The IT Crowd
Perhaps it’s the current fashion for ‘geek chic’ (urgh), but there seems to have been a rash of comedies about or for geeks recently. Well, two—-there’s Hyperdrive, and now the new Channel 4 comedy, The IT Crowd. Roy and Moss are a couple of nerds who toil in the foetid basement IT department of a huge company, fielding stupid help desk calls from the other employees (“Is the button on the side glowing? No? Then you need to turn it on… push the button…you don’t know how to push a button? Are you from the past?”). Roy is prone to rage and wearing RTFM t-shirts (yay!), while Moss is dressed by his mother and has an aerosol can of water clipped to his belt with which to spray his ear when it gets hot.
It’s written by Graham Linehan and has many of the wacky and surreal hallmarks of Father Ted, laugh-out-loud moments (Moss emailing the fire brigade when his soldering iron starts a fire in the office), and some great physical comedy. However, it has one aspect that puts me into ‘Points of View’ mode1:
1 “Why Oh Why do Channel Four persist in…Disgusted of Birmingham”. â
