TV Review: 'Are you from the past?" This was the question asked by the geek-infested Reynholm Industries IT department of a luddite caller who couldn't find his PC's "on" button.
And the question could equally well be applied to The IT Crowd, the latest offering from writer-director Graham Linehan, best known as co-writer of the brilliantly anarchic Father Ted and the superb Black Books. Linehan's new series, a solo run, concerns the relationships between three characters socially marooned in the unprepossessing basement of a high-rise monument to what feels like dotcom capitalism. At its start, the "IT team", Roy (Chris O'Dowd) and Moss (Richard Ayoade), are joined in their squalid subterranean workspace by new girl Jen (Katherine Parkinson), a shoe obsessive and "relationship manager".
Reynholm Industries is the kind of company where pencil-skirted girls make out with clean-shaven, aspirational boys in the unisex toilets, a fact proudly acknowledged by the indestructible and pathologically egotistical boss Denholm (Chris Morris). But the geek squad in the cellar, needless to say, have no such luck.
The IT Crowd is funny, slapstick, boyish and daft, and although ostensibly concerning itself with high-tech innovation it feels comfortingly nostalgic. This is character comedy that falls somewhere between The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and The Monkees, and unlike Chris Morris's Nathan Barley, it doesn't overwhelm with references to the zeitgeist - you can actually watch this kind of comedy without owning an iPod or a pair of 200-quid trainers. Of the two back-to-back episodes that opened the series, the second was more confident and allowed viewers out of the basement. It also included a ludicrously funny public information video from the emergency services, who, torturing the elderly, had replaced the traditional 999 line with an unmemorable multi-digit number.
"You're used to being social piranhas," said a despairing Jen to her two workmates at one point. One feels that The IT Crowd will provide the the water-cooler moments for the next couple of weeks, and you too will be a piranha if you don't watch it.
WHEN THE LATE great John Thaw passed away he deprived his public of one of the most celebrated detectives on television, Morse. Erudite, compassionate and cultured, traversing the lofty streets of Oxford in his Jaguar, his crossword on the walnut dash, Morse has been greatly missed by his devoted audience. Now, having allowed the viewers suitable time to mourn, ITV tested the water by allowing his mildly dim but savagely loyal sidekick, Lewis (Kevin Whately), to try and fill his master's shoes in a feature-length episode of his own.
The latently ripe Lewis, catapulted into maturity by having his fictional wife killed in a hit-and-run and his children grow up and emigrate, was initiated in a new episode this week which required the reluctant detective to re-acquaint himself with one of his former boss's cases.
The Morse-inspired opening salvo was set in a familiar Oxford, to which Lewis returned in a flowery shirt and clutching an orchid after a lengthy secondment to the Virgin Islands. He was met at the airport by his soon-to-be "bag man" and sidekick, James Hathaway (Laurence Fox, son of veteran English actor James Fox), and poor old Lewis, fated always to be the bridesmaid, had barely stepped off the tarmac when his leading role was under challenge from the far more watchable newcomer. Hathaway is an interesting creation: a former theology student who was asked to leave the seminary because of some frivolous behaviour involving mashed potato, he carries smelling salts in his pocket and tempers his conscientious detecting with his Christian principles. Beside him, Lewis, in his Ikea kitchen and crumpled Marks & Sparks linen suit, looked unshakeably pedestrian.
In a frothy bit of Shakespearean hide-and-seek the two men investigated a triple murder. There was the young heir who thought his widowed mother was sleeping with his dead father's brother; his half-sister who didn't know she was a half-sister, who tried to drown herself in a lake; and a guy almost called Polonius who was shot in the head behind a shower curtain; oh, and a dead American girl called Regan. By the time we'd plundered our knowledge of the Bard, however, we'd moved into pure mathematics, the uncertainty principle, and a killer in corduroy trousers who was moved to annihilate a great chunk of the cast because his academic prowess was under threat.
It deserves to be, and surely will be, a series. The jet-lagged Lewis, in a confusion of literary references, is already getting friendly with a lady doctor called Jekyll who runs a sleep clinic (who isn't really a doctor but who is single and cunningly soporific). And we most certainly haven't seen the last of Fox.
AUTHOR AND BROADCASTER Christy Kenneally has been undertaking a fascinating and enviable journey. Starting with the Egyptians, his quest in Na Déthe Caillte (The Lost Gods) has been to explore the great religions that influenced and dominated the world's most powerful empires.
Filmed in 34 countries, Kenneally's poetic script, combined with startlingly beautiful and fluid photography, delicately excavates the stories behind the Greeks and Romans, the Maya, the Inca and the Celts.
This week saw Kenneally travel to the Guatemalan rainforest in search of traces of the Mayan civilisation, whose art and architecture (including hieroglyphs and pyramids) can be compared to that of the Egyptians. Eight hundred years before the arrival of the Catholic Christopher Columbus, the Maya were using the symbol of a cross, a vertical beam reaching towards the sky (the tree of life) and a horizontal beam constituting the eye of god.
Kenneally said that making a series of such cultural diversity had left him with a lasting feeling of humility. Viewing the vast, terrifying and breathtakingly ambitious monuments to their gods created by a people who believed that their world rested on a turtle's back surrounded by water, it was possible to share his sense of awe.
On top of one such sacrificial sarcophagus there was a seated stone god with a dish resting on his stomach, ready to receive the human sacrifice from a pagan people made, they understood, from maize and the blood of the gods (which "had to be repaid"). The statue looks towards the west, towards blackness and death, and Kenneally gently described sensing still the martyrs' ghosts.
Kenneally's journey continues with the Inca and the Celts; as he says, in a world of tyrants and theocracies the series provides a timely reminder of our past.
THE WEEK WOULD be incomplete without a mention of The Perfect Penis. Channel 4, the tease, kept us up until midnight to reveal its phallic fantasy.
Jaw-dropping, stomach-churning and dripping with despair, this documentary was anything but pretty. Essentially, it was about surgical augmentation in the US, or penis enhancement as it's known in the trade. A couple of thousand years BC we had jungle tribes constructing pyramids out of limestone; now, after a few millenniums' progress, we have surgeons shoving bags of silicone into women's breasts and injecting fat into men's penises.
Girth, apparently. It's all about girth.
"I want," one contributor told the programme, "a penis as thick as my wrist and as long as my arm." What? Why? Dean, a Miami-based psychology student, gelling his hair in preparation for his appointment with the scalpel, archly said that his forthcoming augmentation was a reflection of the plastic society that he lived in. Yeah yeah.
If you're interested, the "Cumberland sausage" look (not my description) can be achieved by giving a surgeon $4,000 to sever the ligaments that attach the penis to the rest of the body, and then by spending eight hours a day with the semi-detached organ in traction (which means weights hanging off it). Keep it up (sorry) and a staggering one-eighth-of-an-inch-per-month enhancement is possible.
But girth? Now that's a different matter. Girth costs double, and involves fat being injected into the organ while the recipient is fully conscious. The fat then dissolves with wear and tear and has to be redone every couple of months or so.
Hey, way to go! All this "exteriorisation of the penis" can get a little out of hand (to coin a phrase): Mr Mark, the poster boy of the self-injecting silicone crowd, has a testicle circumference of 24 inches. His actual penis, which he happily hauled (and I mean hauled) out for the camera, is almost indescribable: a moribund slab of pulverised industrial pork-pie filler, no longer capable of having an erection or of urinating from a standing position. Mr Marks's appendage is purely for viewing pleasure, apparently.
They didn't say whose.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
