A Self Facilitating Meeja Node Writes About Nathan Barley(it's well weapon!)

'Nathan Barley' is the newish creation of Chris Morris(Day Today, Brasseye) and Charlie Brookner (TV Go Home). Nathan Barley is situated amongst the flora and fauna of meeja London's style magazines and new media focusing on their numerous idiocies and population of no talent hacks. Morris and Brookner narrow down the scope to the barely imaginary 'cutting edge' magazine Sugar Ape and it's population of what pathetically compromised mid-thirties journalist Dan Ashcroft calls the 'idiots'. Nathan Barley is a freelance web designer of Trashbat.co.ck(who does no designing..) and 'self facilitating media node' loathed by Dan Ashcroft yet fully accepted by the 'idiots'.

The Ashcroft labelled 'idiots' are where Chris Morris' wonderfully twisted use of language comes into play with Morris inventing a Clockwork Orange style vocabulary for his charges. Language is dissolved into meaningless clichés and shorthand, the desire to shock detached from any real meaning or intent. Radical political statements and events such as 9/11 are rendered into aesthetic choices for bleeding edge fashionistas. Chris Morris has always played with language from 'The Day Today's' gleeful dismembering of 'Newsnight' style BBC English to 'Brasseye's' full bore attack on tabloid headlines and the emptiness and desperation of the language used by micro-celebrities to fill them.

'Nathan Barley' then is in some way two fingers stuck up towards Chris Morris' traditional audience with Chris Morris doing an 'In Utero' to his loyal fans in the media and all the other 'idiots' who derive their fun from the shock value in his work. Like Kurt Cobain given a crash course on the British meeja and the works of Swift, Chris Morris is biting the hand that feeds him, subverting the very writers who promote and review his work and the magazines that work this particular demographic.