The It Crowd The Internet Episode

[Lara Preece]

TheIT Crowd is a Channel 4 British sitcom set in London. It was written and directed by Graham Linehan. It stars Richard Ayoade, Chris O'Dowd and Katherine Parkinson as the information technology staff of an office.

Denholm mandates his employees to attend a stress seminar, declaring "war on stress" and threatening to fire those who are still stressed by the end of the day. Roy, who has annoyed the seminar's instructor, later steals his stress-measuring machine. Moss tries to make his own version, but when he leaves a soldering iron switched on, he starts a fire in the office.

Jen has a terrible dinner date with co-worker Bill Crouse (Adam Buxton), during which he is rude to their waiter, refuses to share food (despite being at a tapas restaurant) and speaks with an annoying rising inflection. Jen wants to avoid his asking for a follow-up date, so she tells Moss to lie and say that she is too busy. However, when Bill arrives and is about to uncover Moss's lie, Moss panickedly tells Bill that Jen has died. Things escalate when Bill spreads his false claim that he was the last person to sleep with Jen, while Moss lies to Jen that the flowers and sympathy card are because she was made Employee of the Month. Upon realising the truth, Jen threatens Moss, who tells her that she should go after Bill instead. Throughout the rest of the day Bill believes he being haunted by Jen due to a number of coincidences, such as Jen's disembodied head appearing to float outside his office, Jen calling him with a raspy voice telling him to stop lying, and Jen showing up at his house in the rain.

Roy and Moss try to watch a zombie film on DVD when Roy's friend calls him and is about to spoil the movie's plot twist. When they realise they have been spending a lot of time together like an old married couple, Jen suggests they try new activities to make new friends. Moss enrols in a German cookery course, only to find that his instructor, Johan, is a cannibal who made some translation errors in the advert. Douglas invites Roy to watch the DVD but when Douglas learns it has a plot twist, he tries to guess it, annoying Roy. Roy volunteers to be the German cannibal's next meal so that he can watch the film on the latter's impressive home entertainment system. However, they are raided by the police who are concerned that the video was pirated.

Jen has finally found love with her new boyfriend Peter, and to celebrate their happiness they host a dinner party for six of their single friends: three men and three women. When Peter suddenly announces that the men are unable to attend, she reluctantly invites Roy, Moss and Richmond to take their places. Jen briefs her colleagues on how to act normally. Roy sits with a model, Paula, who was injured by a car crash and had to undergo extensive surgery on her face, which has a lot of bandaging on it. Moss pairs up with Margaret, who is very flirtatious when drunk. Richmond unexpectedly hits it off with Jessica and the pair have sex in another room. During the dinner party, Roy and Moss discover that Jen's boyfriend's name is Peter File, which sounds similar to "paedophile" and causes much confusion and discomfort. At the end of the night, all of the attendees pair off and leave together. Roy discovers that Paula is a gamer like himself and tries to ask her out on a date only to be rejected.

Roy comes back from a stag night unaware that he has been wearing lipstick. Jen loses concentration during an important meeting after wearing a "bad bra" to work, but when Moss invents a bra that does not lose its comfort or form (the "A-bra-cada-bra"), Jen is able to have an effective meeting. Moss gets an opportunity to pitch it to Dragons' Den. Things go sour when the bra has overheating issues, ruining another meeting for Jen, and when Moss cannot remember his pseudonym and answers to the wrong name, he ends up being erroneously interviewed on Newsnight about the Iraq War. Roy and Jen try to help Moss with the pitch in exchange for a cut of the profits, but it goes horribly wrong when Jen ends up repeating phrases, and the bra catches fire.

Roy suspects Jen's handyman Gary is a "builder from hell" who has a reputation of urinating in customers' sinks. Jen spends a day at home to observe Gary, causing the latter to think she must be flirting with him, and prompting Jen and Roy to install closed-circuit cameras. Douglas is instructed to do nothing, as he has an important meeting with Japanese business investors. After finding his grandfather's service revolver, he accidentally shoots himself in the leg before the meeting. When Jen finally spots Gary, who is disgruntled after Jen called him "a big, ugly builder", urinating in her bathtub, she botches her attempt to record the incident and accidentally sends the footage to a monitor at the investor conference. Later at the hospital, Roy attempts to steal a 20 note from Douglas as retribution for the other 20 note owned by Roy which Douglas threw out a window.

Moss and Roy use a football translation website called Bluffball[a] to gather quotes to pass themselves off as knowledgeable football fans in order to make new friends and get free drinks. They are invited to an actual game, and Roy is invited to a poker night, but when Roy finds himself in debt to one of his new acquaintances, he offers to do them a favour by driving them to their event. However, he is shocked to discover that the event is a bank robbery. Moss and Roy escape the police by pretending to be gay.

Jen boasts about winning Employee of the Month and makes Roy and Moss write her acceptance speech. Seeing an opportunity to humiliate her, Roy and Moss trick Jen by lending her "the internet" in the form of a small black box with a blinking light. They explain that if anything were to befall it, there would be worldwide chaos. Douglas finds the love of his life in a journalist named April, but mishears that she used to be a man, thinking she said that she is from Iran. At the shareholders meeting, Moss and Roy find their prank has backfired when the shareholders hang on Jen's every word about the internet. After learning the truth about April, Douglas breaks up with her, but their ensuing fist fight disrupts the shareholder meeting, crushing "the internet", and causing panic. Later, Douglas, alone at home, regrets breaking up with April.

In October 2011, Graham Linehan stated that a one-off special would air to end the series.[7] On 8 May 2013, it was confirmed by Channel 4 and the BBC that the special would begin shooting in a few weeks, and would air later in the year.[8] Den of Geek's spoiler-free review revealed the title as "The Internet Is Coming",[9] though the title of this episode has been incorrectly given as "The Last Byte" by some sources.[10][11][12] The special had a running time of 48 minutes, which is twice the standard length of all the regular episodes.

The IT Crowd was once a beloved British comedy, so how did The It Crowd trans episode mark the beginning of the end for the hit series? "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" has become a frequent quote for fans of the Graham Linehan sitcom The IT Crowd, and its cast of quirky characters instantly charmed audiences with their nerdy hijinks. The show pulled in millions of viewers from around the world and even spawned a failed American remake, yet the original show only lasted for four seasons despite viewer demand.

However, The IT Crowd's legacy has been tarnished due to season 3, episode 4's "The Speech," where company boss Douglas Reynholm (Matt Berry from What We Do in the Shadows) began dating journalist April Shepherd (Lucy Montgomery). The two hit it off after Douglas brushes it off when April tells him she "used to be fromIran." When Douglas later discovers April is a trans woman and that she had been trying to say she "used to be a man," The IT Crowd trans episode abhorrently ends in violence as an angry Douglas engages in a physical altercation with April.

Some viewers tried to ignore the dark undercurrent of this episode in light of the main plot, where Roy (Chris O' Dowd) and Moss (Richard Ayoade, The Mandalorian) convince Jen (Katherine Parkinson) that the "elders of the internet" had allowed her to borrow the box containing the internet for her Employee of the Month speech. However, it ultimately became a controversial episode. To say The IT Crowd trans episode aged badly is an understatement, as even at the time of airing it was considered in incredibly poor taste.

With a growing trend of violence against trans women, audiences started to speak out against the episode, which trivializes the issue for cheap laughs. Channel 4 decided to pull TheIT Crowd trans episode from their streaming service in 2020 after numerous complaints about the blatant transphobia it displayed. Creator Graham Linehan was furious about this, publishing on his blog that the decision infringed upon his freedom of speech. He also vowed to never work with Channel 4 again until it was reinstated.

Graham Linehan, who also created Father Ted, has a history of anti-trans views and his Twitter account was permanently suspended in June 2020 for his frequent anti-trans remarks. The IT Crowd creator has stated he does not believe trans women are women and that transgender rights oppress women. With all of this coming to light, his attitude towards the series' only trans character was no surprise.

The IT Crowd came to an end the season after the controversial episode, and Linehan said he was no longer excited to work on the project as he once had. There have been various attempts at an IT Crowd American reboot, but so far, none have made it to the screen. While some fans look back fondly on the show's best episodes, the ugly transphobia at the heart of "The Speech" has tainted its legacy in the eyes of many.

While comedy as a whole has changed over the years to be more inclusive, TheIT Crowd trans episode and its Matt Berry role showcase a troubling trend in British comedy as a whole. Outside the trans community, the episode hardly caused an uproar, which falls into an unfortunate tradition in British comedy over the years: it's had a mean streak when it comes to representing the trans community.

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