Urban Cultural Dispatj

Ah, yes. Nathan Barley. A.K.S. trashbat.co.ck. Here's the credos.

I've always had a slight problem with Chris Morris. It isn't that I fail to find him funny, or even to recognise his vituperative, corrosive genius. Our modern world needs its own Swift, taking venomous delight in excoriating its faults, and rarely more so than now. No, my problem with Morris is simply that his works fulfil their purpose by making me, very often, profoundly uncomfortable. It generally takes a number of viewings before I can really appreciate the excellence of his work, whether it be the savagely contemptuous celebrity satire of Brass Eye or the heart-of-darkness sketch comedy of Jam.

(Despite numerous attempts, I don't think I'll ever manage to desensitise myself to the "Plumber Baby" sketch. I've taken to fast-forwarding through it on the DVD.)

So, when I heard that Morris and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker were collaborating on a sitcom of London media life, I expected to find it difficult to get into. What I didn't expect was for it to be rather naff.

There are jokes -- at least, there is vicious (and occasionally powerful) irony, and there are characters it's possible to point at and laugh. Most of the actual funny stuff happens in the background, on posters or signage -- making Nathan Barley a DVD-era comedy as well as an internet-era one, but also one it's difficult to appreciate as a broadcast programme. Even these ephemera fail to achieve the joke-to-time density of Brass Eye, let alone The Day Today.

Nathan Barley suffers from a fundamental problem of identification. None of the central characters are ones with whom we can sympathise -- yet drama (even comedy) without sympathy is meaningless. If we find Basil Fawlty appalling, it's because we know we share many of his faults. We find ourselves cringing with every embarrassment he suffers. However morally dubious Edmund Blackadder's behaviour may be, he's charming enough that we're all rooting for him anyway. We loathe David Brent -- but then so do his employees. Without at least one character who affects us emotionally, situation comedy loses all its interest.

So, Nathan Barley is forced to manipulate us into throwing our lot in with one character or another, when none has done anything to deserve such respect. The eponymous Barley is an anti-hero in the Brentian grotesque mould (disconcertingly so, for of us who admire Morris for his originality) -- yet his embarassments and, on occasion, triumphs (as when he gets one over the snobbish couple in the restaurant) are events we are invited to care about. The Office never expected us to do the same with Brent.

The other supposed viewpoint character is Dan Ashcroft, a man with the wit to perceive that he is surrounded by idiots but lacking the moral impetus to do anything about it other than limply denounce them. Even his attempts to escape their milieu are doomed to failure by his own apathy. The episode which casts Dan as the "Preacher Man" seems to be suggesting that we are to consider him a Holy Fool, the jester to Barley's royal court of imbeciles -- with the twist that all of the other characters look up to him, and respect him for "telling it like it is" whilst never considering that any of it might apply to them. The idea has a certain power, but is ruined by the way the same episode unleashes upon Dan the series' one true moment (to date) of genuine Morrisian moral indignation, as we see him gambling on an online tramp-teeth-pulling contest. He is a man for whom, ultimately, we can have no more respect than we have for the unselfconscious Barley.

Even the third string, Dan's idealistic sister Claire, fails to engage our sympathy. Like the only other recurring female character, she's drawn as a conscious contrast to the male idiots she associates with, but -- unlike the receptionist at Dan's workplace -- she suffers from a chronic inability to see through even the limpidly transparent Barley, whose one motivation where she's concerned is to get inside her knickers.

There are other problems. The structure of the storytelling is poor, suffering at times -- despite such scenes as Nathan's attempt to combine the arts of rap and cunnilingus -- from plotting which would not have looked out of place on BBC2 in the 1970s. When Barley admires Ashcroft's hairstyle -- which Dan has accidentally created by sleeping with his head in a large quantity of paint -- and demands the same cut from his stylist, it's a comedic inevitability that the "geek pie" will become intensely fashionable by the end of the episode. However, this is stored up as a final punchline and -- in an almost offensively 70s touch -- attributed to the agency of a gullible Japanese fashion reporter.

Even the basic joke, of the complete cluelessness of everyone in Barley's environment, becomes strangely compromised in this episode. Nathan is proud of the "geek pie" when he thinks it is fashionable, but when he discovers his mistake he tries to hide it by wearing a handbag on his head -- which he knows full well isn't fashionable. If he's prepared to brazen it out with the handbag, why not with the geek pie? Why does his date, who accepted the bag without question, laugh her head off when the hairstyle is revealed? This relies, not only on attributing a degree of discrimination to people who, the script repeatedly insists, have no such thing, but on turning it on and off at the scriptwriters' whim.

Some reviewers have blamed the series' failure on Morris' collaborator (unlikely, since Brooker, formerly responsible for TV Go Home where the Barley character originated, is also very funny), or simply on the fact that he's collaborating at all (again unlikely -- see Jam, The Day Today, or indeed Why Bother?).

In fact, the problem is that Nathan Barley attempts to be a dystopian vision of a world run by cretins -- but it's a dystopia whose entire scope is that of a couple of square miles of London. The insular isolation of the media trendies who live and work here is one of the things we are supposed to laugh at, but the scripts themselves are guilty of a similar short-sightedness. The fact is that, while these may be the people whom Morris and Brooker have to deal with on a daily basis, they don't run the world -- they barely even impact on the lives of most people.

To someone living in, say, Hoxton, this is probably swingeing satire. To the 52 million or so Britons who live outside London but still receive Channel 4, it's meaningless. It's satire without target, statement without referent. With the single exception of that teeth-pulling scene, Nathan Barley hasn't made me feel uncomfortable once. (I'd like to say it makes me squirm in embarrassment, but actually it's not nearly that bad.)

Yes, these people are idiots -- that's perfectly clear. So what? They bear no relationship to anybody I know or care about.

I look forward to Morris' next project -- I can't imagine him ever ceasing to be a comedian whose work was worth seeking out -- but I do hope it makes me feel worse than this.