Chris Morris to appear in The IT Crowd

[A Passing Turk Slipper]

And I think Coogan said something to the audience about Morris being really nervous as he'd not performed in front of an audience since his university days.

So he performed in front of an audience in his uni days eh, interesting. Any idea what that was?

[Little Hoover]

>insert newbies comment suggesting we'd say it was better than The Day Today here<

[Pepotamo1985]

So he performed in front of an audience in his uni days eh, interesting. Any idea what that was?

None, but I bet it was better than The Day Today.

[ffogems]

You have to judge a person by their work and t.v appearances and Ricky Gervais seems to me to be a 'nice when he needs to counteract the cuntness' type man. Nothing wrong with that. At least he's self-conscious.

[Neil]

Nope, APTS, sorry.  And I may have got that wrong anyway, but I think it's right.

Oh. So people are expecting it to be shit then? Thats sad because I was going to look forward to it. :-( A bit of positive excitement would have been fun, I remember when we used to do that on here many years ago... course it was for the brass eye special and look where that got us!

I would have been even more apprehensive about The IT Crowd had I not read bits of Bobby Onion and ffogems' reports.  I did assume there'd be an awful lot of really tedious jokes about computers, but apparently that's not the case.

Anyway I guess if you don't like Graham Linehans writing then its fair enough, I think he's great - at his worst he's black books series one (which is far from awful) and at his best he's father ted and hippies. Thems some good odds surely?

Wasn't Mathews responsible for Hippies?  I did prefer that to Black Books 1. And they both wrote Father Ted...if it was the two of them writing this then fair enough, but they  never seem to have come close to Father Ted when working alone, so there's no way I'm expecting this to be anywhere near FT quality.

I dont have much respect for actors im afraid, its always writers and writing I admire. Clerks for example is appalingly acted but the script overcomes it amazingly.

I dunno, I just don't see how - generally speaking - people who are crap at comedy can make a good comedy show.  It can happen where a show is good despite the writing and performances not being evenly matched, but the best comedy shows are a perfect marriage of the two.  Seinfeld and The Young Ones are great examples here.    

That said I agree wholeheartedly with Neil about his last main appearance - the Brasseye special certainly seemed to show him horribly out of practice didn't it? I wonder why that happened? It hadn't been that long since the original series and he was fine in that. Do you think there was a possibility that his heart wasn't in it?

Well, I assume that comedy performing (and to a lesser extent writing) are skills that will atrophy and die when they're not regularly used.  I do think it's akin to playing music professionally, if you're gigging constantly then you're going to be sharp and on form, but if you just turn sit on your arse and go to the odd rehearsal every year or two, you're going to sound like shite.  Does anyone disagree with that?  It's clear to me that his on-screen performances were never better than the period where he was doing pretty regular gigs.  Surely you have to keep your hand in?  I think that's true of his writing too.  I mean, some of his telly material was originally written for radio, and then carried with him over the years and honed and rewritten for use in other projects.  

Don't get me wrong though, I'm really excited about the fact that Morris is actually performing some comedy again!  About bloody time.  I hope the show is good, but it's a mugs game to presume that anything he's involved with these days will be automatically brill.

[Autopsy Turvey]

At the end of the day, you could put Peter Cook, Lenny Bruce and Spike Milligan in a big cake and it might still turn out to be an awfully nasty mess.

Hey, there's this obscure comedy show from the 70s. It stars Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes and it's written by *Johnny Speight*! And yet, everyone in the world thinks it's rubbish without having seen it. That's a confusing old situation.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

It sounds heavy on the pull-back-and-reveal/cutaways stuff, which has always been part of the Linehan & Mathews style. Oddly, I used to find all that brilliantly funny in Father Ted, but on Hippies and Black Books I just kept thinking 'Oh, put your Simpsons videos away'.

I think one problem with the technique is that, almost by definition, it means the jokes are signposted. Every gag is pushed right in your face, and there's no room for spotting implicit characterisations/back-stories. Strang and I were watching The Young Ones 'Flood' yesterday and became terribly amused by the way Vyvyan, the apparently psychotic and violent one, had poured his lager into a glass before drinking it. I've seen The Young Ones umpteen times, but little details like that continue to thrill me. In contrast, I always found Bernard Black's idiosyncracies rather tacked-on and knowing.

But it beats me why it worked so well in Ted. Twinkles in the eye?

[Artemis]

Ding!

This must have been what Mary Anne Hobbes was going on about when she said Morris was 'filming' at the moment.

[neveragain]

If I can excise a little, slightly misquoted piece from the IAP1 commentary, regarding Morris during his appearance and the antics therein..

ARMANDO: I remember Chris insisted on wearing these big wellington boots, and he was flopping about in the set with them.. and a woman came up to me and said 'You have to see to Chris, he's causing terrible trouble'.. And he was clomping round in these wellingtons during filming...

(Later)

ARMANDO: Oh! Oh, no, he's wearing brown shoes. Err... (Laughs) I don't know what I was thinking of!

An absurdist Italio-Scottish genius.

[Little Hoover]

I prefer
ARMANDO: Chris is very mysterious isn't he, No one's ever seen him.

[Pepotamo1985]

Baynham: He did this in a balaclava, and we had to post-produce a face.

[mrpants]

Ding!

This must have been what Mary Anne Hobbes was going on about when she said Morris was 'filming' at the moment.

http://chilled.cream.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=361095#361095*

No one ever listens to me!  <sulks>



*Apologies for the awful sentence construction in that linked post.