Nathan Barley C4
Desperate HousewivesC4
C4's new sitcom, Nathan Barley, for which the description 'much-heralded' barely begins to hint at the media's thermometer-busting levels of fevered anticipation, is, as you will doubtless already know, if only by osmosis, a collaborative project (with his mate Charlie Brooker, of cult website TVGoHome) from the arch satirist-cum-guerrilla-comedian-cum-whatever, Chris Morris. Who was, in fairness, responsible for precisely none of the relentless pre-publicity.
Morris's last televisual outing was, you will also recall (if only because you've read it somewhere else), the infamous 2001 Brass Eye Special in which a selection of celebrity twits signed up to promote themselves by promoting an alleged charity campaign against paedophilia, but without actually reading the small print.
Indeed, as the likes of Gary Lineker, Neil Fox and Phil Collins (wonder if he kept his Nonce-Sense T-shirt? He'd make a fortune on eBay) earnestly asserted bald-faced rubbish, such as the 'fact' that paedophiles had more genes in common with crabs than humans or that internet grooming may involve projecting poisoned gas through a child's computer keyboard, it was clear that they could just as easily have been duped into promoting a charity campaign in favour of paedophilia.
The Brass Eye Special was both a rather brilliant and brilliantly timed bit of telly, but it aired in July 2001 and the world has changed quite a lot since then. It is a fundamentally less Funny Old World and therefore perhaps a bit harder to satirise, not least because Morris has helped to raise the cutting-edge comedy bar so high he can barely - or should that be Barley? - reach it himself.
Without Morris, there would, arguably, be none of the sweet surrealism of Green Wing (with its visual 'homages' to Morris's Jam ) or the terrifically pleased-with-itself nihilism of Nighty Night, which 'borrowed' ideas from everything Morris has ever done.
Morris has, of course, had a go at satirising the War on Terror - in this newspaper, indeed, where he collaborated with Armando Iannucci to produce a spoof report on the reporting of 9/11, with mixed results, mostly because print isn't really his medium.
Anyway, this is just a preamble to say that I was looking forward to Morris's return to telly as much as the next reviewer.
It's the kind of thing we journalists either really love, because it offers us an opportunity to backslap and feel smug about the fact that, if we have to, we can laugh at ourselves while being held up at comedy pistol point ('BANG!'). Or, for those working on the tabs, it is just a lot of fun to loathe, especially if it's done in a knowing sort of way. And it's only half-an-hour's viewing, so one hardly has to take notes but can still get a lot of posturing copy out of it, ideally by taking a critical stance nobody else has taken.
Mind you, that's a tough call. Even though I don't know the word on the street about Barley, I've got a hunch that it's Morris-critical-backlash time. And the reason I feel this is because I am an awesome pop-cultural zeitgeist-ometer. Which is, of course, how I got a job on The Observer in the first place, all those years ago, when I was cool, before I started popping up on telly talking about the 1970s and how annoying Christmas is.
Funnily enough, Nathan Barley is a complete arse who talks fluent Yoof and thinks he's cool. But as there's always someone further up the slippery ladder of Style, so Barley, who runs an 'online urban culture dispatj [sic]' - a vacuous website called Trashbat.co.ck ('registered in the Cook Islands ... ') - looks to journalist Dan Ashcroft, star columnist on Sugar Ape magazine, for his pop culture cues, though he naturally fails to spot himself in Dan's article 'The Rise of the Idiots'.
Dan, meanwhile, is adrift on a tsunami of self-loathing, killing time writing nonsense for pointless magazines aimed at 500 people in Hoxton while fantasising about a call from the newspaper supplement Weekend on Sunday magazine, which may - please god - want to tap into his urban groove.
The best and most successful scenes in episode one were when Dan (Julian Barratt of BBC3's The Mighty Boosh, a man with whom I once spent an hour in a room roughly 8ft by 10ft without ever receiving the honour of eye-contact. And no, I wasn't paying for the privilege ... ) finally gets an interview at the newspaper and blows it.
It isn't actually possible to care about Dan because he's as much of an arse as Barley, but the creeping knowledge that, though he professes to despise them, his Home Sweet Home is indeed right there in an east London colony with all the other style twats (rather than up west writing a column about his top five supermarket wines for Weekend on Sunday ) has a sort of stinging bathos, if you're looking for stinging bathos in a sitcom.
Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether Chris Morris's first sitcom is any more than the sum of its funny little details, including the coffee shop called Grind Zero, the framed cover of Tom Paulin on the wall of the Weekend on Sunday office ('Tom Paulin - Haunted by Rumour') and an editorial meeting at Sugar Ape, during which Ashcroft is congratulated on his 'Idiot' article by a colleague:
'That's the best thing I've ever read!'
Ashcroft: 'What's the second best thing you've ever read?'
'I dunno. Books and shit? i-D [magazine]?'
Though maybe I just think that's funny because my first magazine job was at i-D, or because those who work on magazines habitually refer to their product as the 'book', as in: 'That great piece about Bluetooth xylophones is, like, going up the front of the book.'
Whatever; thus far Nathan Barley comes across like a pilot that BBC3 might have turned down for trying too hard. I doubt Morris and Booker are trying too hard; I just know that youth culture is so intrinsically facile that it is virtually (unsati)risible on telly (apart from gadget mania which is, admittedly, a little bit funny), even by Chris Morris. Unlike, for example, my 1980s/1990s generation of vapid style gurus and bubble-headed fashionistas, who were, of course, never remotely facile but always the last word in astutely ironic and self-satirising, and who are now, to a man and a woman, all writing columns for Weekend on Sunday magazine.
If watching Nathan Barley ended up feeling more like work than I'd anticipated, then watching Desperate Housewives is the kind of special pleasure this critic reserves the right to enjoy with a glass of wine and without a notebook, enjoying a sharp, predominantly female ensemble cast at the top of their game (and after the demise of Sex and the City I didn't think we'd see another one of those in a hurry).
Last week's episode - the PC production of Little Red Riding Hood, Juanita's gambling addiction - was typical of the series so far: dark enough to be intriguing but light enough to entertain consistently, which is a harder act to pull off than one might imagine (and one which, incidentally, we can barely - or do I mean barley? - manage to pull off at all in this country). Desperate Housewives is, of course, all the better for being the product of the mainstream terrestrial US broadcaster, ABC, rather than, say, HBO. Mind you, if it had been an HBO production, then Susan and Mike would undoubtedly have done it before the first date they keep failing to have, and Mike would've hit on Susan's daughter; Gabrielle would be persuading her teenage lover, John, to turf over husband Carlos; vampy divorcee Edie Britt (the fabulous Nicolette Sheridan, almost certainly Worthing's most glamorous export ever) would be selling more than real estate in Wisteria Lane; while Bree Van De Kamp (I worship Marcia Cross, not least because she turned her post-Melrose Place 'resting' period into a masters degree in psychology) would not only have encouraged the deployment of a female sexual surrogate to try to mend her relationship with Rex-the-soon-to-be-Ex, but might just have moved her permanently into the spare room.
In fact, of all the cutesy storylines, only Lynette's Wannabe Supermom Ritalin-addiction currently strikes the right sort of note (HBO-lite, effectively) of domestic desperation (though coming soon is Ryan O'Neal as Lynette's father-in-law - casting that is somehow, comic, desperate and entirely inspired all at the same time).
But even if Desperate Housewives could get away with being a bit less like The OC for ladies of a certain age, it doesn't mean it isn't one of the three most consistently entertaining shows on the box. The other two? Ha, even the most desperate housewives know there's a lot to be said for delayed gratification.
