13-02-2025
How Nathan Barley predicted Britain's rise of the idiots
'Is something brilliant happening?' Those words – a plea from a TV executive desperate to be cutting-edge – sum up so much of Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris's underappreciated but strangely perceptive sitcom.
That particular moment comes after eponymous idiot Nathan (Nicholas Burns) has poured a pint of beer over the executive Ivan Plapp's head. Plapp (Stephen Beresford) thinks he might be the subject of some boundary-pushing stunt – the kind of thing he's seen on Barley's 'online urban culture dispatch', a platform of bubble-brained satire, tech nonsense, and merciless pranks.
'Are we all in this?' the beer-soaked Plapp asks the bemused pubgoers. 'Am I the centre of something here? Is something brilliant happening?'
The executive thinks Nathan – a self-facilitating media node – is the pulse of east London's tech-infused arts scene, apparently blinkered by Nathan's imitable urban phrases ('Peace and f------, believe') and Geek Pie hair. What he doesn't know is that Nathan Barley is – as actor Nicholas Burns himself says – 'just a prat'.
Indeed, the sitcom – which first aired 20 years ago – is about sheer idiocy passing for subversive, out-of-the-box genius. It's on every corner of the fictional Hosegate – a none-too-subtle Shoreditch facsimile, where grown adults wear miniature Stetsons, ride children's tricycles, and go clubbing in beekeeping gear. It's also printed in the pages of Sugar Ape, an absurd style magazine that publishes portraits of celebrities urinating and dresses up models as sexually provocative 13-year-olds. 'Stupid people think it's cool. Smart people think it's a joke – also cool,' goes the credo of the magazine editor, Jonatton Yeah? (question mark added by deed poll).
But something brilliant was happening – Nathan Barley itself – though viewers were slow to catch on. Critics were divided and ratings dwindled over its six episodes. Even people in the show were slightly perplexed. 'I didn't really get it at the time, I don't think,' says Charlie Condou, who played Jonatton Yeah?. 'People didn't know what to do with it because it was quite different. It's only now I realise it was almost too ahead of its time.'
Twenty years on, Nathan Barleys are everywhere. We've all met them. Nicholas Burns has an adjective to describe Barley types: 'Nathanic.'
Nathan Barley began life on Charlie Brooker's spoof TV listing website, TVGoHome. Nathan was the subject of a reality series called, quite simply, 'C---'. Nathan was 'an undeserving London media do-nothing posh-boy' who struts talentlessly through life, drinking in places that have been gutted by gentrification and sponging off his parents' wealth. Brooker was clearly irritated by real Barleys – there's a particular venom in those original listings (Barley's pals, for instance, are described as, 'S—, p-----, f----, c----, w------, a---holes, and braying corpse-eyed puppet people.')
Chris Morris, who also wrote listings for TVGoHome, suggested making a show about Barley set within the emerging east London arts scene. Morris would direct as well as co-write the series with Brooker.
Nicholas Burns was the first actor through the door for Nathan, though he recalls plenty more actors auditioned for the role – among them was a pre-Messiah complex Russell Brand, who was in his dopey-haired, MTV presenter-on-drugs stage. 'At the time he was quite a Nathanic person,' says Burns.
2022. I left London Zone 2 after 29 years. The place had just become real-life Nathan Barley.
— Hilton Holloway (@hiltonholloway) December 31, 2022
For the audition, Burns had to improvise a scene as Nathan – yapping obnoxiously down a phone, as he does often in the show – and came up with one of Nathan's hip terms. 'F--- sticks,' says Burns, laughing. 'I don't know where that came from.'
He credits Brooker and Morris for the rest of Nathan's lexicon – a stream of trendy-sounding superlatives and sign-offs: 'That's well bum,' 'Totally f------ Mexico,' 'Awesome f------ Welles,' 'Keep it dusty,' 'New f------ paradigm or what?' Inane twaddle, obviously, but delivered so self-assuredly that it translates to the idiot set of Hosegate as the code to some unknowable, indecipherable cool.
Playing opposite Nathan is Sugar Ape writer and Dutch wine connoisseur Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barratt), who begins the series by writing an article about Barley types, 'The Rise of the Idiots', which makes him – somewhat tragically – a sort of guru to them. They're too stupid to know they're the idiots. His disdain is infectious but ultimately impotent. As Brooker and Morris told Burns, 'Nathan always wins.'
The cast would also include Claire Keelan as Dan's sister, Claire, who's trying to make a sanctimonious documentary about London's underclass, and Ben Whishaw as Nathan's bag-of-nerves computer assistant, Pingu (Nathan torments Pingu with pranks, such as clamping a car battery to his ears the laughing when his trousers fall down in an electrified seizure). Smaller roles were played by Richard Ayoade, as gawking Sugar Ape idiot Ned, and Barratt's Mighty Boosh partner Noel Fielding as DJ flatmate Jones, who plays brain-drilling sets of intolerable racket at 4am.
Benedict Cumberbatch also briefly appears as an accountant to musician Doug Rocket (David Hoyle), a spoof of the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart. Rocket – drugs/art-addled to the point of having pretentious mush for brains – has a daily 'ape hour' (screeching around his office like a chimp) and has suffered multiple nervous breakdowns. 'All of which I've chosen to ignore,' he says.
For the cast, developing the series was an unusually secretive process. Rhys Thomas – who more recently wrote and directed the Oliver Twist prequel series, Dodger – played Nathan's daft flatmate, Toby, but he had no idea what the show was about when he got the audition call. It was just an unspecified Chris Morris project.
'Nobody knew what it was,' says Thomas. 'Originally it was called 'Box of Slice'. But there was no script for the audition. You just had to come as a character – very loosely someone who worked in the media – and you had to pitch a project to Chris Morris as that character. He interviewed me as himself.'
They workshopped the characters for a year, and the actors didn't know if they'd actually been cast or if the show was happening. There was a pilot in the summer of 2003 but the series didn't shoot until 2004.
'We used to go to the little rehearsal once a week, or every couple of weeks,' says Charlie Condou. 'We'd improvise stuff and work on characters. Every now and again they'd give us a few scenes. We weren't really told anything. I remember sitting in the little green room area with Julian Barratt, Richard Ayoade, and Nick Burns and none of us knew whether we were going to be in the show.'
'They took a long time getting it right,' says Thomas. 'That's why it took so long.'
Nicholas Burns recalls that Chris Morris would take him for lunch and send him to hipster hotspots so he could assimilate. 'Nothing was set in stone, I still hadn't been offered the part,' Burns recalls. 'But he'd say we needed to do research – to go to Shoreditch – and he'd send me out to certain places. 'I've heard about this place and party, I've bought you a ticket, go and look and report.''
Burns attended a Shoreditch party that was hosted by a style magazine – the type of magazine that Sugar Ape was modelled on. 'There was a bonfire and they were burning magazines like Vogue. They were saying they were the antithesis to those sorts of magazines, which of course they weren't.'
Amusingly, there was a stall at the party selling, erm, meat. When asked why they were selling meat, the response – said with Barley-esque irony – was, 'Dunno mate.' Burns also recalls Shoreditch bars decorated with kitsch tat and little plastic Smurfs. 'They seemed to love things that were rubbish, that had no artistic value,' says Burns. 'They always wanted to subvert and if you do that, you're never wrong.'
Charlie Condou felt tapped into that world already – he'd been brought up around Soho and had friends on the Shoreditch art scene.
'It was very ironic for me,' he says. 'We were all kind of young, trendy, artsy w------ ourselves. I think that's part of the reason it worked so well. We were on the outskirts of that world anyway. I remember Noel Fielding saying something along those lines when we were filming – 'I'm taking the piss out of me and my mates!''
Condou points to several inspirations for his Sugar Ape editor, Jonatton Yeah?, including Jefferson Hack and photographer Rankin, the founders of Dazed & Confused magazine, and the artist Jonathan Yeo. 'There's no coincidence that Jonathan Yeo is a friend of mine,' Condou says. 'I'm sure that name triggered Jonatton Yeah?.' He adds: 'I met Rankin and told him that Jonatton Yeah? was partly based on him. He was very, very pleased – very proud of the fact.'
One of the character's funniest moments – describing the celebrity peeing artworks as 'pretty, y' know, meow ' – came from a real exchange with a prominent Young British Artist. Condou met the artist at a party that Sam Taylor-Wood hosted for the Pet Shop Boys. 'I was very much in awe of this person and they had just suffered a bit of a personal tragedy which I had read about,' says Condou. (He's too polite to name the artist though a cursory google reveals it was Tracey Emin.) 'I was a bit stuck for conversation and I said, 'I'm so sorry to hear about everything you've been through. It sounds really terrible.' And the response I got was, meow. I thought, 'I'm having that.' I went into rehearsals and told Charlie and Chris, 'I want to find a way of meowing as a response.''
While Nathan Barley is an irritant – a man who will literally drink scrambled egg and smoked salmon coffee if he thinks it's on-trend – Jonatton Yeah? is the true bane of Dan Ashcroft's life. Wearing an SS helmet and carrying a raven (his drug dealer), he is brilliantly awful – a man of pure, unfettered sarcasm ('That's hilarious and co'). Even work drinks are done with a degree of irony. 'Pub etc?' 'You've gone to piddle,' Dan tells him. But Yeah? is the clearly smartest one in the room – the idiot ringmaster. He delights in commissioning dignity-crushing assignments for Dan, such as having a straight-on-straight sexual encounter with a builder in a family pub toilet. When Dan can't bring himself to write a glowing piece about idiot urine artist 15Peter20, Yeah? writes it himself and sticks Dan's byline on the feature anyway.
Nathan Barley debuted on Channel 4 on February 11, 2005. 'We all thought we were all doing something good,' says Rhys Thomas. 'We thought we'd all be at the Baftas and Comedy Awards, winning loads of stuff for the series. But when it came out it didn't really have an impact.'
The show began with 1.2 million viewers but dropped at one point to just 500,000. Some critics questioned whether Morris had lost his edge. Morris had stirred significant controversy with Brass Eye's tabloid-riling paedophile special in 2001 – by contrast, Nathan Barley looked like a conventional comedy, and much less confrontational. Morris fans on the comedy forum Cook'd and Bomb'd squabbled about whether it was funny and ironic, or just Morris going lowbrow.
But Nathan Barley flips the traditional Brit-com, which is traditionally about characters who crave some higher social status – something that goes back to Tony Hancock and Harold Steptoe. In Nathan Barley, however, Dan Ashcroft holds a status that he doesn't want – revered by the idiots as 'Preacher Man' – while Barley has blagged his way to social standing as a scenester.
The status is Nathan's to lose, but he's pretty much bulletproof among his thickie hipster acolytes. They even congratulate him for committing an act of paedophilia, taking it as somehow ironic. Nathan always wins. Though there is a smidgen of likability about Nathan. 'He's got a sunny disposition. He's an optimist,' says Nicholas Burns. 'He's also a coward and completely selfish. But underneath it all there's a vulnerability – an insecurity.'
Nathan Barley became a cult, much-quoted favourite on DVD. There was also tentative work on a second series – which was set to feature Nathan's brother – but it never materialised. 'We did a workshop,' remembers Thomas. 'Julian Barratt's character had borrowed a cottage from Nathan Barley's family to write a novel, but we all turn up. It was set in Cornwall. Even though the viewing figures weren't huge, I think Channel 4 still would have gone for it.'
Critic Neil Boorman slated Nathan Barley for spoofing the Shoreditch scene five years too late. Boorman published the satirical fanzine, Shoreditch T---, and made a TV pilot version in 2002. That Nathan Barley came later scarcely mattered outside east London. It would prove perceptive way beyond the parameters of that scene.
Ten years after the show was originally broadcast, The Guardian hailed it for being well ahead of the digital, hipsterfied curve. Barley-ism had indeed gone mainstream. The dunderheaded, off-kilter reality of Hosegate bled into all corners of on-the-pulse culture: creative industries, work spaces, social media, dotcom businesses, painfully trendy hangouts, adult playgrounds, cafes that sell nothing but cereal, the kind of restaurants that served chips on roof tiles. Looking back, Nathan was also a pioneering vlogger – literally days before YouTube was founded (on Feb 14, 2005).
'Chris was insistent that Nathan had to have a video diary,' Charlie Brooker later said. 'I was like, 'No one uses video on the web, it's too blocky!'' Brooker also took credit for inventing the iPhone with Nathan's deliberately annoying Wasp T12 Speechtool, a phone that turns into MP3 turntables, prints business cards, and projects offensive slogans. 'Our version of apps was physical apps,' said Brooker.
Now, a full 20 years on, Nathan Barely looks even more perceptive: a stark warning about buying into the swagger of ill-deserved confidence, or being influenced by the loudest, most tech-savvy voices. The Nathan Barleys are at the top now. The idiots and chancers took over years ago.
'The internet has propagated that hugely,' says Burns. 'It allows people who aren't experts, or don't have the requisite knowledge, to spout things and just by force of personality people believe them. That's what Nathan's about. He'll hitch his wagon to anything that makes him look cool. Whether he believes in it is neither here nor there. You can see that in a lot of politicians.'
Charlie Condou agrees. 'People often ask me what Jonatton Yeah? is doing now,' he says. 'There's no doubt he'd be in politics – or he'd be a dotcom millionaire. Or both. He'd definitely be in the House of Lords.'
Nathan Barley himself, meanwhile, has become a British comedy touchstone, representing a very real personality type – in the way Del Boy does elsewhere on the comedy spectrum. We've all met Nathan Barleys. Nicholas Burns meets them regularly. 'Even now if I'm in Shoreditch,' he says, 'someone will lollop over to me in platform shoes and a weird hairstyle and say, 'Yeah, keep f------ the idiots, man!' I think, 'Wow, the irony is totally lost on them.''
