Rumours that the traditional sitcom lies bloody, battered and beyond resuscitation appear to have been exaggerated. While cultural commentators have queued to pronounce that the studio-shot, gag-based format is over, one man has been quietly smiling to himself and writing what may be comedy’s next big thing.
Graham Linehan, co-creator of Father Ted and Black Books, has just written and directed The IT Crowd, an unashamedly old-fashioned sitcom to go out in Channel 4’s prized Friday at 9pm comedy slot. Featuring two lovable nerds and the woman boss who is condemned to share their basement wasteland, this surreal and silly comedy could buck the trend.
Linehan, who professes himself bored with the whole “sitcom is dead” debate, was determined to go by the old rules. “I find all the postOffice shows that are shot with a shaky camera really dreary, with the exception of Peep Show. This is very much a reaction against all of those. But everyone seemed surprised that I wanted to do it this way.
“Let me put it like this: The Office was a non-traditional sitcom because it had to be. If you’d put those actors in front of a studio audience it would have dropped dead: they wouldn’t have been able to hear it as it was so naturalistically done. On the other hand, if you had shot Father Ted very naturalistically it would have been a disaster. It’s a question of things suiting the format.”
Ash Atallah, producer of The Office and now producer of The IT Crowd, agrees. “This show is all about jokes, and a studio audience forces you to try to be funnier. It’s like every Friday night for six weeks we were having a party for 300 strangers, and you wanted to make sure it was a good one. There’s nothing like looking people in the eye. The immediacy you get with a studio audience is petrifying.”
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On the chilly November night they recorded episode four, the audience seemed in fine form, obediently lapping up the re-takes and laughing uproariously at the over-the-top antics of Moss, Roy and Jen (played by Richard Ayoade, Chris O’Dowd and Katherine Parkinson). The presence of the edgy comedy icon Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today) didn’t hurt either. He plays the ludicrous boss Denholm or, as Linehan puts it, “he ‘s my CJ”, referring to the 1970s classic The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Morris, an old friend of Linehan’s, agreed to appear at the eleventh hour when the actor originally cast decided the comedy was too “young” for him.
Linehan’s original conception was for a comedy set in a travel agency but, as he admits, “like all first ideas, it was terrible”. This then mutated into something set in the IT department of a major firm.
“I got married,” says Linehan grinning, “so the idea of a woman coming into the life of nerds and changing it was to the front of my mind.” He was also determined to write something for Ayoade, whom he describes fondly as having “funny bones” and, it was pointed out, looks like an IT guy. Linehan’s wife Helen then suggested the title, pronounced the “it” crowd rather than the eye-tee crowd, and everything fell into place.
“The title gives you everything. The hardest part of writing a sitcom is the initial idea; the actual episodes are a piece of p***. Once you have the characters it’s just a question of getting them from A to B then back to A again. Every sitcom follows that formula. They start off and everything’s normal, something happens that upsets the normality, then they get back to normal.”
He admits that surrealism is his default mechanism and, with the gorgeously silly Ted on his CV, no one could argue with that. But he is also obsessed with Seinfeld and always striving to write something similar. “But I think of a silly idea and it just takes over. I want it to be like Seinfeld — realistic situations that accumulate to make surreal moments — but mine’s more like surreal moments that accumulate to make even more surreal moments.” He twists his face in a bemused manner: “And I do feel that that’s cheating a bit.”
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One man who is happy that Linehan is reviving the formula is the BBC creative director Alan Yentob. He weighs in to the debate this week with Imagine (Tuesday, BBC One, 10.45pm), which will delve into the current state of sitcom. “I’m pleased to see him staying loyal to the ancient form. It pleases me because it confounds all the stereotypes that the younger generation have abandoned the studio. Sitcom is precious when it works because we chart our lives through things we’ve shared and laughed at together, it can be a wonderful tonic.”
While he identifies a current crop of comedy talent that is pushing the sitcom into different formats, he feels there is still room for our oldfashioned friend. “We have a generation who are much more sophisticated about what television is about and what it can achieve,” he says, citing Peep Show, Green Wing, Help and The Thick of It. “But I think the old ways will come back and others will do them. We need to be a bit brave. We need talented people and commissioners and executives who are prepared to give space to really talented people. The BBC is very open and wants to grow the kind of sitcoms that families can watch that will work on BBC One as well as Two and Three.”
All this analysis aside, what matters is that comedy makes us laugh. The average viewer probably isn’t pausing to debate whether a laughter track should deaden his giggles. As Ash Atallah points out: “I don’t think viewers care, and nor should they. Sitcom isn’t dead, it’s like saying cars are dead because they’re different nowadays. It’s just progress. If a massive hit comes along and it’s set in a studio then, guess what, suddenly sitcom isn’t dead.”