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.
Slashdot is my sitcom
Thats no laughter track, thats just how us Brits laugh!
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
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.
The really interesting thing about this is that the show won't be broadcast on Channel 4 until next Friday. I believe this is the first time a UK broadcaster has made a programmes available online before broadcast.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
A realistic 'IT Crowd' would just shows fat, oily, pimply, hairy geeks. Fortunately Smell-O-Vision didn't become a hit, or the 'IT Crowd' would have been, literally, an olfactory bomb.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Have you tried turning it off and then on again?
works fine for me in mplayer just make sure you have the win32 codecs
Free continuous multi-player strategy http://www.holy-war.com/
I just watched it on my iBook so there doesn't seem to be a total Windows dependence - it is Windows Media, though, so you'll need the appropriate software to play it.
;-]
There was the semi-official Flip4Mac being waffled on about a few weeks ago, I used the prehistoric Mac port of Windows Media Player instead. I don't think I've ever seen it work for a full 25 minutes or so before.
Anyway, trying to avoid sounding like a true nerd and switching off the white noise: the comedy itself. It was pretty funny, and was obviously more of the surreal Father Ted line than some razor-sharp nerd-specific humour - expect to see a vastly exaggerated version of reality, with the workers attempting to maim and/or kill the IT staff instead of some nerd-only Perl puns...
I do think I'm going to have to try the speech recognition thing on my non-boss, though...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Yes, because the world of IT staff is such a limited premise compared to the world of a book store owner, for example.
its a sitcom. it isnt thaat bad its cute and gives you that nice sitcom escapism feeling. its funny too
Its by the same writer as father Ted and the producers of the office. Father Ted had 4 main characters and lasted for several series.
Intense focus in a sit-com isn't bad, lets face it this is normal, low number of core characters and sets with occasional colour add ons.
Fraser - 3 sets (appartement, Studio, coffee shop) - 5 main characters
Cheers - 1 set (bar) depending on series between 4 and 6 characters
Friends - 2 sets (appartement & coffee shop) - 6 characters
Office - 1 set (Office) 4 main characters
Father Ted - 1 set (the house) 4 main characters
So Sitcom history seems to say that you almost NEED an intense small group of sets and characters.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.''
It tries to play on the sterotype of the it business as well as trying to be trendy. It sucks, red dwarf is much better.
.. then you're not much of a geek.
I'm watching it right now with Mplayer (Slackware 10.1)
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.
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
I think this show was and is going to be very well done. It will have to exaggerate concepts and situations for the average user. I do think that "Nerds" or "Geeks" will find that the hummer is to played out for most issues but we are a select group of people and not the main audience target.
I work in IT doing support for an Internet provider and I am willing to bet that they are going highlight most issues that I deal with on a daily basis. Granted, they are never that extreme but who cares. This may even show the average user that they need to relax before calling in. I think that capturing what the IT world does on film will be very hard but it looks like this show is on its way to doing just that.
So Sitcom history seems to say that you almost NEED an intense small group of sets and characters.
If it doesn't have a small group of sets and characters... Then it's not a situational comedy, is it? It's either a sketch show, or standup comedy, or satire, or a late-night show, or a physical comedy show. Sitcoms have a few, recognizable, main characters, perhaps some recurring characters, and a small number of sets, because that's what makes it a sitcom. There are plenty of sitcoms that were totally unfunny, "despite" having a small group of characters and sets. There are also shows that are funny, but not sitcoms; or that stretch the format a bit (for example, to include storylines that span multiple episodes with characters actually developing/changing their personality; or as in Extras have the same characters, but in different - if similar - situations).
In the same vein, succesful novels are often more than 30 pages. Whereas, surprisingly, many succesful short stories are less than 30 pages!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Are all the episodes going to be online, or just the premiere?
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 wasn't that bad. If one looks at it as humor, and not with an ultra-critical eye, it is pretty funny (if a little overacted).
A Passionate Independent Musician
Yeah, I agree. It only really made me chuckle a few times throughout the episode, and there was far too much shouting throughout that made everything looks rather forced and wooden.
Richard Ayoade (the black guy, Moss) is an apalling actor. I know he's meant to look awkward and have a nerdy voice, but he comes across as some kind of robot. He was in a very weird show on Channel 4 a while back called Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, and he was presumably in that because all the acting was *meant* to be terrible.
The other 2 are unconvincing. The Irish guy is just a cad, and the woman is way too cute to be in a basement with them; she'd be out of there in 5 seconds in real life.
What's weird is the enormous amount of effort channel 4 seem to have put into advertising this very average work - I've seen billboard and TV ads around.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
At least it didn't come with commercials.
[Insert Laugh Track Here]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
Today, it is fashionable to make comedy shows without an audience. However, this is not because there is anything wrong with a laughter track. Here, for example, is a list of successful English shows with laughter tracks.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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...
You mean a bunch of nose snort laughs?
Moss: "She's a little bit weird, to say the least."
*sprays water on his ear*
Roy: "What's that?"
Moss: "Oh, just water. Sometimes I get a hot ear and this helps cool it down."
I am affected by the same condition! I keep a spray bottle filled with water on my desk when my ears get too hot.
Their IT manager knows more about computers than mine ;_;
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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.
You're right - Graham Linehan should go back to his more successful and hyper-realistic sitcoms like Father Ted, Black Books, Hippies and Big Train.
And he co-wrote the first series of Black Books, as well, which had a core cast of three.
One thing that may be unfamiliar to American readers, is that the usual model of British TV sit-coms is that a series lasts for just six or eight episodes, very tightly scripted (normally by just one or two writers) and concentrated: the best of them will fit as many laughs into three hours of TV, as a typical American sitcom will get in a 26 episode run.
Short series mean there's less danger of ideas getting stale; on the other hand, a new programme can't afford to spend more than one or two episodes setting up the situation - with a longer season you could have filmed ten episodes before the writers or cast have really hit their stride, but that's just not an option for a producer in the UK.
Here's an interview with the writer/director, Graham Linehan, published yesterday:2 006/01/28/btvline28.xml
http://telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/
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.
Sorry, but that's exactly what it means (that the laughter is canned, even if it's a different kind of can.
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