I don’t think that the ‘meaning’ of Nathan Barley is quite so open ended as you suggest; Morris is too sophisticated a satirist to ‘leave you to think what you like’. I think the show is a deliberate and penetrating satire on youth culture; the self-regarding consumer slaves who are so obsessed with their ‘individuality’ that they fail to recognise how homogenous they all are. Indeed this is not limited to the obvious idiots in the program, but also the TV producers and other journalists are obsessed with what is cool, having no real sense of self-driven purpose – this is ironic because they want to appear so individual.

I like your point about Morris poking fun at those who called his earlier work cool just because the Mail kicked up about it, without really understanding what it was all about. Armando Ianucci recently lamented in a lecture that the satire he did with Morris in The Day Today had been somewhat blunted because, despite the success of the program, the news and the media still acted in the same way. The objects of their satire didn’t even care they were being mocked.

Last point – concerning your favourite scene. The “stranger” in the pub is actually the TV producer that Barley and Claire see at the beginning of the episode. He loves Barley’s ideas and his website and ignores Claire’s proposal. Hence his persistant hopefulness in the pub – after Barley pours a pint over him he says, “is something brilliant happening here?” or similar.

Keep it futile,

Kev