tom

tom paulin haunted by rumour::A long time back: 15, maybe 20, years ago.
Those it was first used against must be middleaged themselves by now.
Yet despite the admirable efforts of beavis and butthead and south park , it has taken that long for television to satirise the concept effectively.
After all, as auberon waugh once said of the working classes, it is not the people we dislike, but their culture.
His boast does not mislead.
Nathan wears two bluetooth ear sets, and in the extremis of submusical composition straps himself inside a straitjacket of electronic paraphernalia.
Nick burns, who plays him, does well not to make him so irritating he is impossible to watch.
His wouldbe nemesis is the pathetically flawed dan ashcroft, who in the opening episode has the misfortune to run into him twice in one morning.
His diatribe is spotted by a middlebrow newspaper called the weekend on sunday whose audience consists of slightly older idiots.
At first dan thinks accepting the call to a job interview would be selling out.
Julian barratt portrays dan raggedly as a dostoevskian misfit, adrift in his career, betrayed by his own preoccupations.
He is not even particularly nice.
The character of nathan was created by brooker on his tv go home website, and it is his good fortune to have been teamed up with the perfectionist morris.
There is so much detail to enjoy.
When claire pitches an idea for a tv documentary, it is to the indie that made nazi experiments in colour.
This is a world in which words have ceased to signify thought.
Although the former is now a decade old, its parody of tv news conventions remains uncannily accurate.
The only surprise is that jeremy paxman, spoofed by morris as a sneering bully, had a career after it.
Brass eye equally repays another viewing.
Its controversial 2001 special on the media frenzy over paedophiles has weathered into a classic.
Both programmes passed an important test: when i switched off the dvd and turned on the real news, i could barely tell the difference.
The middleaged in spirit who waited so long for yoof to be tackled will not like nathan barley : they will misidentify its language and irreverence as part of the problem.
Hoxton yoof dotcommers will complain that it is already out of date.
But in challenging the bad faith of the media wherever he spots it, morris demonstrates why we need him.
He is the equal of malcolm muggeridge in his prime, our greatest living englishman.
Andrew billen is a staff writer on the