The IT Crowd

By now The IT Crowd, beginning its fourth series, has a cosy familiarity. The three main actors - four if you include Matt Berry's deranged chauvinist boss - inhabit their roles so completely that there is no longer any need for them to strain for laughs. That much you would expect from a long-running series. But even so, tonight's episode is exceptionally funny. Jen (Katherine Parkinson) has decided to apply for the job of Entertainment Officer, which involves showing sexually frustrated out-of-town businessmen the sleazier side of the capital. Only on this occasion, these honking refugees from a 1970s sitcom are sucked into a game of fantasy role-play organised by the über-geek Moss (Richard Ayoade). The moral? It's OK to get in touch with your inner nerd.

The cheesily enjoyable geek sitcom returns in fine fettle. Mega misogynist Doug gives Jen the job of entertainments manager just to shut her up, while Moz takes a break from his role-playing games to offer both Jen and Roy some predictably terrible advice about the opposite sex.

There's something about The IT Crowd that gets to us. There's something about the characters and the relentlessly positive tone that means we're drawn into it in a very unusual way. When we interviewed Chris O'Dowd for that ITV2 DJ sitcom thing a year or so ago, we kept calling him Roy. It somehow manages to be both not great and great. It has witty lines which shouldn't be. Many of the jokes are telegraphed a mile of dialogue away. It's just so gosh darned loveable.

The first episode is exactly as you'd expect (the second is better - and the one which features on the trailer - with a mean game of Street Countdown). Jen gets a new job in charge of hospitality for "business men" (a bunch of 70s sexists) while Moss organises an intense Dungeons and Dragons and Roy deals with a break-up. You know what is going to happen but that doesn't matter.

The IT Crowd is so packed with je ne sais quoi that we don't know what to make of it.

I haven't been a fan of The IT Crowd in the past, so either this funny opener to season four has climbed a couple of rungs up the comedy ladder or I was totally wrong.

The four leads all seem to tot­­ally inhabit their characters much more than they did when we last saw them 18 months ago and ­everything about it feels that much more relaxed.

A fifth series has already been commissioned which only makes sense - at only six episodes a piece, it would take four British series to make one full-length series in the US.

And that alone could be another reason why it has taken until now for this show to really bed in enough to regularly provide laughs.

Creator Graham Linehan has said he'll write the next series with a team rather than on his own, which should also keep the quality right up there.

Tonight Jen (Katherine Parkinson) has applied for the job of Entertainments Manager at Reynholm Industries, unaware that the role traditionally involves the messy business of procuring hookers for business clients. Happily, Moss (Richard Ayoade) and Roy (Chris O'Dowd) come to the rescue with some alternative amusements - and a sub-plot involving Roy's freshly broken heart that will have geeks sobbing on to their keyboards like babies.

On a special edition of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe a couple of years ago, Graham Linehan revealed some of his writing secrets: For instance at the time he was writing an episode of The IT Crowd entirely based around a random thought he'd had: 'Wouldn't it be funny if for some reason Roy was topless in the office?' When the episode eventually aired we got the answer to that age-old question: No, actually it wouldn't be particularly funny. But the same series introduced us to the insane genius of Friendface, the social networking site that's like a diseased face of friendship.

So yes, that was basically an entire paragraph to say that The IT Crowd can be very hit-and-miss. And so it is with the opener to Series 4 (a fifth series has already been commissioned.) Despite everyone advising her against it, Jen's got her heart set on being the new Entertainment Manager at Reynholm Industries, only to find out that taking Douglas' guests to The Vagina Monologues isn't what they had in mind. There's some slow patches in the episode but some big laughs as well, like Roy's mementoes of a doomed love affair, and how Jen deals with some horny businessmen who fancy a bit of role-play. And with upcoming weeks promising Moss on Countdown and a geek throwdown, the new series should be worth turning off and on again.

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Although The IT Crowd is filmed in front of a live audience, it sounds more like canned laughter and it just makes it sound dated - but then some of the jokes feel dated, too.

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As a series opener, Jen The Fredo is classic IT Crowd - scattershot, undemanding and refreshingly anachronistic, with canned laughter, cardboard sets and other sitcom trappings we've come to expect - and it's hard not to warm to a comedy that comes up with the ingenious concept of emotional closure through Dungeons & Dragons.

The IT Crowd series 4 episode 1 review #2

It's all just too depressingly normal for a series that has previously likened the smoking ban to Russian tragedy. For an opening episode, this is certainly no disaster but it's just not strong enough. Could do better...

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