Julian Barratt plays men who take themselves seriously in rooms that do not, and he plays them so straight that the seriousness becomes the joke. He is best beside Noel Fielding, whose lightness gives the solemnity something to push against.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Julian Barratt when somebody else has the funny line. In The Mighty Boosh (2004) his Howard Moon keeps his solemnity going while Noel Fielding's Vince Noir is being lighter and more casually confident beside him, and the effort of keeping it going is the joke; we laughed at the seriousness before we laughed at any line. In Nathan Barley (2005) the same face has given up. His Dan Ashcroft slumps in a coat that looks slept in, his contempt comes out as mumbling, and he plays a man who has been tired for about eight years and has stopped expecting to be less tired.
The career is mostly one partnership. Barratt began in stand-up while at university in Reading, met Fielding on the circuit in 1997, and the two of them built the Boosh slowly: Edinburgh shows from 1998 to 2000, a radio series in 2001, then three television series between 2004 and 2007. The same years gave him his two best jobs for other writers, the Padre in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), which we scored higher than anything he has made himself, and Ashcroft for Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. Since then he has co-written and led a film, Mindhorn (2017), and taken the lead in the series Flowers (2016), neither of which we have reviewed.
What he brings that other comic actors do not is music. The music he writes and plays is funny partly because it sounds so confidently played, and the scores he wrote for the Boosh make the nonsense feel considered even when the writing is refusing to make sense. He is also generous in a way that is rare in a double act: neither he nor Fielding needs to win every exchange. The moment of his we keep coming back to is in Nathan Barley, when Nathan first quotes Dan's article back to him in admiration. We laughed, then went quiet, because the expression Barratt puts on is not comic at all. It is the face of a man watching his work be enjoyed for exactly the wrong reasons, and anyone who has had that happen will know it.
The complaint against him is fair as far as it goes. He plays the pompous, the pretentious and the mopey, and Mindhorn's Richard Thorncroft, a faded actor who once played a television detective, is another of them; Barratt has said he would like to try work that is not comic before the type sets. The Boosh, whose scripts he shares with Fielding and Richard Ayoade, also lets a weak idea run as long as a good one, and his performance has usually made the point some time before the scene ends. He told the Guardian in 2017 that he loves squalid sadness. That is a fair account of Dan Ashcroft, and a reason to hope somebody writes him a straight part and lets him keep the coat.
Biography
Julian Barratt is an English comedian, actor and musician. He is best known for his work with Noel Fielding as part of the comedy troupe The Mighty Boosh, in which he played Howard Moon and served as co-creator, writer and composer of the music.
Barratt was born on 4 May 1968 in Leeds and attended the University of Reading. The pair first performed together in the late 1990s, taking shows including The Mighty Boosh to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before the BBC radio and television series. He has also appeared in series including Nathan Barley (2005) and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), and co-wrote and starred in the film Mindhorn (2016).
