After last week’s solidly entertaining series opener introduced the concept of counselling via Dungeons & Dragons, Graham Linehan’s consistently excellent IT Crowd comes up with an equally engaging idea: crossing a popular Channel 4 quiz show with Fight Club. Meanwhile, Roy’s drawn into a convoluted scenario that is classic Linehan, where he spends much of the episode trying to convince a highly successful old college friend that he’s most definitely not a window cleaner. When Jen points out that window cleaning is a perfectly honourable profession, Moss replies, with brilliant candour, “If your last profession was cleaning balls!” It’s a snobbish attitude that ultimately leads to Roy’s undoing in a stand-out scene of toe-curling awkwardness. Moss’s status as the club’s new alpha male gets him on the wrong side of another Countdown champion Negative One, who challenges him to a game of Street Countdown. (“It’s more or less the same as normal Countdown except we play it on the street. It can get quite cold.”) Elsewhere, Jen finds herself intrigued by another apparently secret club, and ultimately discovers that, in her absence, the company’s head of department meetings have evolved into an aerobics class. But then, this is an episode full of memorable moments – not least thanks to the welcome sight of our own Pete Dillon-Trenchard in a stern-faced cameo – and quite possibly one of the best IT Crowd episodes yet.
