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]

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?

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.

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.

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.