A SATIRICAL television series that mercilessly attacks London’s trendier-than-thou, gadget-obsessed “creative” community has outraged business and community leaders in the district where it is set.

Nathan Barley, on Channel 4, is the latest piece of comedy terrorism from Chris Morris, whose previous coups have included a mock documentary on paedophiles and a programme which successfully urged MPs to condemn cake, an imaginary drug.

Barley, its brain-dead hero, is a painfully hip 26-year-old trustafarian who has registered his website in the Cook Islands of the Pacific so he can call it trashbat.co.ck, which he describes as an “online urban culture dispatch”.

Barley calls himself a “self- facilitating media node” and works as a DJ, screenwriter, film-maker and website designer, but is continually revealed to be nothing more than a hilariously impressionable and self-obsessed fashion victim.

He and his baggy-jean wearing circle pedal around the London district of “Hosegate” on collapsible BMX bikes and toy tractors, babbling into phones that supposedly open to reveal “MP3 decks” and other unlikely gizmos. They continually patronise the ordinary working people they come across by talking in rappers’ patois. Barley addresses his Asian newsagent with the phrase “Yo, ma nigga”, for example.

But the setting is easily recognisable as Hoxton, in Shoreditch, east London, where Britart aficionados, fashionistas and internet designers have multiplied uncontrollably in open-plan offices, lofts, old factories and warehouses.

The booming business community there is now concerned that the portrayal of the typical Hoxtonite as being too busy programming their iPod or thinking about their piercings to worry about anyone else will have a detrimental effect on the crucial grant aid needed to continue the area’s regeneration.

The programme, shown on Friday nights, is already picking up the same cult following that programmes such as Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen garnered before bursting into the national conscience. It means that Barley could do for London’s uber-trendies what Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard did for chavs.

Barley and his inane friends work on a style magazine called Sugar Ape and are shown viewing and even placing internet bets on Russian tramps forced into street races on the internet. Barley uses baffling catchphrases such as “it’s well Jackson” or “totally Mexican” to express approval at his latest gadget or website feature.

He was originally based in Notting Hill, west London, as the fictitious star of a programme on a bogus listings website called TVgohome launched by writer Charlie Brooker, who has co-scripted the new series with Morris.

For the series Barley has moved his business to “Hosegate” where he and his fellow “media idiots” drink “zappuccinos” and frequent a pub called the Nailgun Arms. Locals believe it is based on the Bricklayers’ Arms in Shoreditch which has a restaurant where “lady boys” serve Thai cuisine.

The “victims” of the programme, the real-life media types it parodies, say their world is nothing like that, but, worryingly, they share a number of traits with the characters. Some have even dubbed the area south Hackney to distinguish it from the housing estates and street markets elsewhere in Hoxton.

Jeremy Gilley, a former Royal Shakespeare Company actor, rides to his office in a converted brewery on a skateboard. He has spent six years making and promoting a film celebrating world peace day, begging free plane trips and borrowing camera equipment to set up his website, peaceoneday.org.

Gilley, 35, said: “This is a great area for creative people. We all enjoy working here but we get on with our work.” Mark Herring, 40, runs talentlab.co.uk, a branding agency that re-markets firms of City accountants using Radiohead lyrics such as “no alarms, no surprises”, and is as proud of his Sony Ericsson K700i camera phone as Barley is of his Wasp T12Speechtool (“it’s well weapon”, says Barley).

Herring said: “They have taken the idea of Shoreditch and blown it apart. We like to think we are not the idiots; the others are. Already the language — the ‘it’s well Jackson’ — is beginning to creep in, but hopefully this will be the end of grown men going around on BMX bikes.”

Channel 4 and the writers defend their character as representative of a new social species. Morris said: “Hoxton types are just a subset of Nathans. Before writing, we became Barley twitchers, spotting Nathans in Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, and Penzance.

“Hosegate is not Hoxton — it’s a fictional construct in response to the fact that Nathans are absolutely bloody everywhere. This is worse than bird flu.”

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