DVD Of The Week

The slapstick tech support based sitcom written by Father Ted creator Graham Linehan returns to Channel 4 tomorrow night. If you’ve not seen The IT Crowd, now is the perfect time to get acquainted with Moss, Jen and Roy, who make up the entire IT department of the London-based Reynholm Industries, a company which once turned over “eighteen hundred billion billion,” in profits.

Moss and Roy are, in the words of Denholm Reynholm (the CEO, played by Chris Morris), just a pair of “standard nerds” who are outcast by the rest of the firm despite their reliance on their technical expertise.

The glamorous and ambitious Jen is appointed their manager after blagging her way into the job, even though it’s clear she knows next to squat about computers.

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They say revenge is a dish best served cold – whoever ‘they’ are, they clearly never told Sweeney Todd, who serves up revenge in the form of a humble meat pie; literally. Yet another winning result of the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp configuration, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical version of the old Victorian penny dreadful about a killer hairdresser who slices up his victims whilst they sit in his chair.

The story concerns one Benjamin Barker, a successful barber who falls afoul of the corrupt Judge Turpin who takes a shine to Barker’s pretty wife Lucy, and so trumps up some charges and has Benjamin kangaroo courted over to a certain overseas penal colony. Fifteen years later, the mysterious ‘Sweeney Todd’ arrives in London, having escaped from prison. He coincidentally moves into the flat once rented by a certain Benjamin Barker, and whilst there just so happens to come across  a collection of polished silver razors… and begins plotting revenge.

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