Slashdot Mirror
'The IT Crowd' UK Sit-com
Nigsy writes "The Register reports that
"A new sitcom - set among IT workers in the dingy basement of a glamorous company - is due to arrive on the UK's Channel 4 next month. The IT Crowd, written by Graham Linehan (the scribe behind Father Ted, Black Books), will debut on the internet on 27 January, a week before its terrestrial broadcast on Friday, 3 February at 9.30pm."" Here's hoping that they have a consultant on the show to make it technically accurate.
The high-rise towers of Renham Industries are full of go-getters, success stories, and winners... apart from in the basement. While their beautiful colleagues work upstairs in fantastic surroundings, the I.T. department - Jen, Roy and Moss - lurk below ground, scorned by their co-workers as geeky losers.
"Geeky losers"? Oh dear...
<clickety clickety>
Let's just see how geeky you think the IT department is after I format your drive, toss the backup, and submit your 'candid holiday snaps' to a few dozen gay singles websites, along with your name, address, work number, and personal cell number, shall we?
Oh, hold on...
<clickety clickety>
Now the Boss' home page has been set to one of the raunchier gay singles websites, proudly displaying your picture as 'twink of the week', and stating that your interests include latex, flash photography, and small mammals. That ought to spice up the water-cooler gossip.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Black Books and Father Ted are the funniest sitcoms in recent memory...dunno if BB has had any airings in the US yet but if not, go to your favourite torrent site^H^H online DVD store and watch some. I promise it will be the funniest thing you'll ever watch. Father Ted is equally funny.
Hopefully this will be just as good.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
If past performance is any indication, it should be spot on. Father Ted was the most accurate depiction to date of the priest's life.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Drink! Feck! Arse! Girls... sorry, no girls allowed.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's a recipe for wackyness when a linux vs. bsd flamewar breaks out and the flamboyantly gay sidekick has a date with two men on the same night at the same time! Bronson Pinchot guest stars.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I think you got "geeky" confused with "fired".
Show nothing but the tops of the character's heads as they sit in their cubicles. That would be technically accurate.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Just out of interest, did you complain that Father Ted didn't accurately reflect the teachings of the Catholic Church?
You mean it didn't?!
I remember how WKRP in Cincinnati was a favorite tv sit-com in the late 70s and early 80s among those of us working in radio because it had good characters and funny situations. We could overlook that none of the djs ever used headphones, their casual approach to cueing up the next record, the unrealistic l'aissez faire style of the program director, the occasional lack of music director, an AM station looking to rock music as a viable format change (pop music's move to FM was well established at that point), the station's too much wattage for its position on the dial, there never being any powering down and up at sunset and sunrise, that the news announcer and dj shared the same microphone and studio, that full-time operation of the station was possible with an air staff of two, that Les Nessman wasn't jettisoned along with the elevator music recordings, and other compromises of authenticity or verisimilitude.
If technically accurate, the characters will be males reading Slashdot, downloading pr0n, virus-scanning Windows boxes, eating pizza, and quarrelling intensely about Perl and Python.
I predict low ratings.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Yes, because technical accuracy is what makes comedy funny. I find the technical accuracy of Dilbert hilarious. Oh wait, there is nothing technical in Dilbert at all, and yet it's still funny. I wonder how he manages that?
Canonical Anonymous Coward
Can a sig be more clever than it's creator?
grep! as! link! perl!
"That's the great thing about Catholicism. It's so vague and nobody really knows what it's all about."
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
I first got a mail from Graham Linehan back in August of last year (he'd been given my details by Cory Doctorow - okay, not much more namedropping, I promise) and I jumped at the chance to help out - Father Ted and Big Train are two of my favourite-ever TV comedies.
He sent the scripts and I eventually sent a couple of notes back with a couple of minor corrections, but I really didn't need to do much at all; the humour in the show comes from really good character comedy, and the IT aspect is (quite rightly, IMHO) just a sideline thing. Roy and Moss bear slightly more resemblance to real-world sysadmins than Ted and Dougal do to real-world priests, but only slightly. As with Ted, the joy is in exggerating the silliness of the situations.
It was in building the set that the fun really started, and I need to get Sean to participate in the thread here as I recommended him for the job of gathering as much fun techie crap as possible as well as looking after the on-set PCs. Having visited the set once, I can tell you he did a fantastic job. There are so many wonderful little references and rare bits of kit lurking in the messes (British geeks in particular are in for a treat). Plus, thanks to Danny, there are EFF stickers everywhere.
Make sure to tape/TiVo/torrent it - it's a great show, fun and silly, with lots of easter-egg treats for geeks.