'THE IT CROWD' 4.4 – "Italian For Beginners"

[SPOILERS] It lacked the truly joyous idea behind "The Final Countdown", but I still thought "Italian For Beginners" was a marginally better episode of The IT Crowd. There were only two main storylines and one subplot that didn't overindulge itself, and most of the humour was of the clever variety. Even the stupider moments weren't allowed to overwhelm what became a pretty good episode, particularly in its second half.

This week, Roy (Chris O'Dowd) had rather bizarrely got himself a blonde bombshell girlfriend called Julia (Nathalie Cox), but his romantic good fortune wasn't part of any joke. I'm not sure if that's a good thing (hey, just because you're a geek doesn't mean you can't land yourself a glamorous babe) or a bad thing because it didn't strike me as particularly plausible. O'Dowd's not ugly and his character's not as awkward as Mos (Richard Ayoade), but would someone like Julia really date a basement-dwelling IT nerd? To help take the edge off, Julia was proven to be a little "mental", in that she insisted she's an orphan whose parents had died in a fire... at a sea park, during a sea lion show. An astonishingly unlikely story, but one that she's incredibly insistent Roy doesn't press her further on.

This lead to a very funny meltdown from Roy, who simply couldn't get his head around Julia's far-fetched story and started to become obsessed with solving the riddle of his girlfriend's parent's death. This resulted in him absent-mindedly creating a sea park from mashed potato, researching the layout and materials of a sea park while on the internet, and eventually creating an elaborate model using egg cartons, lolly sticks and cardboard. O'Dowd was marvellous in this story, and for once the duration of the joke went the distance.

Elsewhere, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) felt threatened by a colleague called Linda (Hermione Gulliford) at work, who had endeared herself to Douglas (Matt Berry) thanks to her iPhone-based exploits during meetings. To combat this, Jen pretended to be fluent in Italian, hoping to grease an important meeting between Reynholm Industries and Italian business mogul Bernatelli (Martino Lazzeri). Of course, she didn't really know Italian, so had to rely on a translation program Mos had installed on her laptop, which predictably wasn't available to her when Bernatelli actually arrived in person. Not exactly the greatest comedy idea, but Parkinson made it work with her usual array of slowly souring facial expressions and faux-Italian phrases.

Finally, Mos came to the realization that putting your phone in your shirt top pocket, rather than your trouser pocket, saves valuable nanoseconds when answering a call. Unfortunately, it also meant he lost his phone down the toilet while bending over, but had a chance to replace his missing gadget when he spotted an iPhone in an arcade's claw crane. This was all setup for the sight of seeing Mos actually inside the machine, up to his chest in cuddly toys, trying to pass Jen the iPhone in a manner that made it look like he was literally giving birth to Apple's must-have. Silly, but it worked because the idea and visual wasn't overplayed and needlessly stretched for longer than necessary.

Overall, "Italian For Beginners" still wasn't anywhere near The IT Crowd's best efforts, but it was the funniest episode of this fourth series so far, and I appreciated the greater creativity and originality of Roy's storyline. And it was just nice to watch an episode that didn't jump around so erratically. I just hope the show does more with Roy's sudden Don Juan nature... or was this episode originally intended to air before the premiere "Jen The Fredo", given how that episode started with Roy upset that he'd broken up with an unseen girlfriend?

Aside

• Just what is it with Graham Linehan's fondness for showing lovers gazing into each other's eyes while sat on playground roundabouts? I believe it's a cliché of French romantic movies of the '60s, but it also gives the distinct impression the adults in The IT Crowd can't escape childish activities

WRITER & DIRECTOR: Graham Linehan
GUEST CAST: Nathalie Cox (Julia), Hermione Gulliford (Linda) & Martino Lazzeri (Bernatelli)
TRANSMISSION: 16 July 2010 – CHANNEL 4/HD, 10PM