Slashdot Mirror
IT Crowd On-line
prostoalex writes "IT Crowd, a comedy television show by UK's Channel 4, introduced on Slashdot earlier, has released the first episode, available on the official show site in Windows Media format." Pretty standard fare- there are nice touches like EFF stickers and an RTFM shirt scattered about. Some funny stuff, but the laugh track makes it really unwatchable for me.
wget http://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web .wmv
The link should be mms://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web. wmv, but it gets reformatted on posting making it un-clickable. Copy & paste...
Caution: May contain nuts.
No, It's been done before more than once by the BBC.
Mighty Boosh for one, Tittybangbang another. I'm sure there are more.
Man Stroke Women, being another..
/. is good for you.
works fine for me in mplayer just make sure you have the win32 codecs
Free continuous multi-player strategy http://www.holy-war.com/
Unless you count that leaked episode of Doctor Who last year.
its worth mentioning that on "newsnight review" they said that although the first ep was ok the second was better... might be worth seeing the next one... although I do hate laughter tracks.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
aha... you've failed the test. Please surrender your Geek pass to security on the way out... :) a true geek would have tried an alternate approach such as cutting & pasting and replacing mms:// with http:///
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
As I understand it very few British sitcoms use a "canned laughter" track, preferring either to film most of the scenes in front of a live audience or at the very least to play the finished episode on monitors in front of a real audience. The BBC in particular is particularly keen to use live audiences wherever possible (see the BBC Tickets page for information on how to join an audience), and whilst this particular comedy was made for Channel 4 rather than the BBC the same view is held across the entire British television industry.
You can usually tell, anyway -- canned laughter tends to be rather clinical (it starts and stops very abruptly) whereas live laughter will grow or subside as the individual audience members get the joke at different times. That said, a lot of people accuse even live audiences of being distracting or sounding artificial, and that's because the audiences are encouraged by the programme-makers to make as much noise as possible, even if a joke isn't very funny. That doesn't mean they are canned, though.
Unfortunately, it's usually difficult to find out which programmes are and which aren't as those programme-makers that do rely on canned laughter are very reluctant to make the knowledge public. And in all programmes the editors will have tweaked the laughter track a bit afterwards to smooth over glitches, cuts and re-takes.
one of the questions is, "The show's filmed in front of a live studio audience. Did you find it difficult not to crack up in front of them?"
There's another question the actress's past performance in a stage show called "Deep Throat". (Channel 4, prepare for Slashdotting!)
Future episodes that I look forward to:
#11 "The CD/DVD Tray Is Not A Coffee Holder"
#13 "The CEO Nails Roy In The Head With His Chair"
#14 "Roy Utterly Bungles His Google Telephone Interview"
#17 "Meet Your New Colleagues In Bangalore"
#21 "Moss Disguises Himself As Steve Jobs To Hit On The Receptionist"
#24 "Avoiding Another Dot-Com Bubble By Cooperating With Oppressive Regimes"
#25 "The CD/DVD Tray Is Not A Coffee Holder, Part 2"
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
mplayer mms://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web. wmv
You can add wget to a Mac, but curl is standard.
Then you probably need to get VLC to watch it, but who's counting ;)
---- I'm out of your mind!
It is hard to get a fully working mplayer with win32 codecs on x86_64, because you need to compile with -m32 for the codecs to work. Doing this means that you need all the 32-bit libraries that mplayer requires, and there are a lot of them. If you use rpm then installing the 32-bit libs as well as the 64-bit ones (for other apps) creates conflicts.
So, it's possible, but hard. It's not worth the effort for me, so I just statically compile mplayer on a 32-bit box and move it over to my desktop.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
I just install the 64-bit version, and then run a chroot that is purely 32-bit. I don't have much installed there - mainly closed-source stuff, open-source stuff like openoffice which barely builds cleanly 32-bit let alone 64-bit, and semi-open stuff like java which also doesn't do all that well on 64-bit (hello.java works fine, but good luck getting freenet/eclipse/netbeans/etc to work reliably...). Best of both worlds, although my install is using an extra few GB as a result...
Well spotted! That particular machine (along with a load of other junk^H^H^H^Hvaluable retrocomputing paraphernalia you'll see scattered around the set) belongs to my father-in-law. Talkback raided a few different people's collections for the set - watch out for more, as I think they're changing stuff around to some degree every week.
recompile mplayer with -m32 to watch that on AMD64
D'oh
(In my area, I can't even get Channel 5, let alone anything on FreeView... Not that I'm bitter, you understand.)
Anyway. Having seen it, I agree with the comments about the intrusive laughter track. But I it's no worse than we've been used to for decades; it's just that many of the more recent comedies have been brave enough to do without one, so its presence is more obvious now.
I also agree with comments about the old-fashioned feel. The 'IT department' it shows is only really about PC support, which is a far cry from many IT roles. But then, that's not the point -- the show isn't really about IT, just as Father Ted wasn't about the priesthood, Black Books wasn't really about the book trade, and Big Train wasn't about locomotives. It's just a way to provide a bland office setting, and a couple of nerds.
I found the show pleasant enough. Not particularly original, different, or inspired, but I've seen a lot worse. Still, Hyperdrive is the one I shall make sure I'm home for -- despite all the comparisons to another well-known sci-fi comedy, I think that's an original show, well made, and finding its own identity.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
That said, a lot of people accuse even live audiences of being distracting or sounding artificial, and that's because the audiences are encouraged by the programme-makers to make as much noise as possible, even if a joke isn't very funny.
... and so on ...
...]; that's quite a bombshell, so when he says it again in the second take, everyone go 'ooooooooooooh!', let's practice that shall we?", then, "Oh wait a minute -- the director's telling me he doesn't want to go for that 'Home Improvements' vibe, so please do NOT do the 'ooooh' thing."
It is, to an an extent, a directorial decision. I went to a sitcom shooting in Hollywood ("The Geena Davies Show" -- high prestige, huh?) where the warm-up guy, under direction from the production team, coached us in how to laugh. He'd say "Now remember, you're here to add to the atmosphere, and to encourage the actors, so if there's a joke where at home you'd just chuckle a bit, just exaggerate that a bit so it's a big belly laugh". For a second take, he'd say "This time around, you'll have heard the joke before, so you're not going to want to laugh quite as much -- but I want you to try and remember how it felt to see that the first time and laugh like you did that time."
Most amusingly, at one point in the story one of the characters drops a bombshell about an ex-lover or something. For take two, the warm-up says "Now we've just learned that [... whatever
There was a documentary about "the death of the sitcom" (referring specifically to home-grown UK sitcomes) recently. Studio audiences were discussed in depth. A studio shoot puts some major constraints on the production: sets have to be built like theatre sets, with a missing 4th wall, so you can only shoot from a limited number of angles. Actors have to project, so it's theatrical not naturalistic. Cameras and mics can't get in close because that would spoil the view for the studio audience.
Their big comparisom was between "The Royle Family" and Victoria Wood's "Dinner Ladies". The former -- massively popular for some reason -- is filmed almost like a fly-on-a-wall documentary, with no studio audience, and is very naturalistic. Victoria Wood wanted that kind of atmosphere in Dinner Ladies, but for some reason ended up with a studio audience. What made it look particularly old fashioned -- and VW pointed this out -- was that lines that should have been throwaway gags, then move on, had to be projected to the audience, then during the ensuing laugh, the cast had to stand there "like lemons" (her words) waiting for enough quiet to deliver the next line.