Television - Chris Morris proves why we need him in a yoof-full satire. By Andrew Billen Nathan Barley (Channel 4)

When did the middle-aged insult "yoof" enter the language? A long time back: 15, maybe 20, years ago. Those it was first used against must be middle-aged themselves by now. Yet despite the admirable efforts of Beavis and Butt-head and South Park, it has taken that long for television to satirise the concept effectively. In Nathan Barley (Fridays, 10pm), Chris Morris and the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker finally do so by pointing their artillery at the factories that create the culture rather than its consumers. After all, as Auberon Waugh once said of the working classes, it is not the people we dislike, but their culture.

Nathan, the nominal hero, is actually the programme's chief villain, a youth superficial all the way down. We meet him skimming along the pavement on a mini-bike on a "fly-op", distributing adverts for his website, Trashbat.co.ck (it's registered in the Cook Islands). "It's well fucking futile," he tells "me nigger" and the other puzzled citizens at the bus stop. His boast does not mislead. Futile it is. The website is divided into Latest (Damian on webcam addressing us while high, or low, on "colossally concentrated" TCP), Diaree (we have yet to be treated), Pranks (one involves Nathan connecting a lorry battery to the earlobes of a member of his staff) and Other Stuff (cartoons about monkeys).

Nathan wears two Bluetooth ear sets, and in the extremis of sub-musical composition straps himself inside a straitjacket of electronic paraphernalia. His mobile phone is a Waso T-12, a Japanese model that features a larger number-five key "because it's the most common number". He is a Zappuccino-drinking, "self-facilitating, media node", who thinks "credo" is spelt and pronounced "credos". Nick Burns, who plays him, does well not to make him so irritating he is impossible to watch.

His would-be nemesis is the pathetically flawed Dan Ashcroft, who in the opening episode has the misfortune to run into him twice in one morning. Dan works for a Dazed and Confused rip-off called Sugar Ape, currently rebranding itself "suga RAPE" and edited by a guy who calls himself "Jonatton Yeah?". Sugar Ape's target reader is Nathan Barley, and the magazine is written by young men as cretinously neophiliac as he. Dan's mistake is to have turned 30, perhaps even 35, and, in a Damascene moment, to have realised that he is surrounded and read by morons. In a career high, he writes an article about the "triumph of the idiots" aimed at fellow hacks and Nathans, all of whom, naturally, regard it as a masterpiece.

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. But after a particularly infantile editorial conference, in which his colleagues play a version of the schoolyard game rock, paper, scissors ("cock, muff, bumhole"), he sees it as his escape route. The problem is that when he is interviewed beneath framed covers of the Weekend on Sunday Magazine (sample cover line - "Tom Paulin: haunted by rumour"), his potential employers quickly discover he doesn't know anything. Dan's one subject is how rubbish his own culture is and, tragically, it is the only culture he has. 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 quality of niceness is instead awarded to his sister Claire (Claire Keelan), a documentary-maker who vaguely registers that there is a life outside the trendy end of Shoreditch. As we leave her at the end of episode one, it seems she, too, will be seduced by Nathan's know-nothing bumptiousness.

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. You need to freeze-frame to spot a girl wearing a "Stupid Anorexic Bitch" T-shirt, or that the cappuccino comes from Grind Zero. 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.

Reviewing this programme gave me an excuse to look again at Morris's previous satires on the media, The Day Today and Brass Eye. 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 middle-aged 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. Fans of Morris as an actor will miss him in this sitcom (as do I). 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 Times

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