The IT Crowd

Most of you have probably heard of Channel 4’s new sitcom The IT Crowd already. The first two episodes were on TV last night and they’ve been available for download from Channel 4’s website since Monday. For those of you haven’t seen it yet…

It’s bollocks!

It’s like they scraped together all the jokes that were too awful to use in Coupling or Friends, mixed them up with some godawful over-actors, threw in the media’s usual bumbling-scientist sterotypes and added the screamingly painful inspiration behind Louise from Two Pints… The only actual references to IT in the first two episodes feel like the scriptwriters googled “geek stereotype joke” and tossed in a couple of the resulting keywords at random.

But there’s a picture of His Noodliness in the background as well as all sorts of mad IT stuff, so it’s not all bad. The office background junk actually looks a lot like my previous office did when it just housed two blokes. Set-dressers 5/5, Scriptwriters 0/5.

If you missed it, thank His Noodly Grace and avoid this show at all costs. Actually, no. Download the first two episodes from the Channel 4 video archive and see this abomination that is modern British television in all its shining glory. Then delete them and never let it defile your precious hard drive again!

Update 6th Feb 2006: Advice on geek culture and some props for the set dressing was provided by boingboing.net writer and bona fide tech geek Cory Doctorow and Danny O’Brien of digital freedom campaigners, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which explains the quality of background props. Read Cory’s post from yesterday about The IT Crowd – diplomatic silence as to the actual quality of the show, hmm?

Update 8th Feb 2006: Nope, Cory’s put up a new post and actually finds the show hilarious. Aaargh! I should probably point out, I did actually laugh maybe twice per episode – the screensaver moment was genuinely funny – but only twice in a show where the canned laughter kicks in about every 4 seconds…

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