Katherine Parkinson

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10 memorable bits from The IT Crowd

When I read that Channel 4's The IT Crowd debuted ten years ago this week, I thought, "Great! This will be a fun and easy topic to write about." As a dedicated fan of this slightly surreal, smart and sometimes slapsticky sitcom, I wouldn't need to do any research. In fact, I could talk about Jen Barber (Katherine Parkinson), Maurice Moss (Richard Ayoade) and Roy Trenneman (Chris O'Dowd), the staffers of Reynholm Industries' subterranean IT department, ad nauseam. Easy peasy, right? Not at all!

Katherine Parkinson isn't, for a change, the one chewing the most scenery in the penultimate episode of the family comedy. That's because Emma Pierson (as Jenny) spends much of the show wailing at full tilt, as one disaster follows another on what seems to be an ill-starred day to be marrying Tim. As ever, it's hard to see what purpose the 1970s setting is meant to serve, apart from to justify using some good if incoherently programmed music on the soundtrack, and as an excuse for using some tired sitcom standbys.

Opportunity knocks at Jessop Square as the family prepare for a talent show. Tony (Dan Skinner) has turned his hand to kung fu, while Brenda (Katherine Parkinson) tackles disco. All-out war breaks out on the talent front and soon the neighbours become embroiled in an alarming yet impressive dance-off, the highlight of which comes in the form of the Palmers' interpretation of Grease. Elsewhere, Emma asks her parents for a skateboard, but can she bribe enough money out of them to save up for it?

Emma Kennedy is unlucky that her childhood-memoir sitcom comes so soon after Raised By Wolves and Cradle To Grave, but it doesn't help itself by sticking to such well-worn ground: tonight, Dad (Dan Skinner) fails to dissuade Mum (Katherine Parkinson) from learning to drive, while 10-year-old Emma (the ace Lucy Hutchinson) hunts for the sender of her first Valentine. The characters are well acted, but are either familiar types or wacky wildcards, and feel secondary to the light-brown 1970s nostalgia.

The Kennedys was not, in fact, the soapy American biopic drama starring Katie Holmes as Jackie O, but a new family sitcom set in the 1970s. The opening episode was introduced by the 10-year-old Emma (Lucy Hutchison), a Star Wars-obsessed tomboy who witnesses her parents' attempts to host a newfangled, mysterious thing called "a dinner party".

Much hilarious japery is meant to ensue. But it's basically just a series of cliched jokes about the 70s. When Mrs Kennedy, played by the ever-brilliant Katherine Parkinson, says she intends to make a lasagne, there is the obligatory "pasta in it and not in a tin? That's madness!"

Of course, one of the guests turns up with a cheddar and pineapple hedgehog. There's a Space Hopper in the garden, a joke about a woman's breasts cushioning her fall and an exotic foodstuff called "garlic bread", which Emma's father tries to make out of sliced white Mother's Pride. If the past is a foreign country, this was the televisual equivalent of poking fun at Johnny Foreigner.

Still, it's a sitcom and probably doesn't aspire to be subtle or genre-busting. The Kennedys does what it says on the (pasta) tin and it's jolly and well acted. Probably worth sticking with for Katherine Parkinson alone.

The Kennedys had the tough job of following Have I Got News For You on BBC One. The Kennedys is based on the memoirs of journalist Emma Kennedy and just like Danny Baker's Cradle to Grave takes us back to the 1970s. Unlike Cradle to Grave, the family in The Kennedys isn't constantly shouting at each other and instead Emma's parents Brenda and Tony (Katherine Parkinson and Dan Skinner) are relatively demure when compared to their friends and neighbours. The opening episode sees Brenda live her aspirations of hosting the first dinner party in their small neighbourhood of Jessop Square. Brenda then instructs Tony to make a lasange, something that baffles him due to the fact that he has to use pasta that doesn't come from a tin. Tony asks friend Tim (Harry Peacock) to try and help him track down some pasta only to discover that his mate is conducting an affair. At the same time Brenda learns that Tim's girlfriend Jenny (Emma Pierson) is pregnant and hasn't told her other half yet. This perfectly sets up the comedy goldmine that is the awkward dinner party which includes Tim spending the entire meal bare-chested and his lover walking in on the meal to threaten physical violence against most of the guests. I was surprised by how much I liked The Kennedys and I think it had a certain sense of innocence that you don't see in sitcoms any more. That may have something to do with the fact that the comedy has a pre-teen protagonist in Lucy Hutchinson's Emma, with the young actress proving to be a comic revelation. Meanwhile the reliable Skinner and Parkinson were an absolute delight to watch as the social climbing parents with the former pulling off a great Welsh accent. Whether or not The Kennedys can keep the momentum of this first episode going remains to be seen but on first impressions this is a refreshingly likeable old-fashioned sitcom.

This period sitcom is based on writer Emma Kennedy's account of her 70s childhood, and is a riotous look at "new town" life through the eyes of 10-year-old Emma. Autobiographical details take a backseat to the inherent comedy of the era itself - a time when aspirational consumption collided with guileless English provincialism. In this opener, Emma's mother (Katherine Parkinson) and dad (Dan "Angelos Epithemiou" Skinner) host a gathering, Abigail's Party-style.

In the 1970s no more than three minutes was permitted to pass without sighting a gentleman's handsome chest foliage, groomed as much as his luxuriant lip warmer, and this highly chucklesome Seventies-set comedy is careful to include a historically accurate man carpet.

Written by Emma Kennedy and starring Katherine Parkinson and Dan Skinner as Brenda and Tony Kennedy, it's Brenda's aspiration to exhibit her modern sophistication by holding their street's first dinner party and to serve a classy Italian dish called 'la-san-ier'.

But this is the 1970s, when 'la-san-ier' was harder to find than the bar in a pub, blanketed by full-strength tar fags, which forces Tony and daughter Emma (Lucy Hutchison) to enlist the aid of a neighbour with the connections to provide Italian grub. This undertaking has the anxious energy of a drug deal, and what the neighbour drags the Kennedys into is a dinner party which is even better than Abigail's.