While at university, I appeared in a stage version of an African fable called Ananze’s Impossible Quest. As the entire thing had been arranged by drama students, the final show was so bad that the producers gave all of the tickets away to the kids of a Special School.

I think the same thing happened on Graham Linehan’s new sitcom, The I.T. Crowd: instead of normal levels of audience laughter, they appear to have opted for the hysterical roaring of two-hundred retards.

The first installment of this office-based sitcom contained six good jokes, but two of them were borrowed from Father Ted and another one came from Spaced. So it really only gave us three jokes. That’s one joke per ten minutes.

My own life contains an average of one joke per five minutes, leading us to conclude that this sitcom is 50% less funny than reality. Some may say it has failed.