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Well, now there’s nothing in my room. This monitor is balancing on this PC, and this keyboard is on my lap as I slouch against the wall on the floor, wearing a suit for some reason. The room is shaking with the bass of Cat Power (still great), Sufjan Stevens (still amazing) and Sondre Lerche (new! Awesome!), reproduced with extraordinary fidelity and volume by my £25 surround sound system, which is in a heap on my bed, underneath a lamp. I have, officially, moved out of this place.

lap

I’m not feeling too bad about the thunderous noise because Rich is out and the guys in the flat below are playing bland reggae loudly anyway. Rich has dubbed them Jonnie Potsmoker and Smokey McPot, and having watched Dude Where’s My Car on a whim the other day, I now get the reference. We’re not going to miss these guys. Although now I’ve tried this cinema-volume music thing, I may miss that. The better half of Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us sound amazing like this.

[Pause for the vocals-only bit I can't help but sing along to]

I’m hearing a pretty muted or negative reaction to Graham Linehan’s (Father Ted, Black Books) new sitcom The IT Crowd from, like, the three people whose opinions I’ve heard. This is wrong! It’s fantastic. The second episode more than the first, perhaps – some of the actors seemed to ham it up a bit in the first, Chris Morris included, but I was still won over by it.

itcrowd

It’s not really a satire of an IT department, any more than Black Books was about a book shop or Father Ted was about being a priest. Like them, it’s an elaborately orchestrated farce of secrecy, politeness and bureaucracy with a twist of the surreal. What distinguishes it from inferior comedies like The Green Wing is its reluctance to write any of its characters off: none of them are dehumanised charicatures, all of them are at least somewhat likeable, and for me sympathy is essential for humour. I can’t laugh at people I entirely hate.

What made me use the word ‘fantastic’ instead of great, apart from a reluctance to resort to the absurdly over-used sentence “It’s great,” is that I keep suddenly thinking of a particular scene and cracking up – the only real litmus test for a sitcom. It’s the fire scene, but not specifically the:

Moss: (writing an e-mail in front of a fire) ‘Fire exclaimation mark. Fire exclaimation mark’

That they picked out for the preview clip – it’s the line before.

Moss: ‘Dear sir or madam. I am writing to inform you of a fire.’ (backspacing) No, no, that’s too formal.

I’m skirting the real subject of this post, mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to talk about it. But it’s happening soon, it’s both figuaratively and literally a dream come true, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m no longer under contractual obligation to shut the hell up.

 
 

Jason L: You Brits and your actually-good sitcoms. Now I need to hunt that down online - if it comes to the US, you just know it'll go through the same machine as The Office.

Bobsy: Worse: think Coupling.

Also, Scrubs is awesome. Never forget.

FinalSin: It's got a lot of charm, particularly when you compare it to higher-budget comedies. The thing is, sometimes the jokes seem to laboured, and too focused on 'Ho Ho! They're geeks! Yes!'

Though last night's was sublime.

Tom Hardy: The show's fine - it's just that somehow it seems as though there's some terrible curse crippling several of the jokes per episode. As though there was phenomenal communication difficulty between the writer/director, the editor and the actors. In particular, Moz's mug, this week. The payoff was good, but the setup seemed so horribly elongated and laboured that you couldn't really focus on its later achievements.

Also, the woman is terrible. Otherwise, I like it, if only for the Messigo's joke.

Jason L: The DVD set came out and they apparently did incredibly ace 1337 subtitles: http://z1.invisionfr... ...topic=5332

 
 

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