Charlie Brooker insists Nathan Barley wasn’t a VICE parody, discusses the series 2 that never was

Nathan Barley centred on fictional East London-based magazine 'sugaRAPE' (Channel 4)

Despite only running for one series and concluding over a decade ago, Nathan Barley remains a touchstone of pop cultural satire, an adjective for anything purporting to castigate hipster culture whilst simultaneously feeding it.

Centering on a magazine that bemoans the ‘rise of the idiots’ from its quirky, space-hoppers-for-chairs office, it is used as a criticism of VICE in its Twitter replies and article comments ad tedium, having long been assumed to be a direct parody of the magazine.

This week, as creator Charlie Brooker’s latest series of Black Mirror launched, a VICE staffer finally confronted him about it.

"The first thing to clear up," he said in an interview, “there is an episode of Nathan Barley where they produce an issue of Sugar Ape magazine called 'The VICE Issue', which wasn't meant to be a direct comparison – it was a coincidence, literally just a coincidence.

“After it came out and people said, 'Ah taking the piss out of VICE magazine,' I thought, 'No! Of course people are going to think that!' I think it weirdly even looked a bit like the old VICE logo. We had looked at VICE, of course, but it was never a direct piss-take."

I suppose he would have to say that, sitting opposite the allegedly parodied party, but it’s an interesting footnote to the series nonetheless.

Brooker also discussed the embryonic plans he had for a second series, which was to bleed into the experience of being a ‘millennial’.

"We worked out the storylines for a second series that moved away from the style magazine and was about his financial support being cut off, and he was facing cold, hard reality, which – had we known the term – would have been far more 'millennial’,” he added. “He was left adrift in a world where things were crumbling, and he was less certain of things."

You can read our Q&A with Brooker on Netflix and the future of Black Mirror here.