The IT Crowd

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!

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.

The IT Crowd 4.1 review

"Jen The Fredo" wasn't an especially strong start, but it was amusing at times.

The IT Crowd review

The IT Crowd was back on Channel 4 on Friday, and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or not. Isn't it just a bit... over?

The BAFTA winning sitcom returns for a fourth series with Jen applying for the post of entertainments manager in the misogynist world of Reynholm Industries. Expect the usual nerdish banter, a great little Godfather skit and the best Dungeons and Dragons sketch we've seen in a while. It's not the series' finest hour, but it's nice to have the gang back nonetheless.

Graham Linehan's brilliant celebration of all things nerdy reaches its fourth series, and as Moss details to Jen the intricacies of Dungeons & Dragons she realises that she would really like to get another job. Roy is heartbroken after becoming, as Moss describes him, Dumpo, the elephant that got dumped. As ever, Moss gets all the best lines. But Matt Berry shines as the ultra-sexist boss Renham, who admits to a group of feminists that nobody could mistake him for Gok Wan. This may not be sophisticated comedy, but it's still hilarious.

A welcome return for the Bafta-winning sitcom set in a corporation's dingy computer department. This is the start of series four. Many would have wielded the axe after a patchy debut run. The show's stay of execution was largely down to affection for writer/director Graham Linehan - the man behind Father Ted and Black Books, Chris Morris collaborator and recipient of comedy's Ronnie Barker Award last year. His creation is now worthy of those credentials, going from strength to strength. Tonight's opening episode is entitled Jen the Fredo, after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, and is crammed with knowing nods to the revered Mafia movie. Desperate to escape IT, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is made Entertainments Manager by unreconstructed boss Douglas (Matt Berry) - a man given to pronouncements such as, "I like my women how I like my toast. Hot and consumable with butter." Jen's new job means showing braying businessmen a good time - and a theatre trip to The Vagina Monologues isn't quite the ticket. Back in the bunker, geeky Moss (Richard Ayoade) is devising Dungeons & Dragons-style role-play games and heartbroken Roy (Chris O'Dowd) keeps weepily guzzling white wine at his desk. All these plot strands come together ingeniously. Most laughs come from Berry and Ayoade's more cartoonish characters, but Linehan isn't too proud to write in the odd pratfall and it's so well-acted, one scene is genuinely touching, despite its silliness.

The best theme tune on TV blasts us back into the basement of the Reynholm Industries tower for series four of the comedy they might have called Take Me to the Geek. Our favourite IT support team is out of sorts. Roy (Chris O'Dowd) is getting over a relationship break-up and gazing at photographs of himself with his former beloved - a waste of time, since he's electronically blotted her out of them all. Jen (Katherine Parkinson) has applied for the job of company ents officer, even though everyone tells her sternly, "It's not for you." And Moss (Richard Ayoade) is fine-tuning a role-play fantasy game that requires a 20-sided dice. It's good to have the trio back, even though tonight's episode doesn't show the series at its demented best: this is a sitcom that's lovable even when it isn't hilarious.