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.

Comments

meh ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is my sitcom

Laughter Track

[dougjm]

Thats no laughter track, thats just how us Brits laugh!

Re:Laughter Track

[david.joy]

Firstly, "The Prisoner" wasn't a BBC show. It was made originally by Granada for ITV and as far as I know they still own it. But in fact the BBC has brought back "The Prisoner" -- it bought the rights and reran every episode at the beginning of 2005 on BBC 4. See the BBC 4 Prisoner web site. I can't speak for BBC America and so on as that is not strictly the BBC (it's part of a commercial subsidiary, BBC Worldwide).

Getting back on topic, tbe purpose of a classical sitcom is not to portray real life accurately. If it did, it would be terribly boring. You're welcome to make a case for drama based on a geek lifestyle -- and it might well work, with a little creative licence. However, I do think that there is an amusing comic premise in the portrayal of geeks as people who are able to relate to technology more easily than to other people. If the series carries it off well then both geeks and end users should be able to recognise and empathise with the characters. After all, it's a stereotype that holds true in many cases.

Re:Laughter Track

[david.joy]

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.

dont wanna stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

wget http://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web .wmv

Online before broadcast

[NickFitz]

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.

Re:Online before broadcast

[slashknott]

No, It's been done before more than once by the BBC.

Mighty Boosh for one, Tittybangbang another. I'm sure there are more.

Re:Mac attack

[BasilBrush]

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

don't be a troll

[rdx38]

its a sitcom. it isnt thaat bad its cute and gives you that nice sitcom escapism feeling. its funny too

Re:Its too much!

[MosesJones]

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.

If you can't get Mplayer working..

[schon]

.. then you're not much of a geek.

I'm watching it right now with Mplayer (Slackware 10.1)

Re:Thank god it's just audio visual

[Bazzalisk]

It's a weird thing, all the geeks I know who are noticeably fat spent a significant time in America. Is there something about the USA that causes its geeks to become overweight?

Use mplayer.

[cs02rm0]

mplayer mms://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web. wmv

Well done

[gomaze]

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.

Mac - no stream

[Crisses]

curl -O http://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 ;)

Tough crowd, tough crowd...

[ursabear]

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).

Re:Great

[TubeSteak]

At least it didn't come with commercials.

[Insert Laugh Track Here]

Re:Unplayable here (was: Re:dont wanna stream?)

[MentalMooMan]

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.

Re:Thank god it's just audio visual

[saskboy]

"Is there something about the USA that causes its geeks to become overweight?"

That would be "Burger King" you're wondering about.

What's wrong with a laughter track?

[JackDW]

Why is a laughter track a bad thing? Bearing in mind that the laughter you hear on this show is the sound of the studio audience, watching the show as it was recorded, and not "canned".

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.

• Monty Python's Flying Circus
• Fawlty Towers
• Red Dwarf
• I'm Alan Partridge

Re:Retro Computing

[yoz]

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.

An interview with the writer

[Bob[Bob]]

Here's an interview with the writer/director, Graham Linehan, published yesterday:
http://telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2 006/01/28/btvline28.xml

Re:If you want to have technobabble, get it right!

[Jaseoldboss]

Who spotted the reference to Mark Russinovichs blog on the Sony rootkit?

It's never safe to unload a driver that patches the system call table since some thread might be just about to execute the first instruction of a hooked function when the driver unloads; if that happens the thread will jump into invalid memory.