The IT Crowd returns to C4 this Friday
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Graham Linehan’s offbeat sitcom about the (very) small IT department of the fictional Reynholm Industries returns to Channel 4 this Friday for a third series. Much of the humour of The IT Crowd is derived from the social ineptitude of Moss (Richard Ayoade, below, left with the monitor) and Roy (Chris O’Dowd, below right, with the copy of Mustard), the two “standard nerds” who do all of the actual work and the technical ineptitude of their supervisor Jen (Katherine Parkinson, below, middle) a Head of IT who doesn’t know the first thing about computers.
Attempts by Jen to ingratiate her charges with the rest of the company and secure them dates with real life 3D humans fail miserably, as do their attempts to bring their manager’s knowledge of modern day IT up to speed – Roy jokingly tells Jen that Googling ‘Google’ will ‘break the Internet’ – she mistakenly believes him, to her eventual embarrassment during a head office meeting.
Despite being considered outcasts and social misfits by the rest of the company despite their dependence on them to keep the computers humming, the feeling is mutual; Moss and Roy have set up looped recordings of basic suggestions such as “Are you sure it’s plugged in?” and “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” on their answer phone, which seems to do the trick most of the time…
Even though the cast reads like a ‘who’s who’ of edgy comedy The IT Crowd (see, it’s not just a clever name…) features BrassEye and The Day Today star Chris Morris as Denholm Reynholm, the head of Reynholm Industries (who returns, despite his characters apparent suicide at the beginning of series two) and Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade of The Mighty Boosh fame – the first episode of the second series also saw Nicholas Burns, aka Nathan Barley from Nathan Barley make an appearance (Fielding and Ayoade also appeared in Barley as Jones and Ned Smanks respectively).
It’s a whole lot less dark and acerbic as you’d think, given the above information, although one episode concerns Moss being invited over to the flat of a German gentlemen for dinner… only to later realise that the chap is a voracious cannibal intent on literally having him for dinner.
Most of the humour is slapstick, such as when Jen vainly tries to squeeze into a pair of shoes she knows are two sizes to small for her, with painful results, or Moss’ inability to put out an office fire resulting in the extinguisher itself catching ablaze (”I’ll just put this down here… with the rest of the fire”).
You can catch The IT Crowd by logging on to Channel 4 this Friday, at 10:00pm
November 20th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Yay! I love the IT Crowd, I think the ads for the first series did it a disservice - I saw one and decided not to watch off the back of it, the got convinced it was worth it by word of mouth - by which point I’d missed 3 episodes!