Graham Linehan’s basement sitcom is old-fashioned in shape, three walls and a live audience, and at its best it is the finest farce British television has managed this century. The first series is thin and the last stretches its ideas.
Graham Linehan, who wrote Father Ted, puts two computer technicians in a basement under a large company and gives them a manager who cannot turn a computer on. That is the whole idea, and The IT Crowd runs it for twenty-four episodes across four series, from 3 February 2006 to the summer of 2010. It is a studio-audience sitcom of the traditional kind: a set with three walls, doors people run through, laughter you can hear. About a third of it is very funny indeed, most of the rest is funny, and a handful of episodes are lazy. That is a better ratio than most sitcoms manage and we recommend it without much hesitation.
The cast is the reason. Chris O’Dowd plays Roy Trenneman as a man whose one ambition is to be left alone, slouched in his chair, aggrieved by every phone call, capable of enormous effort in the service of avoiding effort. Richard Ayoade’s Maurice Moss has a side parting, thick glasses and a way of saying every line as if reading it off a card he has just been handed; he never understands why the studio audience laughs, and the audience laughs harder because of it. Katherine Parkinson’s Jen Barber has bluffed her way into managing them and keeps bluffing, and Parkinson plays the panic just under the confidence. The three of them have the timing of an act that has been together for years.
Above them, Chris Morris plays Denholm Reynholm, a chief executive who runs the company on slogans, sudden rages and team-building exercises nobody asked for. Every scene he is in is a short sketch and nearly all of them land. Matt Berry, as Douglas Reynholm, joins later and brings a voice too large for the building and appetites to match. Berry can make the word “Jen” sound like a threat and a proposition at once.
Dennis De Groot’s basement is the show’s fifth character: strip lights, stacked monitors, a whiteboard nobody wipes, cables hanging from the ceiling, everything in grey and beige. Upstairs is glass and white and empty of anything useful. Linehan directs his own scripts and knows when to hold the shot after a line rather than cut away from the laugh. The live audience will strike some viewers as dated. It did not strike us that way, because the laughter is earned; nobody is being told when to laugh, they are simply laughing.
The show is at its best when it stops being a workplace comedy and becomes a farce. The best-known example, an evening at the theatre for the three of them, sets up four small lies in its first five minutes and then lets them meet. We laughed until it hurt, and then we went back and watched it again to see how it was built, and it is built like a clock. Every misunderstanding pays off, nothing is wasted, and the last minute is the funniest.
It is not always that good. The first series leans on the oldest joke about computer people, the one about not having girlfriends, and some episodes settle for it. Jen is written as stupid one week and sharp the next, depending on what the plot needs. The fourth series takes single ideas that would have made a fine ten minutes and stretches them to thirty. Most critics have landed somewhere around the middle on this show; we are a little warmer than the consensus because the good episodes are so good and there are only twenty-four to sort through.
Against Father Ted it comes off second, and that is no disgrace. Both use the same machine: a small trapped group, one idiot, one schemer, one who wants a quiet life. Father Ted did it on an island and its world was stranger; this does it in a basement and its lines are more quotable. Two decades on, people still say the tagline to each other in offices, which is more than most sitcoms leave behind.
Watch two at a time, in order, and forgive the first three episodes their nerves. It carries a 15 for language and one or two things we will not describe.
