The IT Crowd

Writer, director and comedy expert Graham Linehan talks about the IT Crowd and his interest in technology.

This interview took place just before Season 2 hit the screens, way back in 2007.

First off, is the show called 'The I.T. Crowd' or 'The IT Crowd'?
Well, I always say I like both. Basically, everybody hates me from a marketing point of a view because I don't care what it's called. The thing is the title works both ways; it's kind of a play on them not being the 'in' crowd, and the word or phrase is 'IT'. I don't really mind what people call it.

Didn't your wife come up with the name?
She did. The reason I'm nostalgic for the name and have a fondness for it is when Helen suggested it we were on holiday and I was toying around with ideas, trying to figure out what my next thing was going to be about. When she said it should be called 'The IT Crowd', that was the moment when I realised I had a show. Sometimes, when a title is really good, the whole package comes wrapped up with it and you know immediately what it's going to be like.

What was the difference between the first and second seasons?
Well, the second had to be done a lot faster because Chris and Katherine had other commitments, but it was strangely easier because I knew the type of storylines I wanted to avoid and what I wanted to do. We knew we wanted to make the characters less adversarial, because they spent too much time shouting across the room in Season 1. This time the storylines explore the idea of them as a gang of friends, a feeling of people hanging out, which is something I always wanted to do because Seinfeld is such a big influence on me.

It also became slightly easier because you know who you're writing for. People know the characters now, whereas the very first episode of Season 1 got a lot of stick because of all the setting-up which needed to be done. People are impatient, but you have to do it. I'm very happy with a lot of Season 1, but there was always one thing I wasn't happy with in each episode; I really think Season 2 is a real step forward, and I think it's going to be a hit!

Going back through Graham's glittering career, we get to Father Ted, a story of three dysfunctional priests living on a remote island, which ran for three series, and won an embarrassment of awards, before the tragically young death of its star, Dermot Morgan. To this day, Father Ted remains a character close to Linehan's heart - indeed, his favourite comic creation.
I always had a real soft spot for Father Ted himself. On that show, he was the one who had a lot of heart, and gave the show its emotion. Really, when you think about it, Ted's situation is very unlucky. I like almost all of my characters, but I've a real affection for Ted.

Whether through a fondness for the name Ted, or simply an inability to think of any other names, another of Linehan and Mathews' great comic creations was called Ted. Ted and Ralph, the faithful, forelock-tugging gardener and his painfully shy, adoring estate-owning boss, became an enduring feature of The Fast Show, though few realise that Mathews and Linehan created them.
Arthur and I were having a discussion about what makes a good sketch, and we were on a train and passed by a big country house, and we thought about the relationship between the master of the country house and the groundsman. It seemed like a good idea, because that was a relationship people could understand, and it hadn't really been done a lot. And I forget which one of us said it, but we decided the master of the house asks the grounds man if he liked Tina Turner, and something about that idea made us both laugh.

Linehan's next great sitcom, Black Books, was written in conjunction with one of its stars, Dylan Moran. Like Father Ted, it won a clutch of awards, including the best sitcom Bafta, and, like Father Ted, it featured three dysfunctional people thrown together by mutual dependence. The IT Crowd is based upon a similar conceit. Although the setting, in the IT department of a successful London company, is very different, the dingy basement office is populated by two computer geeks and their only moderately less feckless female boss.
The three people together, especially the thing of two guys and a girl, is a pretty powerful set up. You could possibly transfer everyone from Seinfeld onto the show. I don't know if it's intentional, it's sometimes just the way things turn out. It's the right amount for a sitcom, though. It's a manageable amount of people.

The acknowledgement of Seinfeld as an influence is one that Linehan has made throughout his career, as he confirms.
I'm very interested in the mechanics of script writing, and Seinfeld seems to be, on a structural level, the best-written sitcom ever. That's a big influence. And I've always been a huge Woody Allen fan. My writing was very influenced by him - especially his prose writing - the comic pieces that he did for the New Yorker. When I was a kid, I actually stole a lot of his material to use in debates that I was doing in class. So I guess Jewish New York comedians are pretty big on my list.

Linehan has also enjoyed occasional forays into acting, making cameo appearances in both his own shows and in I'm Alan Partridge and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Has he ever been tempted to cast himself as a lead character in one of his creations?
Oh I tried to do that with The IT Crowd, but was met with complete indifference. It was like someone farted when I suggested that. I originally thought I might play Roy, and thank God I was completely ignored, and we got in Chris O'Dowd instead. It's something I occasionally do for other people, and I do enjoy it when I do it. The problem is I couldn't make a career as an actor, because the quality of the scripts generally is so weak that I'd just spend my entire life depressed, which I'm sure a lot of actors do.

The casting of Chris O'Dowd as one of the three leads, though, was not without controversy. Having had Irish leads in his last two sitcoms, Linehan, himself an Irishman, was keen to take his new series in a different direction.
Yeah, I just wanted it to be about three people. I was getting a bit bored with the Irish thing. For instance, every time it's St Patrick's Day, I get a phone call from about eight papers asking me to write something. And it's quite annoying being defined simply by your nationality. So I thought I'd avoid it this time. But, as happens with the best laid plans, Chris came in and just blew us away. He was so effortlessly funny that I just couldn't say no to him.

This wasn't the only aspect of the show that changed. Indeed, the whole concept started as something entirely different.
It was originally set in a travel agents, and had one joke to do with being a travel agent, which was where he's on the phone to someone and he says 'No, no, I wouldn't go to France, France is very rude at this time of year'. That was really as good as it got. I couldn't think of any more jokes to do with travel agents, and I didn't want to do the research, because it bored the hell out of me. So I decided to turn it into something I was interested in, which was technology, and how it affects our lives. Oddly enough, although it's about technology and modernity, it's a very old-fashioned sitcom.

The old-fashioned nature of the show is important to Linehan. He cites a recent interview with one of the doyennes of comedy from the last 20 years.
"Victoria Wood recently said that old-fashioned style sitcoms were dead because The Office was so good, you can't go back to studio sitcoms. So I kind of hope that this is proof that that's not true.

Because The Office was successful, everyone thinks they have to do stuff on location with a shaky camera, naturalistic performances, and very black humour. And I always think that if everybody's doing one thing, it's probably an idea to do the exact opposite. So this is unashamedly old fashioned. I'm going to ask Channel 4 if they'll let me put at the beginning: 'The IT Crowd is filmed in front of a live studio audience, and contains no strong language or violence from the start'. It is a reaction against how crass a lot of television comedy has become, really vulgar and crude and unpleasant. I do think one thing that comedy should be is sweet. That's where I'm trying to hark back to, classic sweet sitcoms like Dad's Army. I don't think they're dead, I think there's room for everything.

He is also keen to emphasise the upbeat nature of The IT Crowd.
It's very cheerful, very optimistic, with people you're supposed to quite like. There's a real thing at the moment that comedy should be dark, and I just think that is the last thing we need for now, 'cos everything's so grim anyway. We're facing all sorts of extinction threats, so why have a comedy that looks at the gloomy side of things. Bit of the Blitz spirit. I call it 'singing in the underground'.

The affection with which Linehan imbues his characters is here once again, perhaps even more than normal. He admits that the two geeks, Roy and Moss, are based upon himself in years gone by.
Roy is certainly me before I got married. And Moss is me maybe when I was 16 or thereabouts. But they're the same age, which is what makes them funny.

What will the real-life IT crowd make of their depiction?
I think they'll get that it's done with real affection. It's quite like Ted in a way, in the sense that I'm certainly not out to offend anyone, and if anything it's a celebration of Geekdom in all its guises. The IT office is very like my office. Computer bits lying around, comics and CDs - a total disaster.

Writers are notoriously pessimistic about their projects, and Linehan admits to having worried about his new series in the past.
I guess every time I work on something there's always a sense of disappointment in the sense that you always think 'Well, this could have been better, or that could have been better'.

So what is his assessment of The IT Crowd's prospects?
My instincts are that it's pretty good. I don't feel that sense of embarrassment that I usually feel, but now that I've watched it a thousand times, I'm getting a little bit sick of it, and I just can't wait to get on to the second series, really. But I think it's good, I think we've done it, I think we've created something potentially pretty special.