I desperately want to love The IT Crowd. It has moments of genuine sparkle and surreal invention (as it should, coming from one half of Father Ted's creators), but it generally leaves me frustrated and disappointed. The premiere of series 3, "From Hell", contained the usual assortment of misunderstandings and bizarre occurrences, mostly shoved inelegantly into the story, to a cumulatively deadening effect...The plots of most IT Crowd episodes (and this was no exception) are largely built around set-up and pay-off, with the tiniest of throwaway lines usually having some bearing on the story later. Here, IT geek Roy (Chris O'Dowd) is suddenly given an inexplicable phobia of lending people money, which thus leads to his boss Douglas (Matt Berry) forcing him to hand over £20 so he can throw it out of a window to make a point, much to Roy's inner torment...
Fair enough. But these set-ups are just so forced and graceless that you start to mentally accumulate them yourself, just to see most resolved awkwardly in the last five minutes. David Renwick is a master of this style of writing (see any episode of One Foot In The Grave), but Graham Linehan is not. It's almost like the clunkiness is meant to be part of the fun and charm, but it's just annyoing.
The geekiest IT worker Mos (Richard Ayoade) finds himself being bullied by teenage thugs on the way to work, necessitating some tutelage from Roy in verbal self-defence and later (via another strained merger of subplots), the use of Douglas' revolver to frighten his aggressors away. Elsewhere, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is unreliably informed by Roy that her builder was caught on tape peeing into sinks during a TV expose on "cowboy builders", meaning she starts lingering around her flat -- giving said builder the impression she fancies him.
It's the best subplot of the lot, primarily because Parkinson is a genuinely enjoyable comedic actress whose character is less a collection of tics and quirks – which Ayoade and Berry both suffer from terribly. In fact, fruity-voiced Berry wasn't helped this week by the return of his predecessor (screen father Reynholm, played by the superior Chris Morris.) Infamous satirist Morris is sorely missed on The IT Crowd, having provided an enjoyable amount of edge and unpredictability in series 1. Here, Berry whores out his Garth Marenghi intonations and generally acts Mighty Boosh-style insane, to the apparent delight of the studio audience.
Indeed, the laughter from the live audience (likely compiled from numerous takes, and possibly enhanced with canned laughter) is another reason The IT Crowd can grate with me. When the studio audience are practically wetting themselves at every joke, it only causes mild confusion at home that we're not laughing as much. The creators should try to make the "laugh-track" resemble the genuine studio reaction after the first take, which would more accurately reflect the experience of the TV viewers. Even if a few gags are met with resounding silence – don't boost it with a huge, fake guffaw. Just insert a few polite giggles. I'd have more respect for that.
Overall, "From Hell" was a fairly poor start to the new series. A few of the jokes hit the spot (the obvious secret camera Roy installs in Jen's home to spy on her builder, or the appearance of Hitler in Douglas' near-death experience), but most were either malnourished (the wasted bullying idea) or just too dumb (the £20 note stuck to Douglas' window) to really buy into. I'm sorry to say I sat through this very stony-faced -- not helped by the fact the characters don't have much charm or texture to them. They're fairly two-dimensional caricatures, pushed around by the writer's hand for half an hour.
21 November 2008
Channel 4, 10pm
Writer & Director: Graham Linehan
Cast: Chris O'Dowd (Roy), Richard Ayoade (Moss), Katherine Parkinson (Jen), Matt Berry (Douglas Reynholm), Chris Morris (Denholm Reynholm) & Jonathan Ryland (Gary)
