What else is new?

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Reprinted. I totally agree though.

One of the finest pieces of contemporary London-centric satire is, or was, Charlie Brooker's 'Cunt' (http://thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/): the fictional adventures of Nathan Barley, a "worthless, moneyed little shit who deserves to die". Barley, a typical preening Hoxditch fool, as now undergone the almost-inevitable transformation to the small screen - though with heavy input from both Brooker himself and the massivly-influential Chris Morris.
Its not like Decline and Fall to pass up such a golden critical opportunity, so I positioned myself in front of the television, cracked open a can of Turkish pilsener, and got watching. Telelvision adaptations are often extremely disappointing, but would this one live up to its remarkable pedigree?

Well, from whats been seen so far, the signs are not good; the need for Nathan Barley to conform to the mechanics of television comedy seems to have caused some unfortunate changes to be made. Perhaps the most damaging is that Barley is obviously signposted as a twat - a buffoon who unknowingly humiliates himself with every word he speaks, a man whose mulleted dandyism is so obviously at odds with the surrounding world that the casual viewer can easily pick him out. The true horror of the original Cunt, however, is Barleys absolute comfort within the London milieu. Hes not an obvious caricature; hes an Everycunt - the kind of man youd meet anywhere in the gastropubs of West London, the bars of East London, and a million places in between. He is vile but plausible, and indeed represents that little seed of pretension that lurks in all of us: London welcomes such people, rather than throwing them into sharp relief. His very existence obviates the need for any further comment, or for him to condemn himself via his own stupidity: yet this is obviously too subtle for the new medium. In a further change, a new character, a depressive thirtysomething Dan Ashcroft, is introduced as a voice of reason - since the TV format usually demands a character with whom the audience can identify. In this case, having written an article on the rise of the idiots (we must assume at this point that idiot is the rather limp replacement chosen for cunt) our hero is distressed to find that his articles are read, for the most part, by idiots. While this may have been an effective way for Brooker to salve his conscience over the usual readership of his articles - which, lets face it, are popular with the very elements he constantly attacks - as a satiric device it falls a little flat. In addition, the creation of a new central figure has relegated Barley himself to the status of occasional comic relief, which seems clearly wrong.

So, in part its the execution which is the problem here. But a more fundamental issue is that satires implicit dialogue between outside and in, between engagement and detachment, has become corrupted. The centrality of the London-centric broadcast or print media to our culture means that any attempt to satirise that culture - at least in a manner as simultaneously vicious and specifically targeted as Nathan Barley - from within those same media circles will be doomed to failure. Once the script falls into the hands of the gilded fools behind the cameras, all of its vitality is lost: its translated into a language already simplified by the very things it attacks. For complex economic, educational and social reasons (many of which boil down to the fact that the media is a fundamentally middle-class profession, itself boiling down to the fact that to get ahead you need to be able to afford to work for free), contemporary television comedy is already heavily inflected by Barleyism, however distasteful a judgement this might seem to genuine talents working in the field.

This may seem a terribly sweeping judgement, but to a certain degree its borne out by other humour currently on our screens: increasingly, theres a sense that British television comedy seems to be existing within its own, claustrophobically self-referential world. Id cite the pretentious, self-indulgent Green Wing, the sub-Morris dark comedy of Nighty Night, and even the increasingly cosy, twentysomething tweeness of Spaced - a series that at its best had considerable charm. A lot of this, admittedly, is related to the huge influence of Morris - a talent so utterly unique that any attempt to re-use his techniques comes out as hamfisted parody. It cant help, either, that the creation of BBC digital channels has oriented the programming towards an increasingly specific audience; one that in demographic terms coincides very closely with the materials creators. It should be added at this point that Im not harking back to any golden age of television comedy - it was always crap. Yet failure in these times is possibly less excusable; theres more being commissioned with more airtime to fill, and with most major televisual boundaries and taboos having been broken down, writers are at last free to pursue whatever takes their fancy, which makes it even more depressing when what they seem to fancy is Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. The series of the past few years most likely to bring a wan flicker of mirth to Decline and Falls face have been those which have broken out of the sitcom format by whatever means - the internal monologues of Peep Show, the focused parody of Look Around Yous first series or of People Like Us - rather than attempting to update it with limply surreal touches or flashy camerawork (Nathan Barley was blighted by both of the these, leading to an irritating confusion over whether these innately Barleyesque techniques were part of the satire or were used without irony).

At this point, someone might try and cite the runaway success of current audience favourite Little Britain as an example of Britcomedys rude health and of the success of the BBC3 concept. Well, Id argue that Little Britain is actually deeply old-fashioned; a blend of stale catchphrase comedy (a genre already fucked raw by The Fast Show) with some more traditional elements of British humour. You may remember the episode of Family Guy where the local bar is turned into a English theme pub. I say, says a stereotypical English customer, you know whats really funny? A man dressed in womens clothing. Depressingly, this really gets to the bottom of much of Little Britains appeal - its a traditional-style point-and-laugh freakshow (unless, of course, thats the entire point, and Lucas and Walliams are actually satirising their audiences desperately MOR tastes; but could they really be that clever?)

What this all leads to, ultimately, is the sense that Nathan Barley is part of the same airless, self-contained world. How else would it be possible to explain its startling sense of irrelevance? Webcasts and MP3 decks are all very well as a target for satire, but to some extent its the ludicrously optimistic, pre-tech-crash culture of the late 1990s thats being satirised, and one suspects that most people in the non-media world wouldnt really be bothered. It seems remarkable that a television company would waste valuable time on this or on lampooning of a set of stereotypes only recognisable to those who live in London, until one remembers that for the media, London is everything.

How can all this this be stated more simply? The television version of Cunt is made, most probably, by cunts. For cunts. If it turns out rather cuntish, we shouldnt be surprised.