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Peace and fucking. Believe: ‘Nathan Barley’ and the rise of the idiots
05.05.2015
08:45 pm
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“Well weapon, yeah?”

The majority of DVDs that I own are British comedy series purchased on Amazon UK, but there’s really not much that was made after 2005 sitting on my shelf. 2005 was the magic year that international television shows could easily be acquired via this new thing called Bittorrent. And barring that, most programs were turning up on the even newer thing called YouTube.  It seems like YouTube has been around forever, right? Nope. It launched on Valentine’s Day of 2005, just the blink of an eye ago.

So the other day I was looking at my DVDs and I pulled out Nathan Barley, the 2005 comedy created by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. I haven’t seen it in nearly a decade and as I was rewatching the first episode, I was struck not just by how well it’s dated (which is to say not at all) but by how eerily prophetic it was. Nathan Barley, which predicts today’s frivolous world of cat videos, prank videos and all manner of time-wasting websites (JUST LIKE THE ONE YOU ARE READING RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE) debuted on Feb 11, 2005 on Britain’s Channel 4, four days earlier, you’ll note, than the birth of YouTube.
 

“Totally Mexico.”
 
In the context of 2005, Nathan Barley was (correctly) seen as a vicious satire of a certain type of parent-supported Hoxton hipster, specifically one who might work at VICE or Dazed & Confused magazine, be a DJ, vlogger, web designer, fashion victim, or all of the above. Nicholas Burns, as the obnoxiously oblivious titular character (a “self-facilitating media node” or “meaningless strutting cadaver-in-waiting” as Brooker has called him) pulls off one of the most memorably hilarious star turns in TV comedy history—in Britain, if you call someone “a Nathan Barley,” everyone would know what you meant, probably even the Queen. He’s a legend around my house, as is Julian Barratt (of The Mighty Boosh fame, who I actually saw first here) who plays his quasi-nemesis in the series, would-be serious journalist Dan Ashcroft. Ashcroft is the author of what he believes to be a scathing denunciation of the emerging self-absorbed idiotic pop culture landscape—of which Nathan is the exemplar par excellence—an essay published in Sugar Ape magazine, “The Rise of the Idiots”:

The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail The Rise of the Idiots.

 

“Shut up, fat arms.”

Dan’s problem is that the idiots he’s attacking—like Nathan—think he’s cool, and have no idea that he’s writing about them. Dan’s other problem, as he comes to realize throughout the course of the series, is that he’s a fucking idiot himself.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.05.2015
08:45 pm
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Charlie Brooker’s Justin Bieber rant: ‘Pop Prince Joffrey’ ‘nail of frozen piss through a cabbage’


 
For those of you not watching Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe yet, I highly, highly suggest it. It’s damned good TV. Smart, dumb and bust-a-gut funny.

Here Brooker goes off on a brilliant rant detailing our obsession with celebrity fuckwit Justin Bieber.

“Just another nauseating, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth pop weasel hammered into the global consciousness like a nail of frozen piss through a cabbage.”

Did Shakespeare, Milton or Joyce ever say anything as poetic or funny? No. No, they did not.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.04.2014
03:22 pm
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Charlie Brooker on Invisible Children and ‘Kony 2012’

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Just when you thought shit couldn’t get any more cynical, here comes Charlie Brooker to cast some withering scorn over the recent ‘Kony 2012’ meme propagated by the group Invisible Children (as broadcast on last night on Channel 4’s 10 O’Clock Live.) I could not think of anyone better than Brooker for this job:

“So, in summary, Invisible Children are expert propagandists with what seems to be a covert religious agenda, advocating military action in Africa while simultaneously recruiting an “army” of young people to join their cause (and their weird Fourth Estate youth camps) and to stand around posing like this [quasi-fascist looking picture], a bit like an army of child soldiers might.”

Take it away Charlie…
 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.15.2012
08:56 am
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Charlie Brooker on the Media’s Japan coverage
03.22.2011
03:08 pm
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In 1992 I attended a lecture by Noam Chomsky at a high school auditorium in Los Angeles. During the Q&A Professor Chomsky was asked what televised news sources he recommended and he said said none of them. He had particularly biting comments to make about how CNN “packaged” the (first) Gulf War as infotainment with clips of military jets taking off, waving American flags and footage of targets being hit that looked like video-games with a martial beat soundtrack. How can you expect the public to have an objective view of the country’s foreign policy and military actions, he asked the audience, when they’re fed images from the military itself via a tightly controlled press pool designed to foster an “us vs. them” mindset by a for profit news outlet who find their highest ratings in the midst of war, scandal and crisis? And NBC was at this time owned by General Electric, the #1 company in the world to make money from war. Who could you trust?

I used to be an absolute TV news junkie, but after his words sank in, I found the more and more I drifted away from it. I did most certainly feel manipulated whenever I was watching CNN. It became really fucking annoying to me once it had been pointed out so bluntly what they were up to and how far up the White House’s asshole they’d climbed. It’s worth mentioning that it was four years prior to the launch of Fox News when Noam Chomsky made these observations. To satiate my infomania, I was soon subscribing to five daily papers and 70 monthly magazines that ranged from far-right and far-left conspiracy theory zines, to Vanity Fair and everything in between. In addition to things like In These Times or Z magazine, I also subscribed to The National Review (before it became absolutely worthless on every level) and Free American and various libertarian publications. I picked up anarchist monthlies, eco warrior magazines and just basically everything. Extreme perhaps, but at least my information sources did not have an emotionally leading soundtrack and ludicrous music video montages of saluting soldiers, missiles being fired to slaughter people at a distance and red, white and blue flags flying in the wind.

Much of the time, TV news just felt like I was being shouted at by idiots. It was infuriating. By 1996—the year Fox News launched although I was barely aware of it at the time—I cancelled cable because I never ever watched it and it was just a waste of $70 bucks a month. If it wasn’t for my wife, I’d have never had it since (and I still never watch TV news unless there’s something really significant happening).

The brilliant and sardonic British writer and TV presenter, Charlie Brooker performs a parallel service for BBC viewers that Professor Chomsky once did for me, to illustrate a similar point he made recently—with well-chosen clips—about the despicable way the news media is treating the crisis in Japan. Watch this, it’s really good.
 

 
(via Cynical-C)

Previously on DM:
Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.22.2011
03:08 pm
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David Bowie pissing into a toaster

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A fine example of the Banksy-esque artwork of fictional artist 15Peter20 from the Nathan Barley TV series created by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, who described the character like so, in a February 12, 2005 article from The Guardian:

Either a genius or a dazzling genius, depending on which way you look at it, 15Peter20 (real name Ian Phillips) has made his mark in the world of contemporary photography thanks to a series of shocking, gimmick-heavy exhibitions in which the gimmick quickly becomes attached to the underside of the art, then scuttles up its back, hops on its shoulders and screams which direction it should go in, while simultaneously flashing its bum at passers-by. His new collection, Piss Bliss, consists entirely of photographs of celebrities urinating, thereby expertly capturing their animal vulnerability while exquisitely forcing jocular postmodernity to commit taboobicide. These pictures are at once the most revealing portrait photographs ever taken and an absolutely bloody flabbergasting waste of the world’s time.

This piece appears in the book Fucking With Your Head Yeah? that came with the original Nathan Barley DVD release.

Via Kraftfuttermischwerk

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.03.2011
06:11 pm
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Bring me the head of Gary Glitter
11.06.2009
09:42 pm
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Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn columns in The Guardian are always funny, but this week’s is especially hilarious. Brooker writes on a new British telemovie that imagines the trial and death of Britain’s most notorious pedophile, former popstar Gary Glitter, whose 1972 hit “Rock and Roll Pt 2” is still to this day played by the unwitting at sports events big and small across America:

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution Of Gary Glitter (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4), which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.

I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) Reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) Changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) Chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.

He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full 70s glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.

 

 
Read the whole thing at The Guardian

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.06.2009
09:42 pm
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