Remember when you first heard Calvin Harris's 2007 hit Acceptable in the 80s and thought to yourself how amazing it would be if Harris wrote a sitcom with Irvine Welsh about electronic dance music? And then remember thinking that the only way that could happen would be if Jay Z and Will Smith agreed to produce it? Well, it's happening.
HBO – the visionary network behind modern parables The Wire and Boardwalk Empire – has announced it is in the process of developing Higher, a new half-hour comedy series "set in the world of electronic music," clearly concluding that the next logical step on from crack dealers in Baltimore and bootleggers in prohibition-era Atlantic City is a kid sitting alone in his mum's house in Romford listening to the same kick drum for hours on end and occasionally going out to buy clothes pegs just to "get out of the house".
While, on the face of it, this may not seem like the most fecund comedy ground, as DJs ourselves, we are well aware that the world of dance music is a rich tapestry of egomaniacs and self-oblivious man-children that is ripe for mockery. We have tried to mine this particular seam of comedy for a couple of years now, first undermining our peers by retweeting their bitter, mundane gripes on our Twitter account, @DJsComplaining, then drawing on our own hard-won experience to write cutting think pieces about the EDM scene. And we have remained completely, spinelessly anonymous – because sharing a backstage area with a socially impaired knob-twister is often awkward enough even without the added frisson of them knowing you've spent 500 words and several days of your life lampooning them in the national press.
Saying that, Harris clearly operates in a different sphere to the likes of us, and while details about which aspects of EDM Higher will focus on are scarce, we can only assume that The Most Highly Paid DJ in the World™'s input to the project will be somewhat influenced by his own lifestyle. Harris probably slaps together his latest chart-topper on his iPad in between sips of ambrosia and bouts of clay-pigeon shooting, occasionally sloping off to wistfully roam his grounds on his gold-plated penny farthing. Let's hope, then, that the presence of Welsh – a man whose heart remains closer to the gutter – will bring things back down to Earth. Welsh was reared in a different world of dance music altogether: a world of pills and pubs, of minicabs and chilli sauce; a world where ketamine was what you gave a horse and Traktor was what you used to get away from the horse once you'd given it some ketamine.
We don't know yet quite how these two very different world views will meet on the page, but with Welsh's keen eye for hallucinatory nightmare and Harris's renowned comedic prowess, Higher just might be the laugh-a-minute romp that the EDM world has been so desperately waiting for. Perhaps.
