Cast: Chris O'Dowd (Roy), Richard Ayoade (Moss), Katherine Parkinson (Jen), Matt Berry (Douglas), Amelia Bulmore (Helen Bewley) & Kirsty Wark (Herself)
Jen has a "bad bra day", forcing Moss to create the perfect undergarment…Graham Linehan's comedy always works best when it takes a small comic idea and expands upon it, having it grow to an outrageous extreme…
The focus of Smoke And Mirrors is on Jen's bra, which amusingly makes her lose concentration during important business meetings. Moss (Richard Ayoade), who has a freakish intolerance for "bra-speak", takes it upon himself to invent the world's most comfortable bra (The Abracada-Bra) and market it on TV's Dragon's Den.
While a difficult bra is one of those great left-field premises for comedy, it just can't sustain 30 minutes -- so there's a weak first half about Roy (Chris O'Dowd) unwittingly wearing lipstick as the result of a Stag Night prank. It's an idea that reaches a resolution after 10 minutes, apparently added just to kill time, as it has no ultimate purpose to the episode.
Once the bra plot kicks into gear, Smoke And Mirrors perks up significantly, only to collapse when the episode lurches towards a bog-standard parody of Dragon's Den. Linehan also continues to be heavily influenced by reality this year, with Moss essentially reprising the moment Guy Goma was interviewed by BBC News, who thought he was an online music expert.
Along with the German cannibal episode a few weeks back, the Goma-inspired moment between interviewer Kirsty Wark and Moss seems to indicate The IT Crowd's brand of geeky absurdity is having a tough time competing with real life!
As usual, there are some good lines ("... if you type 'google' into Google, you can break the internet") and Katherine Parkinson is always delightful to watch. I particularly like the vagueness surrounding what Reynholm Industries actually do ("… that product that has something to do with our company") and Jen's outburst of "my tits are hot!" when Moss' super-bra overheats.
Sadly, a few good moments aren't enough to save an uninspired episode. Smoke And Mirrors fails to develop its one-joke idea into any interesting areas, so just shoehorns in a weak "training montage" and a climactic Dragon's Den parody.
The IT Crowd works best when its minor plots and throwaway gags are intricately interwoven throughout the episode, leading to a satisfying pay-off in the last 5 minutes. But there's none of that here. It's just a silly idea about a "living bra" -- that goes nowhere. For an episode that begins with "sexual tensions" as its theme (a gold mine for comedy), Smoke And Mirrors is very disappointing.
21 September 2007
Channel 4, 10.00 pm
