M☾☾N WALK
- when the going gets tough, the tough get tweeting -
Charliecondou: @EmmaK67 I can't make it!! I was literally on my way out of the door but Georgia is sick so I'm staying home. Walk well team, see you Sat! X
misterhsk: @Charliecondou dinner at mine next Sunday night.
Charliecondou: @misterhsk I'll be up north lover
Sharontweet: @Charliecondou you better! Will be watching your return to the cobbles on the train up x
Charliecondou: @jayrayner1 with the mother of my child I believe. Have fun x
WHAT HAPPENED TO NATHAN BARLEY?
Quote from: "Zoo Magazine and its readers"
YES: 78%
NO: 22%
IN OUR OPINION: STOP TRYING TO COPY THE OFFICE
It's just saying "most of you don't like Nathan Barley (well, at least over 3/4 of you who could be bothered to vote on it anyway) and we do"
Girls last laugh
by Caitlin Moran
THE second-most anticipated sitcom of the decade, after Ricky Gervais’s soon-coming Extras, is Nathan Barley, but it has tanked badly on Channel 4. Now nearing the end of a six-week run, Barley has dropped from 1.2 million to 0.7 million viewers and failed to register in Channel 4’s Top 30 programmes.
Losing almost half your audience after three episodes is surely a carelessness on a par with losing both parents, although some of the defections can be put down to cunning scheduling by ITV. They put a season of Bond films on opposite it and posed, for many, the ultimate Friday night dilemma: satire or Halle Berry’s tits?
Still, this ratings loss is a sobering drop-off for a project by Chris Morris, a man who, since he intoned, “These are the headlines — I wish to God they weren’t” in The Day Today, has had one of the most loyal fanbases in comedy.
Why has Barley done so badly? Some have posited the theory that it’s because the whole idea of the show — satirising media-crazed Hoxtonites with unbearable hair — is passé, as Hoxton is over. But frankly, saying that Hoxton is over is exactly the kind of thing that people from Hoxton would say, and therefore all grist to Barley’s mill.
Hoxton, like the poor and Duran Duran, will always be with us. Several of Nathan Barley’s phrases have already crossed over into what passes for conversation among young people (“Keep it chopped out!” “Keep it futile!” “Awesome Welles!”), and the casting is, in itself, a work of quiet genius, particularly the Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt as the persistently compromised Dan, the fatally underused Richard Ayoade as Ned and Charlie Condou as the Jefferson Hack-like Jonnaton Yeah?.
But Nathan Barley is unfocused, both structurally and in its satire. Personally, I suspect that as Chris Morris — along with his co-writer Charlie Brooker, who originally created the Nathan Barley character on his peerless website TVGoHome — did their reputed three years of research on Hoxton, they found that Hoxtonites’ main obsessions (new technology, unlistenable music, the boundaries of acceptability, silly slang) were, in fact, pretty close to many of their own. It’s difficult to find any other way of explaining why the character of Nathan Barley, who was, in his website incarnation, a wholly irredeemable sh**stain with all the morals of a bubonic flea, is now a loveable dandy buffoon with his heart in the right place.
But perhaps mindful of treading on the monolithic toes of the The Office, of which Morris is apparently a great fan, Nathan Barley withdrew from the workplace and focused on the relationships of world-weary media-wannabe siblings Claire and Dan Ashcroft, who are supposed to represent the horror a “normal” person would experience on venturing to Hoxton.
The problem with this is that one half of this partnership, Claire Ashcroft, is one of the worst TV characters this century. The woman has been landed with the unenviable role of having to provide the moral compass for a whole series. While all the other (male) characters are getting good lines, wearing silly hats, exhibiting multidimensionality and generally lining themselves up for a mention at the Comedy Awards, Claire Ashcroft has nothing more to do than display exasperated disapproval at the boys, slam a few doors and sigh like a punctured haggis over everything they say.
To be honest, I’ve seen the character of Claire Ashcroft before. I’ve seen her fill both roles of the miserable, furious women in Closer, pop up on UK Gold as Joy in Drop the Dead Donkey and Kochanski in Red Dwarf.
When it comes to writing lead roles for young females, there appears to be a glitch affecting ostensibly liberal, middle-class screenwriters in their thirties and forties. They tend to create brunettes with nice tits who are articulate, cynical, good at pool and into Elvis Costello — and then, in a moment of self-realisation, fear that they’re engaged in little more than an upmarket version of the scene in Weird Science where the teenage boys creating their ideal woman on a computer give her breasts the size of beach balls.
Scriptwriters tend to decide to cobble on the additional attributes of misandry and fury, ostensibly aimed a world of letches and boors but actually aimed at her creator for perving her. Of course, all this oddly fusty insistence that women are too sensible to bother with funny lines does solve one mystery — it’s suddenly easy to understand which half of Nathan Barley’s audience had abandoned it by episode three.
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