The IT Crowd winning the BAFTA for best Situation Comedy seems like as good an excuse as any to draw your attention to one of my all time comedy heroes.
Graham Linehan has been writing for some of the best comedy shows on TV for years. He started out with writing sketches for Alas Smith and Jones, The Fast Show and Harry Enfield and Chums, often with his writing partner Arthur Mathews, before moving on to creating on the of the absolute classic sitcoms of the 90′s. Father Ted cemented his reputation as one of the best comedy writers at work and was a huge success before it was cut-short by the death of its star Dermot Morgan. It also set the tone for much of what has since come from Graham Linehan, Surreal Sit-coms in the classic tradition of being filmed before a live audience, often featuring characters that are slightly detached from society. Since then his writing credits include, Big Train, Brass Eye, Black Books, Jam, and his main recent project The IT Crowd. It’s a pretty impressive list and so when I found out a couple of years ago that one guy was involved with all of them (there are a few other common threads as well though) I was pretty impressed.
He also runs a pretty good blog over at whythatsdelightful.wordpress.com and is a regular tweeter @Glinner
So yeah, basically, my hat off to Graham Linehan and well done for winning the BAFTA in what was a pretty tough category. ( Peep Show and The Inbetweeners were both also nominated and both also pretty awesome) Hopefully I haven’t seemed too sycophantic with this but as you could have guessed I am a fan and think that everyone needs to watch his sitcoms, because theyre hilarious.
