Graham Linehan

If you're not a lover of The IT Crowd, tonight probably isn't a good time to dip in. Even by writer Graham Linehan's standards, it's a clatteringly silly episode, full of whimsical touches and half-jokes thrown together in a blender and served up as a frothy comedy smoothie. But if you do like the show, the beautifully performed nonsense delivers surreal laughs: Roy goes to a gig and puts his back out dancing in the mosh pit. Meanwhile Jen has fallen in love with the keyboard player of the band and takes to singing. Plus, Douglas Reynholm takes up Spaceology.

The IT Crowd series 4 episode 3 review

After a brilliant second episode, Graham Linehan's The IT Crowd misfires with its third... As Moss himself puts it, "There is nothing remotely funny about this."

Imagine a secret club populated by Countdown winners and their beautiful Countdown-loving groupies. Now imagine Moss penetrating this geek fantasy world and you'll get the gist of this week's show. A disgruntled former champion challenges Moss, codename Word, to a gruelling game of Street Countdown, and Moss rises to the occasion. Elsewhere, Jen tries to break into one of Renham's seedy departmental meetings and Roy gets mistaken for a window cleaner, in a winning episode of Graham Linehan's celebration of all things nerdy.

The fourth series of Graham Linehan's workplace comedy continues. In tonight's episode, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) finally decides to attend the weekly head-of-department meetings she's been avoiding. She arrives to find a mysterious gathering of women in dressing gowns. Meanwhile, geeky Moss (Richard Ayoade) triumphs as a contestant on Countdown and gains access to a secret nightclub for past winners.

The IT Crowd series 4 episode 2 review #2

Series four of Graham Linehan's techno-baby The IT Crowd got off on the wrong foot for me last week. This week, however, we're firmly back in IT Crowd country!

From Steptoe and Son to Only Fools and Horses and Butterflies to The Royle Family, this hike through the sitcom archive - part of BBC Four's Fatherhood season - tells us all about the lot of beleaguered fathers on the small screen. Larry Lamb (Gavin & Stacey), Warren Mitchell (Till Death Us Do Part) and, a little oddly, Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan are among those discussing the image of fathers in television comedy in the past 50 years.

Diary of an extra in The IT Crowd

Pete gets the job as an extra in an episode of Graham Linehan's geek sitcom The IT Crowd, and here's part one of his diary...

I love the comedy writer Graham Linehan but possibly not in the way you love him. For instance, I couldn't get into Father Ted but still miss Big Train. And I much preferred his solitary flop Hippies to The IT Crowd, somehow back for a fourth series.

This is the comedy set among the systems-support team of a gleaming corporate tower and I have to admit to freeze-framing the shots of their nerdy dungeon to check whether the stacked-up board games were as classic as those in Gene Hackman's closet in The Royal Tenenbaums (they're not).

After that? Well, I laughed just once. Jen, to her louche boss: "I don't have to remind you of the independent report which described this firm as an institutionally sexist organisation." Louche boss: "Now hold on a minute, sugar tits."

The problem, I think, is with the setting. You cannot really make fun of info tech. In all my time in this office I've never met an IT-er who, as is the case in the show, worships Mordor or is into role-playing or electronically blots ex-girlfriends out of photographs, confirming his techno-wizardry but also his failure with the opposite sex. I've never been told "Have you tried switching off and then back on again?" and have always found all the staff extremely helpful; indeed I'd go as far as to say there's something quietly heroic about them. And this flattery has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a new computer system comes into operation this week and I will be utterly, uselessly in their hands.

There can't be many sitcom characters as lovably innocent as Moss, the bespectacled nerd in The IT Crowd.

The problem is that innocence so easily shades over into stupidity and then our affection becomes a different, compromised thing. Bubbles, the dimwitted PA in Absolutely Fabulous, was lovable, I guess, but part of what we loved about her was her unerring ability to grasp the wrong end of the stick. Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do Ave 'Em was also lovable in his way, but there was a whisper of contempt somewhere in the mix. In both cases, we fondly felt our superiority enlarged by their cluelessness. Moss, though, is significantly different. We're still laughing at him, rather than with him most of the time; but it's not because he's stupid exactly, just that his intelligence operates in a world several degrees to the left of the one the rest of us are in. There's something touching about how unbesmirched he is, so that even jokes about his sexual inexperience confirm his standing as a holy fool. I love him anyway - and feel more cheerful as soon as I see his face.

He was on good form in the first of the new series of Graham Linehan's comedy, sweetly attempting to be knowing and manly in order to help Roy through a bad relationship breakup, but flubbing it hopelessly because pretence of any kind is quite beyond him: "Women, eh!" he said, adopting his own weird version of a laddish posture, "Can't live with them... Can't find them sometimes". And whereas both Roy and Jen are funny in ways that you can imagine inserted into more conventional (and lesser) comedies, Moss could only really exist here. He is, in Linehan's script and Richard Ayoade's brilliantly naïve delivery, a unique comic creation. It isn't easy to back this up with evidence, to be honest. There are quotably funny lines in The IT Crowd (such as the boorish executive who is grievously disappointed to find that The Vagina Monologues isn't a sex show: "You get there and it's just women talking... it's false advertising!"). But far more often, the laughs sit in the junction between dialogue and expression. I can't think of any way to effectively paraphrase the long and delightful sequence in which Moss employs a game of Dungeons & Dragons as emotional therapy, since most of it consisted of jokes not being made and the absurdity simply being relished. But it was very funny.

When Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews created Father Ted in 1995, they breathed new life into the stereotype of the comedy vicar, a character that for too long had been suffocated by the tyrannical stranglehold of Derek Nimmo. Unfortunately Richard Curtis simultaneously came up with The Vicar of Dibley, a programme as twee and mediocre as any number of Nimmo's cassock-based comedies.

Perhaps realising that the realm of the ecclesiastical sitcom hasn't been successfully exploited in a while, acclaimed comic actor Tom Hollander has co-created Rev, in which he plays a harassed vicar at a struggling inner city London church.

Sadly, despite the talent involved - the cast also includes Alexander Armstrong, Finding Eric's Steve Evets, Peep Show's Olivia Colman and comedian Miles Jupp - this low-key comedy is a disappointment. The blame must lie with writer James Wood, who also wrote the similarly underwhelming media satire Freezing, in which Hollander's ferocious comic performance was the sole highlight.

The jokes in Rev are sparse, weak and principally based around the supposedly amusing conceit of a vicar acting in ways you wouldn't expect. So, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, played with amiable anxiety by the always watchable Hollander, smokes, drinks, swears and enjoys sex with his wife.

So, I imagine, do a lot of modern priests - indeed, a group of them are credited as technical advisors - but that doesn't mean the concept is funny in itself. Father Ted admittedly employed similar material, albeit far more inventively than Wood does.

The opening episode takes underpowered swipes at middle-class pretentions and hypocrisies when Smallbone faces a moral dilemma over the sudden rise in church attendance due to a glowing Ofsted report on a local church school. But the episode just dawdles along and not even Hollander's bumbling charm can save it. Rev, like many sitcoms before, may improve as it goes on, but there's precious little here to encourage you to find out.