The Festival

Year:  2018
Director:  Iain Morris
Screenplay:  Keith Akushie and Joe Parnham
Starring:  Joe Thomas, Hammed Animashaun, Claudia O'Doherty, Emma Rigby, Jemaine Clement, Hannah Tointon
Running Time:  98 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nick (Thomas) is dumped by his girlfriend, Claudia (Tointon) on the day of their graduation.  To make matters worse, he makes a fool of himself by begging her to take him back on stage during the ceremony.  Claudia refuses and Nick falls into despair for days.  To cheer him up, his best friend Shaun (Animashaun) suggests they go to a huge open-air music festival, where Shaun, an aspiring DJ, hopes to give a sample of his music to his idol DJ Hammerhead (Noel Fielding), who performs wearing a hammerhead shark mask.  On the train Shaun befriends chatty Australian Amy (O'Doherty).  However, when Nick discovers that Claudia and her friends are also at the festival, the stage is set for a succession of humiliating disasters.

This marks the solo directorial debut by Iain Morris, who is best known for co-creating the British TV comedy series The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) which also starred Joe Thomas, and featured Hannah Tointon as his girlfriend (incidentally, Thomas and Tointon are together in real life too).  In fact there are so many parallels with The Inbetweeners that this film at times feels like some weird spin-off, Joe Thomas plays basically the same character in both, and the film opens with almost a reprise of a gag from an episode of The Inbetweeners.  The film is packed full of crude, gross-out gags, and there is one sequence involving a nipple ring and a fence that I found genuinely hard to watch.  It is a funny film though.  If you like crude humour then there is plenty to laugh at here, and it goes form one set-piece to another, so it doesn't really drag.  The main problem the film has is that Nick is such a deeply unlikeable character: selfish, whiny, boorish and rude, so it's really hard to care about what happens to him.  In contrast Hammed Animashaun and Claudia O'Doherty provide the heart of the film, funny and genuinely likeable, I wanted to see more of them than Nick's self-involved moaning.  It's the kind of film that is fine for some late-night post-pub viewing, and it is an enjoyable romp, although not as good as The Inbetweeners.  I have never been to a music festival, so if you are a fan of camping out in a muddy field with a few thousand other people you may see it in a very different light.  It has a few fun cameos from comedians including Noel Fielding, Jemaine Clement and Nick Frost and rapper Big Narstie. 

             
Joe Thomas, Claudia O'Doherty and Hammed Animashaun are at The Festival

The IT Crowd

Year: 2006 - ongoing
Director: Graham Linehan
Screenplay: Graham Linehan
Starring: Chris O'Dowd, Richard Ayoade, Katherine Parkinson, Matt Berry (season 2 onwards), Chris Morris (season 1) and Noel Fielding.
Running Time: 24 episodes over 4 seasons to date. 25 minutes per episode.
Genre: Situation comedy.

Summary: The show is set in the offices of Reynholm Industries, run by the deeply eccentric Denholm Reynholm (Morris) and, after Denholm's suicide, by his dim-witted, lecherous son Douglas (Berry). The offices, in the heart of London, are a glittering monolith of a building occupied by glamorous, attractive employees "not doing very much work and having affairs with each other". Except in the dingy, messy IT department located in the building's basement. Working in the IT department are Roy (O'Dowd) a workshy nerd who has a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing his standard answer to any enquiry: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" and his best friend Maurice Moss (Ayoade) who is highly intelligent and knowledgable about science and computers but is completely clueless about pretty much everything else and still lives with his mother. They are pretty much hated or ignored by the rest of the staff and seen as "standard nerds". The newest member of the IT department is Jen Barber (Parkinson) a popular and fashionable woman who lied on her CV that she is an expert in computers when in reality she knows very little about them but manages to work as the "relationship manager" between the IT department and the rest of the staff.

Opinion: This British comedy series created by Graham Linehan (best known as the creator of the popular comedy series Father Ted (1995-1998)) is in many ways a traditional situation comedy which tends to start off the storylines with elements familiar to most people who have to work in offices and then spins them out into surreal extremes. The show is usually extremely funny with clever dialogue that incorporates numerous references to popular culture and most particularly geek culture, including frequent scenes that parody other TV shows and movies. The show features some memorable comedy characters in particular ubernerd Moss and the inept boss Douglas Reynholm (Berry). Unusually every seaon is a genuine improvement on the previous one. The first season was promising but awkward, a prolem shared by many British comedies during the first season possibly due to the short amount of time they get in each block (six episodes per season is usual for British comedy shows). However the most recent seaosn featured moments that were comedy gold. A show that's well worth checking out and sticking with.
A fifth season of the show has been commissioned and an American version is also rumoured to be in the works.