Spoilers. A good, solid episode all round. Once again, this was far funnier after the advert break than before it, which is quite common for IT Crowd's set-up and pay-off style. Douglas (Matt Berry) stole this episode for once, as he dated a transsexual journalist called April (Lucy Montgomery), who is writing an article on him for Richest magazine...Elsewhere, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) has been made Employee Of The Month at Reynholm Industries, but her pride over the honour soon curdles to fear, after Roy (Chris O'Dowd) reminds her she has to give a speech as part of the deal. As Jen struggles with writer's block in her office, Mos (Richard Ayoade) and Roy agree to help her out, while actually planning a cruel practical joke to embarrass her in front of her peers.
It was great to see both storylines given equal attention (in terms of quality and time), and Douglas actually worked far better away from the other characters (where he's often just the instigator of their torment, or a side-order of crazy.) Given his own story to sink his teeth into, Berry excelled -- ably supported by Tittybangbang's Lucy Montgomery, who again put her slightly masculine features and Wallace & Gromit-style mouth to good use. It was an inherently funny idea to see sex-obsessed alpha male Douglas so blasé about April's sex-change operation, and their resulting romance was amusing. The twist at the end worked nicely (Douglas had misheard April's confession "I used to be a man" as "I come from Iran"), and the climactic mano-et-(wo)mano fight between the lovers in a laboratory was good, physical slapstick.
Roy and Mos were slightly too cruel in setting up Jen for public humiliation, I thought, but their ideas to exploit her I.T ignorance were funny (every Apple Mac contains a real apple inside, Bill Gates is so-called because he owns a lot of gates, etc), and their chosen "glass hammer" story was delightful: giving Jen a small black box they claimed was "The Internet" for show-and-tell. The resulting twist to the situation when Jen took the stage was slightly predictable, but it sat well with The IT Crowd's running gag that everyone who isn't a geek is extremely gullible about technology...
Overall, while perhaps not the funniest episode and suffering from slightly limp plotting, there was enough here to keep you giggling. O'Dowd has excellent comic timing, Ayoade is more palatable this series for me, we discover what happened to goth Richmond (he got scurvy – so is that the end of him?), I always enjoy Parkinson's odd performances, Berry was able to shine on his own, and guest-star Montgomery showed more comic ability here than during a whole series of her terrible sketch show Tittybangbang.
12 December 2008
Channel 4, 10.05pm
Writer & Director: Graham Linehan
Cast: Chris O'Dowd (Roy), Richard Ayoade (Mos), Katherine Parkinson (Jen), Matt Berry (Douglas), Lucy Montgomery (April) & Tom Binns (Nolan)
