Graham Linehan

I desperately want to love The IT Crowd. It has moments of genuine sparkle and surreal invention (as it should, coming from one half of Father Ted's creators), but it generally leaves me frustrated and disappointed.

The set-ups are just so forced and graceless that you start to mentally accumulate them yourself, just to see most resolved awkwardly in the last five minutes. David Renwick is a master of this style of writing (see any episode of One Foot In The Grave), but Graham Linehan is not. It's almost like the clunkiness is meant to be part of the fun and charm, but it's just annyoing.

The laughter from the live audience is another reason The IT Crowd can grate with me. When the studio audience are practically wetting themselves at every joke, it only causes mild confusion at home that we're not laughing as much.

It's hard to think of an office-based comedy more different from The Office than this. Graham Linehan's absurdist sitcom feels nearer in spirit to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin: off in a mad world of its own, yet uncomfortably familiar, even at its maddest. The IT Crowd even used to have its own 'CJ'-type figure in Denholm Reynholm, the overbearing boss of Reynholm Industries played by Chris Morris. Although Reynholm jumped out of a high window in the last series, his playboy son Douglas (Matt Berry) shows every sign of carrying on the family name (plundering the pension fund, putting flakes of gold in the drinking water, etc) and more or less takes over tonight's very funny opening episode. That leaves our IT-department trio of geeky Moss, lazy Roy and uptight Jen slightly overshadowed. But the sweet scene where Moss and Roy try some role-play to help Moss deal with park bullies just about makes up for it.

Returning for a third series, Graham Linehan's office-bound sitcom seems to have been given a much-needed reboot. The swipes of cruel humour have been toned down in favour of the flashes of absurdist comedy Linehan perfected in Father Ted and Black Books. It's a good move, enabling Linehan to make the most of his superb cast, including Chris O'Dowd, Katherine Parkinson, Matt Berry and Richard Ayoade.

Version 3.1 of Graham Linehan's popular sitcom brings with it the same ill-fitting characters, the same gags and the same vague feeling that you really need to get out more.

Compared to the funnier and far cleverer Big Bang Theory, which returned to E4 this week, this is pretty desperate stuff. And never more so than in the disastrously ill-judged scene that sees Moss arming himself with a gun. What on earth were they thinking?

Graham Linehan's always-enjoyable comedy returns for a third run, but as before, it still leaves me yearning for the vibrancy and wit of his Dylan Moran collaboration, Black Books. Still, I'll take what I can get (and compared to Clone, The IT Crowd looks like vintage Galton and Simpson). Roy, Moss and Jen are still stuck in the basement, attending to the IT needs of Reynholm Industries, while Douglas (Matt Berry) does his level best to run his father's company into the ground.

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