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Well, I was dead pissed off when I wrote the above, so there's an element of exaggeration in there (cf "every man in the show is clearly established as a misogynist - that's obviously a generalisation). However...
The purpose of the show is appears to be the portrayal of certain posers/wankers in the meedja industry (which some are very familiar with and others less so). I think there's certainly a case to be made for misogyny here.
The constant battering women get in NB is appalling. Just because NB is drawing characters who ape the gormlessly laddish/thuggish mentality of a certain set of people does not mean that the show doesn't have to answer its own charges of misogyny. One of the things that clinches it for me is that there appears to be almost no comment on the values being expressed by any of the characters. As has been commented, Claire is as much a callous scumbag as any of the men in the show, while Ashcroft, though he hates the idiots only slightly less than himself, seems only to do so because he sees them as idiots - they aren't reprehensible, they're just gormless/talentless. And referencing behaviour without providing a context to place it in - especially when you're a maverick comedian with a reputation as an edgy risk-taker/bellicose journalist with a reputation for inventive swearing - is just asking for a value judgment on the programme itself. One of many things that's struck me is the typically lad's magazine style referencing of anal sex as the zenith of any putative sexual relation with a woman - that referencing typically being in the form of anecdotes that could easily qualify as confessions of date rape, ending with a cod-amusing flourish of wit involving some cod-absurdist play on vague ideas about what constitutes anal sex (different doors/entrances ; changing ends/football ; anything involving mention of the colour brown or chocolate seems to get a chuckle). 'You see, she though I'd ordered her a latte, but she got a chocolate cappuccino when her back was turned.' Pretty clunky, I agree, but it was my first go.
As for Barley being the hero... Morris/Brooker make no bones about the fact that Barley is the central figure in the narrative - the show's named after him, he drives many of the plots, and out of a cast of repellent, horrendous individuals with a number of repellent horrendous characteristics, he's representative of all of said characteristics, but magnified and focussed. Barley is more or less the acme of the media personae this show features. And not only is there no value judgement on any of the characteristics he represents, but he is consistently seen to win, every time. Doesn't get to score with the girl he manipulated into bed? He pretends he had her up the arse (see above) and gets kudos. The vacuous chancer gets mocked for his new 'look'? Those crazy Japanese think he's a god. Thinks he's been blown by a minor? Let off the legal hook when she confirms her actual age, gets kudos from the idiots who don't know different. NB doesn't comment on the values or behaviour expressed by the characters within it, and the characters certainly don't comment on themselves, so we're left with a show that consistently parades a certain standard of behaviour without comment and shows the protagonist and principle exponent of said behaviour as coming out on top. In narrative, we sometimes call such a protagonist "the hero".
And please don't try the "the viewer is being made to confront such behaviour and make up their own mind" - we've already had people on this board adopting phrases from the show, and I've heard people at work and amongst my friends, too. The target audience appears to be precisely the kind of bloke who regularly buys lads magazines (as someone pointed out, it's on just after the pubs kick out on a Friday night), and the set-up just isn't complex enough for satire. Nathan Barley is just a sitcom about a misogynist wanker, and not a funny sitcom at that. Reactionary, gutless TV that has no point to make except to seemingly revel in its reactionary gutlessness - Walker: Texas Ranger with less kung-fu and a twatty overbite. |
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