Stress Kills

Last night we went to Teddington Studios to watch filming of the second episode of Graham Linehan's new sitcom for Channel4.

It's called "The I.T. Crowd" and is set in the IT department of a large office building.

The odd thing is, that even after 2.5 hours of watching the show, I'm still not sure how funny it was:

The problem is that you watch a scene and laugh along - but you're used to watching at home and not necessarily laughing out loud, so the warm-up man has to tell you to laugh more loudly, and they show you the same piece of VT again and you try to laugh more, but you want to laugh less because you know what's coming and actually, it wasn't really laugh-out-loud funny all the time anyway; don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed it and will probably watch the whole series...

Where was I?

Oh, yes. It's VERY difficult to make yourself laugh over and over when you are seeing something done for the 5th or 6th time. The final scene was a long and complicated take. No jokes, as such, more physical stuff and sight gags.

Anyway, the cast were excellent. Richard Ayoade was very good indeed. Chris Morris was guest-starring in the episode we saw. He's very tall. And intense.

So, yes. Right. As I said, there were definitely some good moments in this and I'll be giving it a go when it's shown on C4 (sometime in 2006, we're told).