The IT Crowd

While I was gone…

9 November 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

…the following exciting things happened:

  • Happy Hour and Eamonn Holmes’ game show The Rich List appear to have been cancelled. It’s not official yet, though. That’s mighty impressive for our Eamonn, since Fox only aired The Rich List once.
  • 20 Good Years has also been shot in the head and buried in the back garden where, hopefully, the neighbours won’t find it. Surprisingly, for a show clearly intended for the over-60s market, the reason for its execution was lack of success in the 18-49 demographic.
  • The wonderful Dexter has been picked up for a second season. Yey!
  • Studio 60 has been picked up for a full season. Half a yey: it’s getting better, but it’s still not there yet, as far as I’m concerned. Find some more targets to be funny about except Christians, Aaron Sorkin. When even the characters start complaining that the show’s sole target for satire is Christianity, you know you need to start thinking about other things to avoid becoming a one-note show.
  • John Corbett is to appear in a US version of the Beeb’s Manchild. That appears to be a slight format change, since the original, which starred Nigel Havers, Anthony Head, Don Warrington and Ray Burdis, was about men in their 50s.
  • David Tennant is ‘cagey’ about whether he’ll commit to another series of Doctor Who after the next one.
  • British actress Lena Headey is to play Sarah Connor in Terminator spin-off series The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Really, you just can’t move for Brits in US shows these days.
  • Men in Trees has been picked up for a whole season and given Six Degrees’ time slot. I knew I should have waited till the fifth episode before dropping it. Damn. The latter show isn’t coming back till January at the earliest. Seeing as I stopped watching it in the middle of the last episode, thanks to near-terminal boredom, that’s not too upsetting.
  • Jericho is to emulate Lost and take a 12-week hiatus before returning in February. The aim is to avoid re-runs, which can spell death in the ratings for serialised dramas.
  • The Nine, which I said from the beginning was rubbish but no-one else seemed to believe me, is getting duller by the week and looks like it’s not long for this world.
  • NBC is to remake The IT Crowd.
  • Martin Scorsese is to make television shows. Maybe.

It’s all go when I’m away, isn’t it?

The burgeoning trade in directors’ commentaries, real or otherwise

16 August 2006 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Time was, directors’ commentaries on DVDs were an optional extra. You knew you had a classy DVD if there was a commentary.

Nowadays, if you put out a DVD, an investigative hearing will be convened if you don’t have a commentary track, no matter how bad.

Commentaries are even springing up before the DVDs come out; you can download the Doctor Who commentaries and Battlestar Galactica commentaries the night the episode airs then list to them while you watch a recording of the show.

But there’s also an odd trade growing in fake commentaries.

Continue reading “The burgeoning trade in directors’ commentaries, real or otherwise”

Watch some shows for free over on Sci Fi Pulse: Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, The Amazing Screw-On Head

14 July 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

US cable network The Sci Fi Channel is giving us all (for some reason, they haven’t banned British viewers like they normally do) the chance to watch a couple of TV shows streamed over the Internet in not very high quality. Hoozah.

The first is Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a Channel 4 series that starred Richard Ayoade of The IT Crowd among others. It’s a parody of just about every 80s sci-fi/horror anthology series and serial going, with references to The Twilight Zone and The Ray Bradbury Theater in the opening titles alone, although the likes of Stephen King and Shaun Hutson are the main victims.

It’s not actually very funny though. It’s like something a bunch of students put together to show how clever they are (I, erm, wrote similar things when I was 16…): yes, you can see exactly what they’re satirising, but it doesn’t make you laugh, only go “Oh yes. Very clever.”

Also appearing in stream-o-vision is The Amazing Screw-on Head, a pilot for a new animated series based on a comic book of the same name. Not too great either, but you can vote on it at the end to decide whether it should be made into a series.

While you’re about it, if you decide to watch anything on the site, you’ll get the SciFi video player and be able to watch interviews with the Doctor Who team. It has Eccles-cake in full humourless mode, sucking the fun and joy out of the atmosphere. But it’ll make you all nostalgic for 2005.

IT Crowd theme tune

5 March 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Since a lot of you are coming here now to find out what the theme tune to The IT Crowd was (why??), I thought I’d put you all out of your misery: it was a specially composed track by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy (who came up with the theme to Father Ted, you may recall). It’s not been released commercially yet, but I’m sure it will be at some point.