan documents his supposedly ultra-cool life online to an almost obsessive degree. Brooker and Morris were essentially predicting the vacuous social media influencers and persistent online re-branders that would arrive on social media platforms over the following two decades. However, the origins of such characters had already begun to take root as Internet 2.0 kicked into full gear.
What’s more, the show portrayed the kind of media-obsessed businesses as the shallow and fickle echo chambers that they would truly become throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Utterly unaware of the rampant gentrification and the commodification of, at one point, poor urban areas, many of the characters in Nathan Barley, like the so-called journalists of Sugar Ape magazine (intended as a parody of outlets like Vice and Dazed), are consumed by the latest online trends at the cost of awareness and acceptance of the social inequalities that surround them.
In that light, Brooker and Morris were weaving a cautionary tale of the decline of genuine journalism and artistry in favour of a commodification of culture, where each trend is less relevant than the last and for a shorter period of time. Such victim of this kind of rampant nonsense is writer Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barrett) and his documentary-making sister Claire (Claire Keelan), who find themselves not only surrounded by vacuous fools like Nathan but actually having to give into their practices in order to curry audiences of their own.
Manipulative content, in which outrage is the order of the day, is of the highest priority at Super Ape, and Nathan Barley makes no mistake in revealing the kind of online fascination that would develop as social media begins to take hold of us all. It was around this time that the symbiosis between free-thinking human beings and technology began to occur. Each of the characters in the show, particularly those of the more vacuous kind, is never depicted untethered to their laptops or smartphones, also seeing online connections and follows and likes as more important than genuine, emotional human ones.
In that light, Nathan Barley was somewhat ahead of the curve in predicting the emerging digital culture of the 21st century. With the excellent satire and wit expected of Morris and Brooker, the show called out the kind of idiocy that seemed to be taking hold of East London and other urban areas, a mode of thinking that appears to have become simply accepted as a way of life ever since its release, a reality in which culture is no longer artistry, but is merely tradeable asset, a commodity with a price as per its impression on an audience.
There’s a deep ridicule in Nathan Barley that remains as relevant today as it did then, more so perhaps. While the 2000s stereotype of the hipster has certainly dwindled away as mainstream culture has swallowed the alternative whole and spat out a whole generation of individuals utterly unable to distinguish themselves from those around them, shows like Nathan Barley remind us that an obsession with the self and an inherent need to be admired by others with our pretentious protestations will always be vacuous and foolish in nature. It’s that insight, that seriousness, that made it one of the best British comedies of all time.