--- title: "Nathan Barley" year: 2005 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/nathan-barley" fi1m_score: 74 critics_score: 71 critics_reviews: 6 published: "2026-09-17T14:59:34.514013+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T14:59:35.086227+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Nathan Barley (2005) Created by Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris · 2h 28m · Comedy **Fi1m score: 74** · Critics 71 from 6 reviews *In a sentence:* Everyone here is an idiot, the show says so in its first five minutes, and then proves it for six weeks > Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s six-part comedy about east London media idiots is sharply written, well cast and, twenty years on, uncomfortably accurate. Julian Barratt gives it a heart. It has one joke, and by the fourth episode you will have heard it several times. ## Synopsis East London, 2005. Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barratt), a weary journalist at the style magazine Sugar Ape, writes a piece called The Rise of the Idiots, and the idiots love it. The loudest is Nathan Barley (Nicholas Burns), who runs the website trashbat.co.ck, films himself humiliating strangers and wants Dan to be his friend. Dan wants to leave the magazine and cannot afford to. His sister Claire (Claire Keelan) wants to make a serious documentary and needs money, which Nathan has. In the office, Ned Smanks (Richard Ayoade) and Rufus Onslatt (Spencer Brown) mistake Dan’s contempt for a manifesto. Nathan books a haircut. Dan goes to the pub. ## Review Nathan Barley started life as a single listing in Charlie Brooker’s spoof television guide *TVGoHome*, a rich idiot with a camcorder, and in 2005 Brooker and Chris Morris gave him six episodes, 148 minutes in all, in which to be an idiot at length. The result is one of the sharper British comedies of its decade about the people who make media, and the sharpest thing in it is not Nathan. It is worth your evening if you have ever worked in an office with a table football machine. It also runs out of new things to say around the fourth episode and simply says the old things again, harder. Nicholas Burns plays Nathan with total commitment and no self-knowledge at all. He wears a trilby indoors, rides a small bicycle and waves a phone the size of a paperback at anyone who will look. He runs trashbat.co.ck, a website where he posts films of himself being cruel to people who did not agree to be in them, and he calls this a business. Burns never asks us to like him and never plays him as a monster either. Nathan is a child with money, and the horror is that everyone around him treats the money as a personality. The series belongs to Julian Barratt. His Dan Ashcroft writes for *Sugar Ape*, a style magazine staffed entirely by the people his article was about, and Barratt plays him as a man who has been tired for about eight years and has stopped expecting to be less tired. He slumps in a coat that looks slept in. His contempt comes out as mumbling. Richard Ayoade and Spencer Brown, as Ned Smanks and Rufus Onslatt, are the office’s resident geniuses, and their scenes together, batting a stupid idea back and forth until it becomes a feature, are the best written in the series. Claire Keelan gives Dan’s sister Claire the only working conscience in the building, and the script mostly uses her to be disappointed by her brother. Morris directs it drab on purpose. Danny Cohen shoots the streets in flat grey daylight and the parties in sick greens and sodium orange, so that nothing ever looks as glamorous as the people in it believe it does. Luana Hanson’s production design fills Nathan’s flat with things that were expensive last month and the *Sugar Ape* office with beanbags and one working desk. Leonie Hartard dresses the idiots in mismatched trainers, ugly hats and slogans nobody has read, and the joke is that in 2005 this counted as exaggeration. Nick Fenton cuts Nathan’s trashbat films with the jump-cuts and captions of the real thing. Jonathan Whitehead and Morris’s music is twitchy electro with a faint note of nausea, and it tells us these people are having fun and that it is not fun to watch. We laughed a great deal, mostly at Ayoade and Brown. Once, when Nathan first quotes Dan’s article back to him in admiration, we laughed and then went quiet, because we recognised the moment. Anyone who has watched their own work be enjoyed for exactly the wrong reasons will know the expression Barratt puts on his face there, and it is not comic. The trouble is repetition. Each episode puts Dan within reach of something better, has Nathan or the magazine take it away, and leaves him in the pub. By the fourth time this is no longer a pattern but a rut. The series is also crueller than it needs to be to people who are not Nathan; a running thread about the magazine’s photoshoots is designed to appal and does, and the writing then does little with the feeling once it has it. Some reviewers in 2005 thought the show had arrived too late for its target. Watched now it looks early. The phone Nathan waves about is in everyone’s pocket, and the website he runs is called social media. Against Morris’s own work it sits oddly. *The Day Today* (1994) and [*Brass Eye*](https://film.one/tv/brass-eye) (1997) picked a target, hit it and stopped. This picks a target, hits it, and then keeps hitting it for two more episodes than it needs. Watch two at a time, with someone who has worked in an office where nobody could say what the company did. Then stop and come back the following week, which is what the original audience had to do, and probably why they enjoyed it more than we did. *Fi1m score 74, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (6) - **The Guardian** (90/100, inferred): The series is very good, beautifully observed, written and acted, and very, very funny. It shows the idiots for what they are through sharp character-based comedy. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/feb/12/tvandradio.television) - **Vulture** (90/100, inferred): The critic praises Nathan Barley as diamond-hard satire that holds up after ten years, eviscerating urban tech-chic culture with prescient insight into narcissistic media culture. They single out its unique balance of detachment and engagement that forces introspection and self-laughter. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2015/02/the-gospel-according-to-barley.html) - **Empire**, William Thomas (70/100, inferred): The series initially baffled fans of Chris Morris but over time reveals itself as a deceptively rich, if stupid, piece of work. It is rooted in 1970s sitcom classics and praised for its bathos and childishly hilarious moments. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/nathan-barley-review/) - **The Telegraph** (70/100, inferred): The sitcom brilliantly satirised London media do-nothing posh boys and proved perceptive far beyond its original scene. It was ahead of the digital, hipster curve despite mixed initial reception. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/how-nathan-barley-predicted-britains-rise-of-the-idiots/) - **The Times** (30/100, inferred): The show arrives long after the fact and the results are disappointing despite patches of genius and visual gags. It is not as accurate or direct-hitting as other comedies like Peep Show or Absolutely Fabulous. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/too-little-too-late-wk9nqgrd8xv) - **Paste**, Cara Ellison (80/100, inferred): The critic finds the 2005 series still painfully relevant a decade later as a dissection of media culture and obnoxious 'proto-hipster' figures. She singles out its prescient satire of online video culture, self-facilitating media nodes, and the symbiotic relationship between cynical journalists and idiots for praise. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/nathan-barley-turns-10) ## Details - **Created by:** Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris - **Creator:** Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris - **Director:** Chris Morris - **Writer:** Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris - **Cinematography:** Danny Cohen - **Editor:** Nick Fenton - **Music:** Chris Morris, Jonathan Whitehead - **Production design:** Luana Hanson - **Costume design:** Leonie Hartard - **Producer:** Derrin Schlesinger - **Cast:** Nicholas Burns as Nathan Barley; Julian Barratt as Dan Ashcroft; Claire Keelan as Claire Ashcroft; Richard Ayoade as Ned Smanks; Spencer Brown as Rufus Onslatt; Benedict Cumberbatch as Robin; Julia Davis as Honda Poppet; Stephen Mangan as Rod Senseless - **Runtime:** 2h 28m - **Release (the US):** 11 February 2005 - **Genres:** Comedy ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. Also available in: GB, IE. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Brass Eye* (1997), Fi1m 86: Morris at his most precise, and far shorter about it — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/brass-eye.md) - *Peep Show* (2003), Fi1m 88: Two men who despise each other and cannot afford to move out — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/peep-show.md) - *Garth Marenghi's Darkplace* (2004), Fi1m 83: Ayoade and friends make something worse on purpose, and it is glorious — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/garth-marenghis-darkplace.md) - *Four Lions* (2010), Fi1m 84: Morris’s film: idiots again, with far higher stakes and real feeling — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/four-lions.md) - *Portlandia* (2011): The American cousins of Nathan’s friends, treated with rather more affection --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/nathan-barley