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February 12, 2005
Hosegate, yeah?
The long-awaited (and by now somewhat anachronistic) Nathan Barley. Haven't yet reached an opinion as to whether it's funny/better/worse than x/y/z Morris product because still in shock from its horrible, cringe-inducing, will-to-exist-destroying accuracy. I'm not even sure, given its purely documentary importance, that its timeliness, funniness, or the inevitable sold-out/softened-up accusations matter much.
Yes, it was that bad (no doubt it still is, in pockets where economic correction has yet to take its toll), I have met all of those people and various hybrids of them personally. I could even name them*, but as Morris&Brooker show in forensic detail, the Idiots are unshamable, their hegemony is absolute within the bounds of the Hoxton/Shoreditch Triangle, and its tentacles spread outwards via the multitude of sad cases desperate to secure some 'edge' through desperate overbudgeted frottage with these loons (let us note that some of them number amongst the staff of the production companies Morris has contracted to supply the 'edgy' visual 'treatments' of the series - ironic, yeah?).
How do you satirise Ultimate Style-Man? "They say 'self-facilitating media node,' and blink".
The respective plights of Dan Ashcroft and Pingu are devastating in their poignancy. Just as Morris's savage newsmedia parodies were always outdone by the real thing, these characters painfully reveal the impossibility of combatting such hyperbolic levels of insular arrogance and wilful superficiality as those produced as secondary froth on the dotcom bubble. The first is a terminally-recuperated theorist of idiot-decadence trapped in the world of cool (he knows what's happening, but no-one is listening, he fears absorption but the only other exit is to renounce cool), the other an able, sincere-but-mild, code-drone slowly crushed to death under the ironically exploitative heel of the braying, superconfident incompetents.
*let's just say that a certain company's boardroom table was made out of a salvaged wing of a biplane and the director made a point of wearing skirts to all meetings. And that, being as I was employed by a corporate entity desperately seeking approval from the new ruling class of fashion-victims, I saw suits melt with ravenous delight and bust open the coffers at every swirl. Another major offender was a still-extant self-facilitating trustafarian goon who was paid richly by the hour to come and sit around in the offices of a certain dotcom company drinking coffee and exchanging hootingly loud excruciating faux-"street" banter with a hapless public-school developer.
Posted by robin at February 12, 2005 02:18 PM