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Warning: This post contains spoilers. But I’ll make a few general comments first and put the real spoiler bits past the “click for more…” button.

It is probably fair to say that Nathan Barley has had mixed reviews. The usual suspects have been digging in as usual — I’m talking here about the Chris Morris so-called “fan” site Cook’d and Bomb’d. Evidently they’d rather Morris just sat behind a desk doing Jeremy Paxman impressions for the rest of his career.

The people who seemed to like it the most, though, seemed to be journalists and people who hang about on internet messageboards (not me of course!…) who probably have had a closer experience of ‘The Idiots’. A little clique, just like The Idiots. We’re all a bunch of little Dan Ashcrofts, railing against The Idiots, whilst we actually are Idiots ourselves.

A common criticism of Nathan Barley is that the characters were far too cartoony for them to be funny — just way over the top. But it’s been too easy to see real-life examples of the characters in Nathan Barley. Last week, for instance, walking home in Edinburgh there was this guy on a bike. The thing that made me notice him was his walkie-talkie type thing. It was very loud; the sort of thing a policeman would have, except he clearly wasn’t a policeman. He wasn’t properly riding his bike. He was sitting sideways on the frame and using it more like a scooter or a skateboard, and generally going nowhere fast and getting in everybody’s way. I thought, “That guy is such a Nathan Barley.”

There was another time on the train when somebody was doing something loud with their phone; the person across from me looked at the guy in disgust, just like Claire Ashcroft. I saw somebody else describe somewhere that “punks were the Nathan Barleys of their day.” You might even have been challenged to a game of Cock, Muff, Bumhole. The characters might be a bit over the top, but they definitely exist in real life. And this programme has definitely made an impact.

You wouldn’t believe it looking at the audience figures though. Nathan Barely was the least-watched show in Channel 4′s second-worst ever Friday night — only 700,000 viewers (a 3% share) tuned it. I’d be pissed off if only 700,000 people watched my television programme, but Channel 4′s problem was to schedule it on a Friday night. Nathan Barley isn’t a Friday night programme. Friday night is usually reserved for infantile garbage like Friends and The Friday Night Project. It was a brave move by Channel 4 which really didn’t pay off. Charlie Brooker, the creator and co-writer of Nathan Barley, got his excuses in early, in his Screen Burn column in The Guardian‘s The Guide.

Trying to catch every episode of your favourite TV series throughout its run requires almost as much commitment as maintaining a marriage.

Taras Young, writing in Student, described Nathan Barley as “Chris Morris’ latest forced turd.” That was after the admittedly dire second episode, and I was thinking similar things. I thought Morris and Brooker were struggling to come up with enough material. For instance, why concentrate on Dan Ashcroft when the title of the programme is Nathan Barley? The second episode had very few jokes in it. It was long and drawn out, and could have easily fitted into ten minutes rather than half an hour.

It was also at this point that I wondered what exactly the point of Nathan Barley was. At times during the series it seemed more like an excuse for Chris Morris to make music and to generally be stylish. (I especially liked the bits when it sounded like incidental music but it was actually Nathan Barley’s ringtone.) But wasn’t this the sort of thing that Morris and Brooker were meant to be taking the piss out of? The common theory is that it was autobiographical; that Morris and Brooker built bits of themselves into Barley and Ashcroft.

By the third episode, it was back to being funny again, and it had been getting better ever since. The series finale was a bit difficult to laugh at though.

I had been waiting for the whole series for Pingu to get Nathan Barley back. But the point was that Pingu was too much of a weakling. Barley became more and more extreme with his pranks, which he had begun to film for his television programme — the one he got during Claire Ashcroft’s interview.

This sixth episode really dug into The Idiots. The Idiots were winning, and Nathan Barley was more Idiotic than ever. He was caught out for only the second time in the whole series (the first one being the Geek Pie incident). The problem was that the only people who knew that Barley had been caught were Barley himself and Dan Ashcroft. Ashcroft — the closest this programme gets to having a hero, even though he is plainly a twunt himself — ended up looking like the biggest Idiot of them all. Literally backed into a corner, he fell out of a window and seemingly he died. Not before Barley had got Ashcroft — in a highly dazed, Jammier than Jam state — to sign a contract to appear in his new television programme, as the whole series of events had been filmed. It doesn’t get much more Idiotic than that. The Idiots won.

It was an excellent programme. Definitely not Morris’ best — it might even be his worst (although I still don’t think he has comedy constipation). But it’s probably Brooker’s best. I’m sad that it’s finished now. But hopefully the DVD release won’t be too far away.

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