Hello, I'm Ash Atalla, Series Producer of "IT Crowd".
And I'm Jamie Glazebrook, the Producer.
And what we've got here, Jamie, is a little film about a day in the life of,
- the night of, "The IT Crowd". - Bring it on.
We are doing a dress run that should take us, hopefully, about 40,
50 minutes, just to make sure we've got everything right.
Then we let the audience in and then we start shooting.
So that's what's happening right now on all these screens.
And this is called a quad split.
There we all are pretending we know what all the buttons and screens are for.
The audience. Here they come. God bless 'em,
If they weren't there, we'd be playing to an empty room.
We have come from... we came from Rugby Station.
About an hour, two hours. There had to be a toilet break.
I came from Colchester.
- Liverpool. - Liverpool, yeah.
I've come from Belgium.
I'm a computer programmer, a system administrator for a small company in Ascot.
In college, basically. I need to get a job. I'm poor. But, yeah...
Everywhere you go there's computers now.
But I would imagine that there's a lct of people exactly like them.
We work in IT.
We're all big geeks.
The characters are, like, very, like, much more different. It's not as boring as The Office.
You can certainly empathise with them being stuck in a basement not getting recognition.
I've got a few friends that are, like, doing computer science at university
and they're pretty much exactly like Moss.
It was nice, wasn't it? Cos lots of people who did work in IT departments would come.
That bit of the audience walking in with the empty chairs was a very nervous moment.
I took you out on the first night. You said, "Let's have bit of that studio gold. "
We went out, and there were ten people sitting in the back.
It was like a party, and nobody had come.
But then, minutes later, this is what happens. Here's Patrick, our warm-up.
So for the studio audience, there's an awful lot of waiting around between takes.
- They are extremely patient and kind to us. - They're amazingly patient.
It gets kind of hot and uncomfortable. The whole recording takes about three hours.
Three hours. But they have to watch lots of scenes over and over again.
We record at Pinewood.
"The Weakest Link" comes from Pinewood,
as well as James Bond and "The IT Crowd".
So this is backstage. Um, nervous, obviously, for the actors.
And here they are, being received like rock gods.
The audience love them and, as you can see, they're all quite shy, which is sweet.
They were... They didn't kind of come out and lap it up.
- They were sweetly shy, - We had to force them out.
You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a car.
So most people who watch sitcoms don't really know
that this is how they're recorded.
Banks and banks of people watching... It's kind of quite theatrical there, isn't it?
Definitely, definitely
And the bits... As you can see, they're watching now a bit that we prerecorded
months before you'd get shown it on a video screen.
Only certain scenes and sets are taking place in front of them. Like this one - the IT office.
And I work in TV, and that surprised me the first time I saw it.
- And every subsequent time, as well. - Short memory.
And action.
There you go. I think it surprises some people how live it all is.
It's basically like going to watch a play, you know.
There's a set.
It's like watching a play that you can't see very well because the cameras are in the way.
It's like watching the worst play you've ever seen.
And then someone in the audience in front of you stood up and obstructed you.
But they've got a massive camera.
But the upside is that you don't pay for your ticket.
It really is like having 300 people round to your house every Friday night.
- You do that anyway. - You want it to be good, don't you?
You do want it to be good.
This is great fun cos you see everybody doing their thing.
I believe that we're about to see Richard laughing and cracking up a bit.
The old outtakes.
I'm in an ethical pickle.
It turns out meeting new people is a lot more com...
Oh, come on now.
I've got Dastardly and Muttley here.
That actually went on for about five minutes.
Yeah. And, weirdly, audiences love it when people...
Often, the biggest laugh you get in a night is when an actor f... swears.
- Hence the success of Denis Norden. - That's right.
This was an idea that one of the characters from "Moss and the German"
would play us out live with "The IT Crowd" music.
There's the audience. I think that's called "lapping it up".
Moss is my favourite character. I love his faces, where he just... pouts.
I did love the scene with the German bloke, the first one.
It would have to be the muck-ups, where they buggered up. That was hilarious.
I liked the cello bit at the end. A bit of electro cello's always good to hear.
It was really cool. Moss is the best one. He's really brilliant. He's really sweet.
Seeing Matt Berry. Seeing Matt Berry. Big fan.
- I didn't know that they make it in blocks. - No.
- So it was really interesting to find that out. - Yeah, we thought they just did it in one.
And the set, as well. It's all backwards, I mean...
I was trying to look at them and look on the TV, the VT shots and everything,
and just try and find where the cameras are.
It's just impossible, like a maze. It's really interesting.
That's what they thought. Let's hear from the man himself,
creator/writer/director - Graham.
I was bit worried cos of the subject matter. This was "Moss and the German",
which I've always been slightly nervous about because I didn't know
whether people would laugh at the idea of Moss being potentially eaten.
So I'm very happy with the way it went.
They... they really went for it.
We're the Germans.
I met the Germans and I apologised to them profusely, and they were fine about it, so...
The whole reason the show exists is because it is true.
Apparently, before that German cannibal ate the guy he ate,
there was a bloke just before him who he watched Ocean's Eleven with and bottled it.
So it's based on that, yeah.
So I kind of told them that that was the origin of the story
and I used that to mask my embarrassment that I'd just insulted them
by saying that most... that Germans are generally cannibals!
Which I don't believe. Just a small percentage!
We like Schweinefleisch
The pressure of a live audience is an absolute boon, when it comes to comedy.
Adrenaline's going, and you have all these ideas you wouldn't normally have.
Sometimes I see something and I know that line could be done funnier.
Sometimes the actors need a tweak and sometimes it's the line.
I just go on and make sure that, you know... we're getting the optimum out of gags.
I'm not saying all comedy should be filmed in front of a live studio audience,
but I certainly like it.
To me, it just gives it all a kind of... fairy dust that is very special
and you don't get with stuff that's just shot on location.
- Bye! - Bye!
There they go. Auf Wiedersehen. A good night, wasn't it?
- I think so. - I think so.