Series / The IT Crowd

"Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?" ^note "Is it definitely plugged in?"

"I'm told my father was particularly proud of the IT department, run by a dynamic go-getter, a genius, and a man from Ireland."

— Douglas Reynholm

A Britcom written by Graham Linehan (of Father Ted and Black Books fame), set in Reynholm Industries: a prominent London-based corporation filled with "a lot of sexy people not doing much work and having affairs". Unfortunately for them, the "standard nerds" who make up the IT Department are not part of this glamorous world. Consigned to the squalid basement, they're looked down upon and disregarded by everyone else despite keeping the entire place running smoothly.

Our main characters are Roy (Chris O'Dowd), a surly and slovenly comic-book fan who despises his job and the stupidity of those around him; Moss (Richard Ayoade), a naive and innocently-tactless savant with No Social Skills; and Jen (Katherine Parkinson), a twitchy career-woman with absolutely no grasp of technology but a smidge more social proficiency than the two geeks.

Frequent guests included Chris Morris as the aggressively eccentric (to the point of complete madness) company chairman Denholm Reynholm, Noel Fielding as reclusive goth sys-admin Richmond Avenal, and Matt Berry as Douglas Reynholm, Denholm's extremely promiscuous son who appears in the second series to take over the business.

The series is produced in the classic Britcom mode (as opposed to the more naturalistic style popularised by The Office (UK) and Extras), despite it going out of style in UK television. It has a loyal following and often did pretty well in the audience ratings, running for four seasons. Because the fifth season frequently hit obstacles, a final episode was made instead, airing in 2013.

An American remake was commissioned with Joel McHale as Roy and Richard Ayoade reprising his role as Moss. It was leaked and can be found online.

A German remake was also attempted, but ran for just two episodes.

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Hello, TV Tropes, have you tried turning it on and off again?:

A-E

• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • Judy. Not to be confused with Julie.
  • Douglas is this to Jen - he comes onto her pretty frequently and she is often visibly disgusted by it - and apparently also to the women who took him to court.
• Aborted Arc: The S1 ending. All the main cast get drunk at an office party and end up pairing off to sleep with one another, much to their horrified realisation the next morning. It even says To Be Continued, but is never mentioned again. Writer Graham Linehan explains in the commentary that he wrote this ending to have something to write away from in series 2, but then couldn't think of a decent way to get out of it, so just continued as though it never happened.
• Ac CENT Upon The Wrong Syl L Able:
  • Jen's pronunciation of "COMputers". It is sometimes missed by American audiences who might not realise this isn't just the British way of pronouncing it. Just listen to how Moss and Roy pronounce the word, and how Roy cringes every time Jen says it with the accent on the first syllable instead of the second.
  • In one episode, Moss when recommended a family restaurant called "Messy Joe's" to Jen and Roy for their dates, Moss pronounces it "Meh-SEE-joes", causing them to think it's foreign.
  • Moss also pronounces tapas as "tape-ass" and is very insistent that his pronunciation is the right one. The joke might seem like Hypocritical Humor to Americans and Spanish speakers given that Jen's correction may sound equally wrong to them, but it's the standard British pronunciation and so the creators almost certainly didn't intend it as a joke.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: The British ability to heavily drink, according to Roy.
  Roy: (Hungover) When did the English start drinking like that? You people drink like you don't want to live.
  Moss: (Cheerfully) We do love to binge.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Jen, on winning Employee of the Month.
• Acting Unnatural: Moss and Roy after Moss shoplifts the Grand Designs DVDs in "Bad Boys". Moss, Roy, and Richmond in "The Dinner Party" in a slightly different variation where Jen tells them to try and look normal to keep up appearances.
• Actor Allusion: Oliver Chris once again plays an employee of a large corporation who dabbles in quiz shows.
• Actually Not a Vampire: Richmond, the goth. Nocturnal, sensitive to sunlight, kept locked in a dark basement as a "punishment." Jen even assumed he was trying to suck her blood when he put a plaster on her cut.
• Aerosol Spray Backfire: In the finale, the team launches a new, concentrated pepper spray for women. To give it a feminine touch, it comes in a pretty perfume bottle. What could possibly go wrong?
• Affably Evil: The cannibal in "Moss and the German" is quite friendly to Moss and Roy, apart from the whole wanting to eat them thing.
  Moss: He was a fine young cannibal.
• Agony of the Feet: Jen wears gorgeous shoes that are several sizes too small for her. Body Horror ensues. She's in terrible pain, yet she keeps the shoes on.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: An entire episode is spent spoofing, lampshading and playing the trope entirely straight.
• Alliterative Name: Maurice Moss.
• All Periods Are PMS: Jen's "visit from Aunt Irma" - she yells at Moss and Roy and then apologises explaining that Irma is visiting. To make matters worse, Roy and Moss start exhibiting the same symptoms as though their cycles are synchronizing, even though neither of them has a uterus.
• All Women Love Shoes: Jen cannot resist buying a certain pair of shoes even though they are much too small for her and cause her tremendous pain.
• Ambiguously Human: No one is quite sure what exactly Richmond is.
• Ambiguously Gay: Moss. He's quite camp at times, and notoriously awkward with women. And then there was that time he made out with Roy.
• Ambiguous Syntax: These lines from "Aunt Irma Visits":
  Roy: What would you say to a big girls' night out?
  Moss: How big are the girls?
• Amusing Injuries: Roy endures quite a few.
  • Combined with Groin Attack in Douglas' electric pants he has to wear as part of his sexual harassment suit settlement with Jen. They malfunction horribly, sending random jolts of electricity into his scrotum with increasing regularity.^note Though, as it's Douglas (see below), they may not have been malfunctioning.
  Douglas: It's like being tazed in the balls, only painful.
• Analogy Backfire: In the first episode, Roy and Moss are disgruntled and complaining about the way everyone treats them despite their skills keeping the company running. Moss claims that everyone "tosses them aside like yesterday's jam", to which Roy enthusiastically agrees. Moments later, however, he realises that the analogy doesn't actually work "because jam lasts for ages".
• Artificial Limbs: Douglas gets a robot hand.
• Artistic License:
  • A company the size of Reynholm Industries would have a larger IT department. In this world, all IT does is fix minor computer issues, but in the real world, they are responsible for monitoring and maintaining network infrastructure, tracking and maintaining inventory, keeping track of what users have what system access and/or company hardware, and a whole host of other things. A real IT department for a company that size would, at minimum, have five employees, not including Jen or Richmond, and two or three of them would likely have responsibilities that don't include desktop support for employees.
  • The act of "turning it off and on again" in itself, while being a suitable way to begin diagnosis of almost any computer-related problem, often won't be the sole solution to it, and further investigation will be required to nail down the fault and fix it.
• A-Team Montage: The pilot episode uses this - with the A-Team music included as a Brick Joke since Denholm had mentioned the A-Team earlier when telling the IT Department how much he loved teams.
• Back for the Finale: Richmond, who was previously Put on a Bus, in the Season 4 finale... and again in the final episode, albeit as a goth again.
• Bad Liar:
  • Moss. Any time he tries to lie on Jen's behalf, he freezes for a few seconds before blurting out "She's dead!"
  • Jen herself isn't much of a criminal mastermind, doing things like faking a phonecall on a disconnected phone or faking typing on an unpowered computer. She's just lucky that whenever she's lying to anyone in power they're usually too dumb to notice.
• Bang, Bang, BANG: Averted when Douglas shoots himself in the leg - it's so loud the ensuing ringing noise drowns out the dialogue for a few seconds.
  Douglas: WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! You come in here, ranting about gunshots and service revolvers ...
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: Roy and Moss are pranking Jen into believing she's holding onto The Internet so she can present it to the shareholders:
  Moss: I spoke to the Elders of the Internet not one hour ago. I told them about Jen winning Employee of the Month, and they were so impressed that they wanted to do whatever they could to help.
  Jen: Wait a minute... "The Elders of the Internet?" The Elders of the Internet [excitedly] know who I am?!
  • Then there's Moss' reaction to finding out that the play they're attending in "The Work Outing" is an extremely homoerotic musical about gay men in Thatcher's Britain.
    Moss: Oh, no! It's set in the '80s!
• Bedmate Reveal: A threefer at the end of series one. Jen with Moss, Roy with the therapist who looks like his mother, and Denholm with Richmond.
• The Bet: Roy, annoyed that "have you tried turning it off and on again" has become "like a bloody catchphrase", bets Jen £100 quid that he can go the rest of the day without saying it. And then walks straight into a situation involving a malfunctioning bomb-disposal robot.
  • Also:
  Roy: We need to post a classified lonely-hearts ad online that'll make me sound like a psycho so I can prove to Jen that all women love bastards and therefore win twenty pounds.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: At one point Moss finally decides a situation is bad enough to deserve a real cuss word, but all he can come up with is "Ploppers!"^note A British euphemism for a turd that makes a plopping sound
• Black and Nerdy: Moss. What better visual shorthand could there be for this trope than an afro with a side-parting?
• Black Comedy Cannibalism: The episode "Moss and the German", where an advertisement Moss thinks is for cooking class turns out to be a German cannibal fetishist looking for a victim. They both have a good laugh over it.
• Black Comedy Rape: Doesn't actually happen, but Moss references it when discussing why he doesn't want to go to prison.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Friendface is obviously an ersatz Facebook/Myspace.
  • Cuke from the same episode. "It's like heaven in a can!" Oddly, they have no problem dropping a brand name when ordering a Bacardi and Cuke. Later episodes just referenced Coke instead of Cuke).
  • Chitter from S4, a replacement for Twitter.
  • A lingerie catalog contains a brand called Penelope's Fancies, reminiscent of Victoria's Secret.
• Blatant Lies: "I love that you used to be a man! It's your thing! I love thinking about that operation that you had!"
• Bluff Worked Too Well: Played for Laughs when Roy gets caught using the disabled toilet at a theatre and pretends to be disabled himself, which snowballs into a story about having had his wheelchair stolen. His every attempt to escape the situation only attracts more and more attention from well-meaning people.
• Break the Motivational Speaker: Roy and Moss stress out the man their company brings in to talk about how to prevent losing one's temper while stressed - they stress him out so much that he loses his temper at them.
• Brick Joke: Several per episode, no reference ever seems to be wasted.
  • In "The Work Outing", Roy gets caught in the handicapped bathroom at a theater and pretends to be disabled so he won't get in trouble. He tells the theater staff and police that his wheelchair was stolen by a bearded, red-haired man with glasses. Later, the police see a man matching that description leaving the theater and quietly take him away. In the same episode, Moss is caught using the employee bathroom and is mistaken for a new employee. Later, Jen goes to a party at the theater to find Roy in a wheelchair and Moss tending bar.
  • In "The Work Outing", Jen is asked out by a man she thought was gay. Moss replies, "Don't take this the wrong way, but could it be because he thought you looked a bit like a man?" Right at the end of the episode, after Jen is convinced he isn't gay, she asks him an Armour-Piercing Question about him borrowing a trashy gossip magazine that causes him to breakdown and admit he is gay, saying he thought it could work because she looked a "a bit like a man."
  • Another episode has Moss have a "Eureka!" Moment, in which he decides it would be better to leave his phone in his shirt pocket rather than his back pocket, for easier access. Later in the episode, he leans down to flush the toilet and his phone falls out. Even later in the episode, Moss gets stuck in a toy crane machine while trying to get an iPhone, and it isn't until the end of the episode that Jen realises she forgot to get him out.
  • There is at least one epic, multi-episode brick joke. In the Season three episode "The Speech", Roy and Moss trick Jen into thinking the internet is a black box with a light on it. The prank works so spectacularly well that nine episodes later, in the season five special, she brings out "The internet" again. Roy realises out loud that they never told her it was a joke.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Roy's entire work-ethic. In one episode he hooked up a tape-recorder to the phone with his side of the conversation pre-recorded, simply so he didn't have to bother answering the same old inane IT questions again and again.
• British Brevity: Like most UK comedy shows, the show only has only has six thirty-minute episodes per season. It ended in 2013 after four seasons and an hour-long special.
• Broken Ace: Richmond was once one of Reynholm Industries' top executives, before being sent to the basement after becoming a goth.
• Broken Glass Penalty: Moss was sued by his mother for accidentally breaking the patio window when he was a child. She even held a Kangaroo Court where she was both prosecution and judge (possibly of the Hanging Judge variety) with a viewing gallery for the cats.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • Moss has several very obvious personality quirks, but appears to be quite good at his job. That or nobody cares enough about the IT department to evaluate his performance.
  • Richmond almost never leaves his room and has a habit of monologuing to the camera, but used to be high up in the company.
  • Denholm, who is mad as a box of frogs yet runs a company so large that the takeover of ITV casts barely a ripple and was taking money from the pension fund.
  • Douglas, who varies between The Casanova, Casanova Wannabe and Kavorka Man, has a flair for the Dramatic, and is literally (as shown in one episode) Too Dumb to Live.
• Business of Generic Importance: Even Douglas Reynholm doesn't know what his company Reynholm Industries does:
  Reynholm Industries: a big hard business in a big hard building. Thrusting into the future strongly. Again and again. Pounding into the future, making the future beg for it. The future wants it, and Reynholm Industries wants to give it to the future. That's what it's all about. We don't want to be like a dead fly regretting what we didn't do in our short time on this earth. So maybe its a time to make a decision.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Implied. Denholm mentions having no recollection of taking over ITV.
• Call-Back:
  • Douglas asks Moss to call 999 in 3, to which he responds that that isn't the number anymore, and starts to sing the jingle from Series 1, Episode 2. "0118 999 88199 9119 725...3"
  • In the third series, Jen sues Douglas for sexual harassment. During the settlement meeting Jen is wearing a large pair of sunglasses that cover her eyes entirely causing Douglas to accuse her of sleeping at one point which she immediately denies. In the last episode of series four when Douglas' wife is divorcing him, she wears a similar pair of sunglasses to the settlement meeting. During the meeting Douglas suggests she is wearing the glasses to hide her fear, but it's then revealed she's actually just asleep.
  • In the same episode, Roy calling back to the last time he was in court, after a masseur kissed his bottom.
  • The plot of "The Haunting of Bill Crouse" is briefly mentioned in the episode "The Speech."
  Jen: I've won employee of the month.
  Roy: I thought you had already won that.
  Jen: No, everyone thought I was dead.
  • And again in "Aunt Irma Visits", where Moss reveals that he was forced to attend therapy sessions after making that up, as it was seen as a sign of serious mental disturbance.
  • In "From Hell", the company lawyer mentions Mr. Yamamoto, who last appeared in "Calamity Jen". The merger didn't work out, but he is apparently now the majority shareholder of Reynholm Industries.
  • In the final special, when Jen and Roy are despised by pretty much everyone on the internet, Jen thinks she has a solution. She goes into her office and gets the black box with a red light on that Moss and Roy convinced her was "The Internet" in S3, and suggests that they hide it. Apparently they hadn't told her they'd been joking.
  • Douglas' robot hand from "Something Happened" which he uses to break into a car that turns out to be his own.
  • In ruing how unusual their lives always seem to turn out being, Roy refers back to the time he ended up pretending to be a gay man in a wheelchair which resulted in him being ferried to Manchester after a trip to the theatre ("The Work Outing") and the time Moss ended up trapped in a toy crane machine game after finding an iPhone inside ("Italian for Beginners").
    • Additionally, the final spoken words are this:
  Douglas: This internet's not working, I can't connect.
  Roy: Just try turning it off and on again.
• Camp Gay: "A gay musical... called Gay!. That's quite gay."
• Casanova Wannabe: Roy straddles the line between this and Karvorka Man.
  Jen: Why are you doing this?
  Roy: Same reason I do anything, Jen... to have sex with a lady!
• Catchphrase Interruptus:
  • "Hello, IT, have you tried turn- oh I'm sick of saying that..."
  • "Hello, IT, have you - oh piss off I'm not in the mood."
  • "Have you tried sticking it up your arse?" (Accidentally said by Roy to his own mother.)
• Ceiling Cling: Richmond in "The Dinner Party".
• Character Catchphrase:
  • For Roy: "Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?" - lampshaded in "Bad Boys", when he realises that he says it a lot and starts worrying that it might be a catchphrase.
  • For Jen: "Taxi!" - usually heralding the end of the episode, or at least her subplot.
  • Moss keeps asking for a White Russian, despite not knowing what it is.
• Charity Workplace Calendar: One episode sees Roy putting together a sexy calendar for charity (and to win a date with one of the calendar girls.) Over time, the calendar morphs from a regular sexy calendar to a calendar filled with old ladies, to a calendar filled with nerdy men.
• Check, Please!: Jen's "Taxi!" serves almost the exact same Screw This, I'm Outta Here purpose.
• Chekhov's Gun: At least one per episode, it's hard to find one where a comment or event will not return later to catastrophically affect the plotline. Bonus points for Douglas randomly looking into a drawer he never opened before and finding his grandfather's service revolver in it, making it a literal example of the trope.
• Chekhov's Skill: In the episode "Men Without Women", Moss is revealed early on to have the ability to detect trace chemicals in food using his nose. This successfully saves Jen from getting roofied by Douglas at the end of the episode.
• Chew Bubblegum: Naturally, Moss gets to say a suitably geeky variant.
  I came here to drink milk... and kick ass. And I've just finished my milk.
• Chew Toy/Butt-Monkey: Roy, who's arguably the most notoriously unlucky of the cast, qualifies as either of these, depending on how sympathetically he's portrayed in any of the episodes.
• Church of Happyology: Beth Gaga Shaggy and the Spaceologists, whose opposition to the massage industry parallels Scientology's hate of psychiatry. The show's Guy Fawkes mask is very prominently shown throughout the episode, of course.
• Cliffhanger Copout: Series one ends with Jen and Moss in bed together, Roy and Moss's psychiatrist/girlfriend in bed together, and Denholm and Richmond in bed together. No mention is made of any of these liaisons in series two, or indeed ever.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • Jen shouts a string of mostly profanity at a Japanese executive after he stomps on her injured foot by mistake. The executive is confused for a bit... until his interpreter begins to repeat the tirade for him in Japanese. Played for Laughs even more in that all the cursing by Jen was bleeped out - to the characters and not just the audience, as it is revealed one of Denholm's subordinates was slamming a big red "Profanity Button" on the wall at every cuss word. Denholm follows this up by immediately turning to Jen and shouting "You fucked up!" at her, which the subordinate is too late to bleep out.
  • In Series 2, Roy's outburst at Denholm's funeral when his phone vibrates so violently that he thinks he's having a heart attack.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  Jen: "You need to pretend to be normal people, yeah? Keep the conversation about things that would interest everybody. You know, nothing about memory or RAM."
  Moss: "Oho! Memory is RAM!"
• Comic Role Play: In "From Hell", Roy attempts to teach Moss how to deal with a group of bullies through role play. Needless to say Hilarity Ensues.
• Continuity Nod: While most episodes are fully autonomous from each other, the amount of continuity nods and in-jokes increases throughout the seasons.
  • Somewhere between this and Brick Joke is the new emergency services number. Brought up and used for jokes in the first season, then not referred to again for two whole seasons.
  • The "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?" conversation makes a comeback in series 4.
  • Moss trying to kiss Roy to get out of situations involving the police.
  • A minor one, when Jen applies for a new job, she references that she knows and is a fan of Guided By Voices, a band she admits she wouldn't know if she wasn't at the IT. This is a nod to the song "Game of Pricks", by the same band, that appears at the end of The Dinner Party episode.
  • "Reynholm vs. Reynholm" has a bunch, including a reference to Douglas's fight with his transgender ex-girlfriend, Roy testifying about getting kissed on the bottom, and the return of Richmond.
  • In the Season three episode "The Speech", Roy and Moss trick Jen into thinking the internet is a black box with a light on it. The prank works so spectacularly well that nine episodes later, in the season five special, she brings out "The internet" again. Roy realises out loud that they never told her it was a joke.
• Crazy-Prepared: Denholm creates a tape that predicts his son Douglas dramatically gatecrashing his own funeral and chatting up a random woman during the process, which of course, happens to a tee. He also predicts his own mode of suicide in the note he leaves for Douglas with his service revolver.
• Creator Cameo
  • Graham Linehan appears in the chaos at the end of Jen's Employee of the Month speech, as a member of the Mariachi band in the episode "Fifty-Fifty," the "Blind Irish Sorcerer" from "Men Without Women", and as Guru Beth Gaga Shaggy (No relation to either Lady Gaga or Shaggy), the leader of Spaceology (Remember - Spaceology is a Religion, not a cult).
  • Producer Ash Atalla makes a cameo at the end of "The Work Outing" as the gay disabled man who comes on to Roy. Bonus points because of the fact that he actually IS disabled.
• Damned by Faint Praise: The poster reviews for Gay! A Gay Musical: "The audience applauded;" "More than tolerable;" "Not as long as some musicals."
• A Day in the Limelight: The season 4 finale "Reynholm vs Reynholm" focuses primarily on Douglas - while Jen is still heavily featured, Roy and Moss have only very brief appearances.
• Delayed Reaction: Lampshaded. Roy continues to promise Jen that one of these days, they'll prove she knows nothing about computers, even after Moss shows him that the computer she'd been pretending to use wasn't plugged in. When he storms out, Moss tells Jen "He'll realise in a minute," and they patiently wait until he leaps back through the door gesticulating wildly at the plug.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "You stole it? But that's stealing!"
• Description Cut: In "Jen the Fredo", Jen assures Roy that businessmen are different from what they were in the seventies. Cut to Reynholm laughing with a pack of visiting businessmen, apparently having just finished a discussion about their balls.
• Deus ex Machina: In the final episode, Roy and Jen become social pariahs and are due to be fired by Reynholm. After then screwing up further trying to fix things, Reynholm shows up as a fugitive, and asks them to take over the company while he stays hiding in IT, fixing everything.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Roy tells the psychiatrist she looks like his mother, and it's all downhill from there. Waaaaay downhill.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Parodied. A particularly hyperbolic anti-piracy ad compares digital piracy to stealing a handbag, a car, a baby, killing a policeman, then stealing his helmet to defecate in, then sending it to his grieving widow, and re-stealing it from her. The ad ends with an FBI agent shooting a young girl in the head after catching her downloading a film from the internet.
• Disney Villain Death: The degree to which Denholm Reynholm qualifies as a villain varies, but he meets his end by jumping out of a window when police are on their way to investigate irregularities in the pension fund.
• Disorganized Outline Speech: When everyone thinks Jen died, Denholm does this when he gives an opening eulogy:
  Denholm: God I miss Jen. She reminded me of me at her age. (beat) I mean, when I was her age, she reminded me of her age. (beat) She reminded me of my age at her age. (beat) When I was her age, she was reminded of me? ^note He got it right the first time.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Roy and Moss' 'married' life.
  • Jen and the smokers being banished to increasingly desolate places in "Moss and the German" is played like a Soviet forced resettlement.
  • Also in "Italian for Beginners", Moss giving birth to an iPhone.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Averted. In the first episode, a woman gives Roy a rather brutal beating using her shoes. Jen defuses the situation (after letting it go on for a while) but no one seems to be seriously concerned by it. However, in "50/50," when Jen is humorously concerned that her date, who lost big on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire because of her, will beat her with his shoe.
• Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male: Two subverted examples.
  • Jen laughs in Roy's face when he tells her about his masseur kissing him on the bottom, but is the only one In-Universe not to take it seriously, and is treated with disgust by the rest of the cast for doing so.
  • Jen summarily dismisses the trauma of Roy and Moss's sexual harassment by way of being trapped in an office with a very horny Douglas, but in the end, the two get a bigger payout for their lawsuit than she did from hers.
• Dramatic Downstage Turn: Parodied in "Reynholm Vs Reynholm," when Victoria gets up from their restaurant table to face the camera and deliver her enigmatic backstory — which puts her right next to another table where a couple of Living Props are eating. She then notices them and comments on what they've ordered.
• Driving into a Truck: In "Are We Not Men?", Roy unwittingly becomes the wheelman for a gang of bank robbers. After the robbery, the leader has Roy drive into the back of a waiting lorry. The gang then sits there till the heat is off and the police have dispersed.
• Drop-In Character: Richmond, who was often absent for several episodes due to Noel Fielding's commitment to The Mighty Boosh. At one point Jen apologies that "I keep forgetting you work here." Another time Moss says "Oh look! Richmond is still alive."
• Droste Image: First scene ever in the show shows Denholm in the same pose as on the photograph behind him.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe examples.
  • Roy's reaction to people laughing at his charity work for people with permanently crossed eyes. (After having done so himself, of course.)
  • Roy has to yell at Jen to stop laughing when he tells her about the masseur kissing him on the butt.
• Dull Surprise: The keyboard player whom Jen briefly dates.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: A key element of series 1 is the relationship between the IT department and the rest of the company: the IT department are generally shunned by the general staff, who are only interested in them briefly when they want their computer fixed. This is phased out from series 2 onwards however, which simply uses the IT department setting to do wacky sitcom shenanigans. Referenced by Graham Lineham in the DVD commentary for Episode 1 Series 2.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The final episode has the main trio legitimately work towards not screwing everything they do up like the always do to finally find success in life. Subverted in that they still end up screwing up horribly, but then end up becoming the heads of Reynholm industries and instant billionaires for a completely unrelated reason that none of them had anything to do with.
• The Eeyore: Richmond.
• Embarrassing Cover Up:
  • "Italian For Beginners": Roy grows obsessed with his girlfriend's bizarre story about her parents' deaths, and when she catches him researching the matter on his laptop late at night, he covers by quickly claiming that he was masturbating. And then looks relieved that he got away with her not finding out the truth.
  • "The Dinner Party": At a singles' mixer, Roy is assigned to Paula, who's had facial reconstruction surgery after an accident. When she becomes offended by his intrusive questions about the surgery, he excuses it by saying his mother wants breast implants and he's looking for a reputable surgeon.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Richmond "Felicity" Avenal.
• Employee of the Month: The main inciting event of "The Speech" has Jen win the Employee of the Month award, leading to her making Moss and Roy write her acceptance speech for it.
• Epic Fail:
  • Moss points a fire extinguisher at a fire. The extinguisher catches alight. And why? Because it was made in Britain.
  • Denholm points a stress machine at Jen. The stress machine detects nothing, despite Jen passing out from the stress moments after Denholm leaves. And why? Because it was made in Britain.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Reynholm is interviewed. His favorite non-fictional character is Sherlock Holmes. When he's told that Sherlock is fictional, he tells the interviewer to check her facts. She decides to ask him who his favorite fictional character is, which turns out to be The Elephant Man.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Douglas Reynholm makes his grand entrance by gatecrashing his father's funeral, Skyward Screaming in fake emotional pain, starting a fight with the priest and chatting up some nearby trollop Jen.
  • Roy taking his time to eat his doughnut and drink his coffee, licking his fingers one by one, before answering the phone with "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
  • Moss talking on the phone with an overly long Techno Babble speech.
    Moss: Hello, IT? Yuh-huh? Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot? [...] You see, the driver hooks a function by patching the system call table, so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread's about to jump in there and do its stuff, and you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory. [chuckles] ...Hello?
  • The way both men handle their respective callers is also quite telling. Roy is blunt and clear with his advice, but delivers it in an unnecessarily snide, confrontational and patronising fashion which just antagonises the person he's talking to (and later backfires when she later (a) turns out to be quite attractive and (b) belts him one in the face). He's fairly down to earth, but is kind of a dick. Moss, however, is polite, friendly, and genuinely wants to help, but the advice he gives is too technical and unclear. He means well, but is incredibly nerdy and lacks social awareness.
  • Jen lying through her teeth at her job interview, landing her the head of IT position.
  Jen: Haven't you been paying attention? I lie, and I lie, and I LIE!
• Even Evil Has Standards: Played for laughs; the German in "Moss and the German" might be a cannibal, but even he finds the Digital Piracy Is Evil warnings on DVDs a bit much.
• Even Nerds Have Standards:
  • Even Moss and Roy look down on Richmond the goth.
  • And even horndog Roy doesn't want anything to do with Judy.
  • Roy and Moss accuse Jen of lowering her standards by going out with the geeky rock musician.
• The Exit Is That Way: In "Moss and the German", Douglas arranges a man-date with Roy, says his PA will call him with the details, and then walks into Jen's office. He comes out a moment later saying "That's not my office".
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Moss, after posting a question to the general IT community about whether his and Roy's embarrassing symptoms might be the result of sympathetic PMT;
  Moss: Don't worry Roy, they wouldn't use something like that against us oh wait, they totally would, wouldn't they? Oh nooo!

F-J

• The Face: Jen is the socially capable Nerd Nanny for the IT Department. She has no computer skills but unlike the rest of the cast, she has social skills. Or at least moreso than Roy and Moss.
• Facepalm:
  • Jen or Roy frequently bury their faces in their hands, be it for their or anybody else's stupidity.
  • When Roy and Moss ran into a bomb disposal robot, the entire company facepalmed for them.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: Moss and Roy for an Overly Long Gag in one episode. Given a call-back in another, where Moss tried to use the tactic again only for Roy to shut it down "That's not going to work now!"
• Fake Shemp: Various celebrities appear on screen played by obvious doubles.
• Fan Disservice:
  • In-Universe, Jen distracts some co-workers by pointing out a shirtless builder. When they get up to look, it's just a flabby guy giving them a gormless look.
  • After Jen screws up Roy's plans to photograph the Girls of the Seventh Floor nude for a charity calendar, he's forced to settle for taking photos of shirtless geeks instead.
• Fashion Hurts: Jen demonstrates this with a pair of too-small shoes.
• "Fawlty Towers" Plot:
  • Roy uses a handicapped toilet at the theatre and accidentally yanks an emergency signal. When concerned theatre staff kick the door down to get to him, he pretends to be disabled. This snowballs into him getting loaded onto a bus on a wheelchair, bound for Manchester with a whole group of gay, disabled men.
  • Jen tells Moss to tell a man she had a bad date with that she's busy in order to avoid him. He tries, but when that doesn't work he tells the man that Jen is dead. This snowballs until the entire office thinks she's dead. Jen mistakes the monuments and grievances as celebrations for her winning Employee of the Month.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Jen will often laugh at a situation usually Played for Laughs while everyone else treats it as Serious Business. She is called a monster for laughing at a man's crossed eyes and for a masseur kissing Roy's ass.
  • Jen breaks up with a man for looking like a magician.
  • And who could forget the various punishments for DVD piracy.
• Female Misogynist: In "The Internet is Coming", a complicated series of events results in Jen being labelled a female misogynist. Her every attempt to correct this misapprehension only compounds the problem. Hilarity Ensues.
• Fiery Redhead: Jen has her moments.
• Five-Finger Fillet: Done by Moss.
• Flanderization: In the first series, Jen knows as much about computers as the typical non-technical office drone, but doesn't know nearly enough to be in IT, much less the head an IT department. This gets flanderized into knowing absolutely nothing about computers by the time series 4 came around.
• Flashback Stares: Richmond does these when telling his story. Parodied repeatedly as everyone else slowly leans into shot staring in the same direction and looking confused.
• Footsie Under the Table: Douglas can't remember why he ever married his estranged wife Victoria. So she reminds him.
• Foreshadowing: Not long into "The Work Outing", after Jen, Moss & Roy meet up with Phillip the scene ends with them going off to get their tickets, the camera lingers just long enough before the transition to show a group of men in wheelchairs in the background. They don't become involved again until the last 3rd of the show.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: After the anti-piracy ad scene, there is a brief period in which the TV shows an FBI warning ordering the viewer to stop watching immediately, call the FBI and place their hands above their head.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": practically a recurring theme;
  • Douglas burst into his father's funeral, ran up the aisle screaming "FATHERRRRRRRRR!" and got into a slap fight with The Vicar. This was after Roy's phone went off in his pocket making him think he'd had a heart attack, and Moss had compared the death to losing a pen.
  Jen: Just say, "I'm sorry for your loss," and move on.
  Roy, to the grieving widow: I'm sorry for your loss. Move on.
  • A flashback in Richmond's introductory episode shows Richmond attending Reynholm's father's funeral in full makeup (Reminiscent of Alice Cooper) and giving Reynholm's elderly mother a Cradle of Filth album to cheer her up.
  Richmond: Try track four, Coffin Fodder. It sounds horrible but it's actually quite beautiful.
  • In the finale, Roy is asked to be a pallbearer at a dwarf's funeral. He's the only tall person out of the 6 of them, and evidently nobody suggested he might hold the coffin at waist height...
  Jen: Didn't have the required gravitas?
  Roy: Gravitas? No no. Wasn't very dignified. It wasn't dignified at all, Jen! If I had to pick a word to describe Pip Pop's final journey to the grave, it would be "funny." It was sooo funny, Jen! Of course, I tried not to laugh, I tried to put other things in my head, but every step that we took was a fresh reminder of just how funny the whole thing was!
  Jen: You didn't... laugh, did you?
  Roy: I laughed my hole off!
• Fun T-Shirt: Roy has a wardrobe full of them.
• Gag Sub: The official DVDs of the show have an option for 'l33t' subtitles, which vary from Leet Lingo to ROT13 to Base-64 encoding depending on the episode.
• Game Show Appearance: Moss wins Countdown and joins 8+, a swanky, exclusive club of Countdown winners, where he participates in the illegal, unlicensed and highly dangerous Street Countdown.^note  Unless you dress up warm for the chilly air. Then you're probably fine.
• Genius Ditz: Moss demonstrates extraordinary intelligence, memory and mathematical ability... it's a shame he's a Cloudcuckoolander too.
• Gilligan Cut: In "Are We Not Men?" Roy promises Moss he won't go in too deep pretending to be a football fan. Cut to them sitting in a crowded stadium decked out in West Ham colours.
• Girlfriend in Canada: In "Jen The Fredo", Moss talks about a girlfriend he had "on holiday", causing Roy to snap "They're always on holiday, aren't they Moss?".
• Glad I Thought of It: Inverted when Moss suggests helping Jen out of a situation where she needed to speak Italian (in spite of not doing so). He came up with a plan for using some translation software and suggested it to Jen. Before he'd even finished explaining the idea, he concluded it was a stupid idea and wouldn't work. Then Jen just spelled out the idea back to him and Moss realised it would work and congratulated her for coming up with it.
• A God Am I:
  Denholm Reynholm: "Gentleman, when I first started Reynholm Industries, I had just two things in my possession: a dream, and six million pounds. Today, I have a business empire the like of which the world has never seen the like of which. I hope it doesn't sound arrogant when I say, that I am the greatest man in the world."
• Goshdang It To Heck: Moss. See Unusual Euphemism.
• Goths Have It Hard: Parodied. When Richmond explains why he became a goth, he mentions how people at work started treating him differently for no reason. This social alienation caused him to turn to gothic music for comfort. However, flashbacks showed the reason people started treating him differently was because he showed up to work wearing stereotypically gothic clothes.
• Grand Finale: Downplayed in the 2013 episode. As an alternative to the idea of a whole fifth series, which had been bouncing around for some time, it concludes the show altogether. However, the majority of it feels like a typical misadventure for the main cast, and it's only until the last few minutes when the IT department is promoted to management that it's made clear that it really is the last episode.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: Roy and Moss are completely out of their depth when trying to rub shoulders with average blokes. They latch onto the line "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?" as their only conversational gambit into football.
• Grossout Fakeout: In "Fifty-Fifty", Roy is in a taxi with his date, and hasn't noticed a suspicious-looking brown smear on his forehead. The date is grossed-out and tense, pointedly not looking at Roy as he tries to talk. She gets out of the taxi at her house, finally telling him "You've got poo on your head!" when he tries to talk his way inside. Puzzled, he wipes the stuff off his head and declares, "It's chocolate!" He and the date laugh, relieved... but she's still too grossed out to invite him in.
• Hacker Cave: The office basement where the IT department is located.
  • Subverted, as most of the equipment is simply being stored there and is not in use or working in any way.
  • The eagle eyed viewer can spot many historical computers, such as an Altair 8800, lent to the show by fans.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Denholm is normally very friendly with his staff, even the shunned IT department. Just make sure you aren't STRESSED and can work as a TEAM.
  • TEAM, TEAM, TEAM, TEAM, TEAM, TEAM, TEAM, TEAM...
  • Expanded upon even more in this series of phone conversations:
  "Hello? What? Well if you can't work as a team you're all fired. That's it, you heard me, FIRED! Get your things and go."
  "Hello, security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired. Escort them from the premises. And do it as a team. Remember, you're a team and if you can't act as a team, you're fired too."
  "Dom, get on to recruitment. Get them to look for a security team that can work as a team. They may have to escort the current security team from the building for not acting like a team."
• Handshake Substitute: Moss and Roy quietly fist bump after the panic caused by the destruction of the "Internet".
• Happy Dance: Moss and Roy's reaction to Jen falling for their "Internet" prank.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today?: Moss does this when he has to pretend to be married, several times going out of his way to mention all the frequent and amazing sex that goes on in his marriage.
• Have You Tried Rebooting?: A catchphrase for Roy and Moss.
• Headphones Equal Isolation: Douglas' iPod party.
• Ho Yay: More often than you'd think. Roy and Moss even kiss, twice. invoked
  • Moss also moves to kiss Roy again in 'Bad Boys'. It's essentially his go-to plan for distracting the police.
  • You're my wife Roy!
  • Played for laughs in the episode 'Moss And The German'.
  • Richmond and Denholm back before Richmond was a goth. They're shown skipping down the hallway together, hand in hand.
  • In universe, Moss and Roy interpret practically everything that Philip does as homoerotic. After Philip goes through all of the indicators that he was gay and defends each one, it turns out that reading Heat Magazine is indefensible and he is actually gay.
• Hollywood Hacking: In "The Haunting of Bill Crouse", Jen forces Moss to hack into an account...
  Moss: It might be a bit difficult, I have to hack into his private company account. It might take a bit of time. About four rapid keystrokes later... There we go...
• Homemade Inventions: Moss has a knack for these, from his own Stress Machine to the perfect bra to the Moth Bath Ladder.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms:
  • In the last episode of series 1, Jen is trying to tell the boys that she is 'getting a visit from Aunt Irma' and Moss keeps misunderstanding her. Roy finally comes up with a pop-culture reference, which gets through to him.
  Jen: I've fallen to the Communists.
  Moss: Well, they do have some strong arguments.
• Hurt Foot Hop: Jen forces on shoes that are several sizes too small for her, despite a shoe store employee's warnings that this would cripple her. To compound this issue, a Japanese businessman accidentally jumps on her foot, causing her to clutch her foot and hop, and many swearing gags.
• Hypocritical Humor: Jen's purpose in the IT department. She is supposed to be the one with social skills, but she is actually just as socially inept, awkward and consumed with her obsessions as Moss and Roy are, with the only real difference being that her particular tastes and obsessions are seen as more socially mainstream than the geeky fixations that the guys have. This enables her to get away with it more than they do.
  • She frequently chides Roy for not being honest and telling the truth to the girls he dates, but she often weaves one enormous ball of lies after another (and she is not even good at it).
  • Her attempt to convince Roy that nude female calendars are "empowering", after previously deriding them as sexist and sabotaging his attempts to photograph the girls of the seventh floor, due to Douglas threatening her job if the calendar didn't sell well.
• I Am Not Shazam: To quote Douglas: "Well, I'm the boss, head honcho, el numero uno, Mr. Big, The Godfather, Lord of the Rings, The Bourne Identity, er... Taxi Driver, Jaws... Forgot the question a while ago." invoked
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Well, Series Naming at least: Versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0...
• Ignorant About Fire: In the episode "Calamity Jen", Moss attempts to put out a fire with a fire extinguisher, only for the extinguisher itself to catch fire. He then calls for help by sending an email.
• I Like My X Like I Like My Y: "I like my women like I like my toast. Hot..." "And consumable with butter, you don't have to remind me."
• I'm a Humanitarian: An ad reading "I want to cook with you" is not what it seems.
• Incoming Ham: the very first time we see Douglas is his throwing open the doors of a church in the middle of a funeral, Milking the Giant Cow and Skyward Screaming "FATHERRRRRR!"
• Incompetence, Inc.: Reynolm Industries in a nutshell. Rest assured you will find unisex restrooms and lift doors that don't open all the way. In fact, we don't know what the company actually does!
  Denholm: That's the sort of place this is, Jen. A lot of sexy people not doing much work and having affairs.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Done by Jen (without words, she just rapidly gulps down her glass) in Friendface while Delena is going on about how awesome her life is and how perfect her marriage is.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Jen frequently claims an "office RAM emergency" to skip the boring staff meetings.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Roy is (somewhat intermittently) reduced to this when he's dealing with a traumatic break-up.
• Insistent Terminology: In the last episode, Roy's complaints about a dwarf have him labelled as a "small person racist", and he insists his apparent autism is "emotional colourblindness".
• It's A Small Net After All: It's just a small black box.
  • Well duh, the internet doesn't weigh anything.
• It's Not You, It's Me: "No, actually, it is you."
• Juggling Loaded Guns: Douglas opens a random drawer and finds his grandfather's unloaded revolver. He soon rectifies the situation. Whilst attempting to conceal it, he accidentally shoots himself in the leg shortly before an important business meeting. Amusingly, that happens after he checks if it's loaded by putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger five times. He is supposed to be a self-absorbed buffoon, but damn. In The Stinger, Moss waves the gun around to drive off the bullies in the park. "I've got a gun! I've got a ruddy gun!"

K-O

• Karmic Rape: After Roy and Moss try to get Jen sacked from her job, and Douglas tries to spike her tea with Rohypnol, Jen forces Douglas to drink the tea instead (which inexplicably makes him extremely aroused, even for Douglas) and locks him in a room with Roy and Moss.
• Kavorka Man:
  • Douglas, a fat, hairy oaf with mild mental retardation, has a pretty good record with hot women, with Jen and a few rumours and court cases being the exceptions.
  • Roy manages to snag dates, hook-ups and even relationships with some seriously hot, model-calibre women throughout the series, despite his dead-end job, scruffy appearance and geeky, abrasive demeanour. However, his relationships never last.
• Lampshade Hanging: The cast will usually point out and comment on things that exist in the environment purely to advance the plot and don't look like they belong there. Examples include:
  • The grandfather clock in the church during Denholm Reynholm's funeral.
  • In one of the episodes, Roy says that his trademark "have you tried turning it off and on again" "is like a bloody catchphrase".
• Large Ham:
  • Both Reynholms. "FATHERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" Douglas comes across extremely unintelligent and oafish at first, but becomes more eccentric like his father in series 4.
  • Roy and Moss also have their over the top moments but when she gets going, Jen can out-ham even Douglas.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Through an improbable series of events, Roy ends up walking the streets dressed as a tramp begging for 50p for a phone call to allow him to get back into the building. Then he meets the very tramp he'd heckled earlier for having too improbable of a story.
  • Jen also intentionally ruins Roy's chance to do a nude calendar with the girls on the seventh floor (which had been their suggestion, not his). Aside from ruining one of the few Throw the Dog a Bone moments for Roy, her actions took a virtually guaranteed successful way to raise money for charity and pretty much doomed it to failure. Douglas then informs her that the success of the calendar is now entirely her responsibility.
• Last Het Romance: Jen to a guy with mysterious sexuality.
• Last-Name Basis: Moss.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Roy is going on about his trauma over being kissed on the ass by a masseur, he has to stop halfway through to angrily tell Jen to quit laughing. However, due to the way the shot is framed and the fact that we don't hear her, it comes off as him shaming the (more audible) studio audience.
• Left the Background Music On: Twice in "The Haunting of Bill Crouse" Moss seems to have a dramatic epiphany accompanied by a DUN-DUN-DUUUN!, only for the music to turn out to be his mobile phone's ringtone.
• Line-of-Sight Name: How Roy comes up with his football team name when he sees a ham, and says "West Ham", but subverted in that West Ham is a real team.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Jen. Roy and Moss completely fall apart when she's not around. When Jen left the IT department for an interview for a new job in one episode, Moss gets electrocuted and concussed and Roy loses his shirt and jacket, gets thrown out of the building and becomes a wandering tramp living in a cardboard box. And all of this happened in the span of two hours.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: Roy suffers this when he can't get some disturbing images out of his mind.
• Look Behind You: The entire plot where Roy is stuck under an employee's desk. Moss fails at this completely because what he says isn't much better than actually using the phrase "Go Look At The Distraction." (Jen employs a different method.)
• Love Potion: Subverted, in that the "potion" is actually just Rohypnol, and lampshaded in The Previously on a later episode, where the narrators point out that Rohypnol doesn't cause arousal - just tiredness. Pre-lampshaded (and possibly making the later example a Hypocrisy Nod) when Moss asked Jen if she was drinking it because she was having trouble sleeping.
• Malaproper:
  • Jen, which Roy frequently makes fun of. She gets her own back when he uses the phrase "damp squid" in a courtroom (although his explanation of why it should be "squid" rather than "squib" actually makes sense).
    • This is right after Roy picking on Jen saying complaining that men put women up on a "peddle stool".
  • Moss is utterly convinced that the correct pronunciation of tapas is "tape-ass", no matter what anyone else says.
• Manchild:
  • Moss is a man in his thirties who acts and speaks like a 4-year-old most of the time, doesn't swear, still lives with his mother and sobs uncontrollably when confronted by bullies...
  • Roy to a lesser extent.
• Mathematician's Answer:
  Roy: What was that name, was it Julie or Judy?
  Moss: Yes. One of those.
  • And another one: "Is it a PC or a Mac?" "...Yes!"
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Played for laughs; every so often it's suggested that Richmond might actually have become some kind of supernatural vampire-like being through the power of sheer goth-induced moping.
• Medium Awareness: The last episode has Jen and Roy discussing how their coming up with a scheme seems familiar, and they get an eerie feeling that things might go From Bad to Worse. They do.
• Menstrual Menace: Jen transforms into some sort of demon woman due to PMS.
• Metaphorgotten: The boss' speech in Calamity Jen
  Denholm: I am declaring war... what am I declaring war on? Stress. Stress is a disease, people, and I am the cure. ...I'm a doctor with a cure. No! I'm a general, and it's still a war! ...a war on disease! STRESS!
  • Moss has a few:
  Moss: Well, prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them along with this slice of humble pie that comes direct from the oven of shame, set at gas mark "egg on your face"! (beat) I sort of forget what I was talking about.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Richmond.
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup: Jen dumping Michael for "looking like a magician". And also dumping Peter File for, well, being named Peter File.
• Mistaken for Destitute: In one episode, Roy gets stuck outside the office with no shirt on for several hours. Several passersby assume that he's a homeless man.
• Mistaken for Dying: Roy in "Return of the Golden Child." It was supposed to happen on Thursday at 3:00.
• Mistaken for Gay: In "Work Outing", Roy tells a Snowball Lie to explain why he is in the disabled toilet that ends with everyone in the theatre believing that he is disabled and gay. And ultimately on a bus full of disabled gay men on its way to Manchester.
• Mistaken for Racist: In "The Internet is Coming", a strange chain of events conspire to make the internet brand Jen as a female misogynist who hates the homeless, and Roy as bigoted against little people. Their attempts to fix matters only make things worse. Roy does not help by continually pointing that he cannot be racist against little people as little people are not a race.
• Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: Richmond, despite wearing over-the-top makeup, obsessing over Cradle of Filth and being banished to the server room by Moss and Roy, is actually quite sweet and friendly. However, more than a few minutes of his company still tends to have a depressing effect on people.
• Mrs. Robinson: Moss' therapist, which disturbs Roy as she looks exactly like his mother. She ends up sleeping with him.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • It's not just the game show, it's Street Countdown!
  • Douglas has a Star Trek inspired sex-tape.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Used a couple of times, as in the top quote, and in the series finale.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Jen cannot speak Italian, despite her misguided belief that she sounds like she does which is sort of the same. Moss reminds her that Italians and people who speak Italian would strongly disagree.
  • This backfires on her so badly that a promising, multi-million dollar deal with an Italian businessman is catastrophically destroyed in just a couple of minutes.
• Nerd Nanny: Jen plays this role about as straight as you can, outright telling Moss that Richmond's "going to come out and play with us for a while" just like a schoolteacher would in Richmond's debut episode.
  • Deconstructed and Reconstructed in "Tramps Like Us". Jen comes to the realisation that, as the only thing she does is take care of Moss and Roy and play Guitar Hero, she is wasting her life and potential in a dead end job. Roy points out that idea that he and Moss require babysitting at all is a bit insulting, as they're both grown men. By the end of the episode, however, Moss and Roy prove that they really do need Jen to balance out their lives because they're terrible at coping with real-life situations, and Jen finds the feelings of fulfillment in simply being needed by them (as she has no other skills to offer).
• Nerds Are Virgins:
  Moss: Compiling a list for a role-playing game I'm hosting. [...] Kind of like a Dungeons & Dragons thing
  Jen: Ughh, is this something to do with sex?
  Moss: Ha! Far from it, Jen!
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Moss's ability to smell individual ingredients in drinks.
• Nice Guys Finish Last: Which Roy attempts to prove. See All Girls Want Bad Boys.
• Nice to the Waiter: When Jen goes on a date with Bill, she discovers that the man is very rude towards the staff and a complete sleazeball. When talking about the date, Roy tells her that when he used to work as a waiter he and the other staff members used to contaminate the customer's food as punishment. When asked if the waiters were snickering while giving the food to Bill, he confirms they have contaminated his food as revenge.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: There is a brief cameo of a character called "Raymond Peterfellow", who shows Douglas a design for a van with a pair of breasts on the front. He's a pretty blatant parody of the nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In the second episode of the first series Moss and Roy reference an incident in which an unattended soldering iron caused a golf... I mean fire.
  • One of Roy's girlfriends told him how her parents were killed in a fire. At a Seaparks, while watching a sea lion show, in a concrete, outdoor amphitheatre with at least a dozen exits. At this point, she refuses to go into further detail, and Roy spends most of the episode trying to figure out how it was possible. Eventually he does, after building a scale model of the amphitheatre - but before he can tell anyone, the model burns out of control, putting him in hospital, and he likewise refuses to talk about it.
  • That time Moss lost his glasses in Amsterdam. This one is an inversion as the story he's actually not meant to talk about is the one about when they got drunk and decided to hire prostitutes, also in Amsterdam. He gives a full account of that story to the entire staff that attended the IT office party, but we never hear the glasses story which is the one that was fine for him to tell.
  • "Do you think it would be helpful to role play?" "It certainly helped me learn how to buy sandwiches." (The incident not so much being the role play as whatever Moss did that prompted its necessity.)
• No Periods, Period: Averted; an episode from Season 1.0 focuses on Jen experiencing an angry period, with Roy and Moss discovering the male period and that theirs are synching up with Jen, demonstrating sympathy symptoms and eventually culminating in worldwide computer technician riots.
• No Social Skills: Roy and Moss. Jen's job is based on the fact that she's (marginally) better at socializing than them, and she certainly likes to think she is, but in truth she's practically as socially awkward as they are — she just lacks their overt geekiness.
• Not Really a Birth Scene: In one episode, Moss climbs into a crane machine to get an iPhone that was dropped in but gets stuck. Jen manages to use the crane to get the iPhone, but Moss has to try moving to the side to let the iPhone slip through. When it finally gets out Moss exclaims "it's beautiful."
• Obfuscating Disability: Roy in 2.1 does this to avoid getting in trouble for using the handicapped toilet.
• Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: Reynholm Industries.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Moss answers Johan's ad believing that he was offering lessons in German cooking; it turns out that due to a translation mixup, Johan is actually a cannibal fetishist looking to cook with someone. Eventually they both realise the humor in the situation and watch a movie together instead.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted in Jen the Fredo, where Douglas introduces three visiting businessmen as "my good friend Paul and two men named John." This is done deliberately so that Jen, who has become a pimp-like figure, can tell Roy to "get out there and show those Johns a good time."
• Otaku Surrogate: Jen may be building up to be a subtle or soon-to-be uncloseted example, judging by the decorations in her office (the most obvious being the poster on the wall to the right of Jen starting in late Series 3, but a Freeze-Frame Bonus shows a few significant examples on her shelf).
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The beginning of "Men Without Women" takes place in an "Arabian Nights" Days type fantasy setting. Douglas journeys through the desert in search of a wizard living in a tent, to whom he pays 20 gold pieces for a love potion.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • The opening scene of the pilot, Reynholm "sizing up [Jen] with a long, hard stare."
  • The second scene of the pilot, Roy's introduction: ignoring the phone as he eats and then licks each of his fingers clean one-by-one.
  • 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3.
  • "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?..."
  • Reynholm eating an apple... on the end of the video he has made to be played at his funeral.
  • The Fake-Out Make-Out and the police cars.
  • "Hello. Hello computer. Hello. Hello. Hello computer." ^note "HELLO!"
  • "Your name is Maurice Moss, is it not?"
• Overused Running Gag: Roy frequently gets sick of saying "Have you tri-" oh you know what he says. They actually turned his annoyance at his own catchphrase into a Running Gag in its own right.

P-T

• Pass the Popcorn: Moss pulls some out when listening to Douglas talk about "Space Star Ordering".
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Many people seem to think Roy saying the rest of the office see him and Moss as "drudgeons" counts. Drudgeon is actually a real word.
• Perky Goth: Richmond, at times. At others he's capable of making everyone else thoroughly depressed.
• The Peter Principle: Jen is the poster girl for this. Not only is she not competent for the job she does have (she became head of IT by lying about her nonexistent computer skills, and in fact doesn't even know what the initials IT stand for) but she keeps applying for jobs she is even less capable of handling. Hilarity Ensues of course!
  • It's even lampshaded by multiple characters in one episode: "It's not for you, Jen."^note though it turns out they're talking more about the seedy nature of the job arranging entertainment for old-fashioned, bigoted men being at odds with her Straw Feminist tendencies
• Phone Number Jingle: Parodied: the new emergency number is 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3.
• Pink Is Erotic:
  • In "The Haunting of Bill Crouse", Roy wears a pink shirt with crossed guitars on it (brown Stratocasters) as talks about Bill "The News" Crouse's history of bragging about his sex life. Roy also leaves to lech on the girls on the 5th floor, unwittingly getting the attention of a freakishly ugly woman called Judy, who proceeds to harass him for the rest of the episode. In "Italian for Beginners", the pink t-shirt returns as it was worn by Roy's girlfriend, Julia, as a pajama top.
  • Douglas Reynholm is the new boss of Reynholm Industries and is shown wearing pink in a few episodes (a t-shirt, a tie, and a dress shirt). Douglas is obsessed with sex, is openly sexist, and is obsessed with Jen.
• Platonic Prostitution: Moss tells about the time he and Roy were so drunk in Amsterdam that they hired a couple of prostitutes, but were too scared to do anything so they took them to a fair instead. In the end they only charged them half price.
  Moss: That was a nice evening wasn't it? With Brandy and Crystal.
• Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: In one episode, Douglas does this to himself. He is trying to drug Jen's tea, but gave himself tea in identical mugs, and switches the mugs around several times as he forgot which one is his. He eventually picks the correct cup. Later on, his ruse is revealed and Jen forces him to drink the tainted tea.
• Poor Man's Porn: Roy has an issue of a fictional lingerie catalog called "Penelope's Fancies" in his desk. He's keeping it safe so he can deliver it to his neighbor.
• Post-Coital Collapse: In "The Speech", we see Douglas Girl of the Week collapse beside him in bed after they're done having sex, with a Modesty Bedsheet covering them up to their necks.
• Precision F-Strike: Douglas to the inter-faith tour.
  • The subtitles on Netflix claim that at one point Moss complains about having to use the "motherfucking stairs", something extremely out of character for him and his squeaky-clean dialect to say, but he clearly is saying "motherfudging" instead, making this an accidental kind of subversion.
  • After a Cluster F-Bomb which was entirely bleeped out, it is revealed that the bleeping occurred in-universe and when Denholm says: "As for you Jen, you fucked up!" the line is completely clear, the person using the profanity buzzer having just missed the mark.
  • Jen, when talking to an old classmate about how successful everyone else from high school has become:
  Classmate: ...I hope that's not a rude question.
  Jen: No nonononono no no...
  Classmate: It'd be awful if I just listed all our successful friends and you were stuck in some terrible, dead-end job you hated.
  Jen: Oh God, yeah, that'd be an absolute fucker.
• Product Placement: In the unaired pilot for the US IT Crowd, the amusement park that Roy and Moss took the hookers to is quite clearly Universal Studios.
• Public Exposure: In the third season finale, the company decide to do a sexy calendar to raise money for a charity for the "boss-eyed". Roy's original attempt to use the ladies from Floor 7 is stopped by Jen, the attempt to do grannies fails and the "geek" calendar produces unattractive male geeks, instead of the Liz Lemon sort.
• Pun-Based Title: Combining the phrase "the it crowd", as in a group of cool people, and IT, professionals in information technology.
• Put on a Bus: Richmond, after filming clashed with the tour of The Mighty Boosh. Would be Chuck Cunningham Syndrome were it not for one throwaway Lampshade Hanging;
  Roy: Whatever happened to Richmond?
  Moss: He got scurvy.
  • The Bus Came Back: He returned for the series 4 finale.
• Race Lift: In the unaired US IT Crowd's pilot, Denholm is African-American.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Jen being hired as the IT department's manager despite not knowing anything about computers isn't unrealistic. Most IT directors are not technicians. They are business or sales majors, depending on how company hierarchy is managed. What's odd is that in-universe Moss and Roy expect that Jen will be a technician and are horrified that she is not. What is unrealistic is Denholm assigning her as IT's manager because she claimed to know about computers.
• Reckless Gun Usage: see Juggling Loaded Guns entry.
  • Not only that. After finding the gun and reading his father's letter, Douglas proclaims, "I wonder if it's loaded", immediately followed by opening his mouth wide, pointing the gun at it, and rapidly squeezing the trigger five times.
  Douglas: *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* "No."
• Reset Button: If it wasn't for Richmond's later appearances, "The Red Door" would be a textbook example. Jen finds Richmond in the server room, to where he had been banished from the office mainstream a few years before. She encourages him to rejoin the office; Reynholm reinstates him, then capriciously changes his mind and sends him back to IT. Moss has taken Jen's suggestion to clean the basement's window and let the daylight in, which makes Richmond retreat back behind the red door.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • Moss' appearance as a guest on a BBC current affairs program, inspired by Guy Goma.
  • The German Cannibal was inspired by the case of Armin Meiwes.
• RPG Episode:
  • Jen is told to take some raunchy business clients out on the town, but instead she hands them over to Moss, who takes them through a pencil and paper Tabletop Game, implied to be Dungeons & Dragons itself. The clients are confused and annoyed at the whole concept, but by the end of the episode we find that they've greatly enjoyed themselves.
  • The packaging for the limited edition Season 1-4 DVD boxset is designed to look like an RPG rulebook.
• Rule #1: The Fight Club Shout-Out that is Street Countdown starts as...
  Prime: "The first rule of Street Countdown is... that you really must try to tell as many people as possible about it! It’s a rather fun game and the more people we tell about it, the better."
• Rule of Funny: When it comes to Jen's towering ignorance about computers.
• Rule of Three: The catchy new emergency services jingle is said thrice; twice by the advert, and once by Moss.
• Running Gag: It is never made explicitly clear exactly what Reynholm Industries does. Lampshaded when Jen refers to another company as the "top makers of a product that has something to do with our company"
• Sanity Ball: Depending on the episode, it can be held by either Roy or Jen, and in some very specific situations, even Moss. Generally speaking, Roy and Moss tend to lose it over geeky things or matters of social interaction they are ill-equipped to handle, while Jen will go completely crazy over something which is seemingly more 'normal' but which she just goes way overboard in taking seriously.
• Scrabble Babble: Moss plays the word "TNETENNBA" during a game of Countdown and wins.
• Screaming Birth: Parodied in "Italian for Beginners" when Jen helps Moss "birth" an iPhone.
• Series Continuity Error: In series 3's Calendar Geeks, Roy shows no distress at being in a room full of balloons during his photo-shoot. In series 4 we're told he has a terrible fear of balloons.
• Sex Goddess: April, Douglas's Girl of the Week in "The Speech", is really amazing in bed, with Douglas describing that she "really knows that area'', with the implication that her being trans gives her some extra insight into the male anatomy.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • A fair few of these from Moss.
  Moss: You stole it?
  Roy: Well... yes.
  Moss: But that's STEALING!
  • There's also the gay musical. Called "Gay!". Which Roy says is "Quite gay."
• Shell-Shock Silence: A brief one after Douglas shoots himself in the leg in his office. He tries to deny hearing a bang, even as he has to shout over the tinnitus.
• Ship Tease: Roy and Jen on occasion, particularly in the first series. There are also a few hints that Roy and Moss might be slightly more than Heterosexual Life-Partners.
• Shirtless Scene:
  • In one scene, Jen tries to distract an office full of women by telling them that a builder outside the window has taken his shirt off, "just like in ads" (a reference to the Diet Coke Hunk). It's true — but the builder is not hunky.
  • Roy loses his T-shirt because of Moss's trick (he spilled coffee on it), and he had to lend his jacket to a lady who was cold (emergency situation). He ended up running crazily around the office premises. Not exactly eye candy, but it's not Fan Disservice either.
• Shout-Out: With real geeks involved with the show, the list of things in the office that aren't a Shout-Out to classic computer geekery, nerdly in jokes, and memetic mutations would be shorter. To wit:
  • Every piece of British 80s computer gaming nostalgia ever. The range runs from an Underwurlde poster on the wall to huge piles of Spectrum ZX81s to the menus from the DVD release being ripped off from Head over Heels.
  • The menus of the DVDs are also shout outs in their own right:
    • Season 1.0 menus have animations of the cast in ZX Spectrum graphics.
    • Season 2.0 has menus including Tetris, Lemmings, Mortal Kombat and even a parody of the intro of Zero Wing, complete with Engrish!
    • Season 3.0's Episode Selection menu has a Grow Cube-style, IT Crowd themed animation.
    • Season 4.0's menus feature "levels" identical in design and gameplay to Windosill.
  • In one episode, Roy tries to break up with an old girlfriend who wears a lot of make up which melts when she cries making her look like The Joker. The episode ends with Douglas hitting on her in the same manner as Heath Ledger's Joker hitting on Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight, scars and all.
  • Peter File's unfortunate name is a call back to a similarly named person in the infamous Brass Eye Paedogeddon special.
  • The IT department's set is decorated with various Alternative Comics and their related merchandise:
    • Figurines depicting Pogeybait from Eightball, Jimmy Corrigan from Acme Novelty Library, and Buddy Bradley from Hate.
    • A poster of Jim Woodring's Frank hangs behind Roy's desk.
  • Moss says that Johann is "a fine young cannibal." The audience audibly groans from this one.
  • Roy has a framed Axe Cop poster prominently displayed in his flat.
  • There's a poster of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the wall somewhere behind Moss' desk.
  • "And the first rule about Street Countdown is that you really must tell everyone about it."
  • During a Channel Four news montage of people watching a viral video of Jen and Roy on their mobile phones in the special, one of the locations seen very briefly is Craggy Island Parochial House.
  • The final episode has several internet references, including Anonymous and "Chitter", among other things. invoked
  • In "Are We Not Men", Moss gets very annoyed with Roy for borrowing his red stapler.
  • Douglas's narration in the very beginning of "Something Happened" references Kirk's opening narration from Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • Jen's backup singer attire is a walking (and lampshaded) Shout-Out to Stevie Nicks.
  • There's a Samurai Jack toy on a desk in the IT department.
  • Roy and Moss's late arrival at, and consequent disruption of, a meeting is a direct lift from the Laurel and Hardy film Sons of the Desert. Freely admitted on the commentary track.
• Shrug of God: Trying to figure out what Reynholm Industries actually does would be exhausting, even for the creator.
• Skewed Priorities: At the end of Moss and the German, the police break into the cannibal's flat and arrest... Roy and Moss for owning and watching a pirated film.
• Slapstick: Quite a few minor examples in the show's run, but the most notable is Douglas' incredibly violent and hilarious fight with April in season 3.
• Slipping a Mickey: In one episode in Series 2, Douglas slips Rohypnol (roofies) into Jen's drink in an attempt to get her to sleep with him.
• Slow Clap: Moss starts one in response to Roy's impassioned speech at the end of Something Happened in Series 4.
• Slow-Loading Internet Image: Lampshaded, with Roy harking back to the days of dial-up.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Judging by Denholm and Douglas, this is a Reynholm family trait.
  • Jen also displays some qualities from this trope, being neither quite as competent, upwardly mobile or deserving of being such as she seems to believe she is. It particularly kicks in after she wins Employee Of The Month in "The Speech", however.
• Snap Back: The cliffhanger of Series 1 (which even ended with "To Be Continued...") was never continued in Series 2.
• Snowball Lie:
  • Moss telling an unwanted suitor of Jen's that she was dead to keep him away from her.
  • Also seen when Roy says that he's disabled, and Moss that he's a barman, both due to being caught using the wrong toilets, and having to keep up the lie for the rest of the episode.
• Snub by Omission: An Overly Long Gag during a company meeting where the Boss goes around thanking all the departments, such as the lawyers and the accountants and even the janitors, but not our titular heroes. Upon each announcement, he says something that could potentially describe IT, only for it to be another department.
  • Taken to extremes when he's filling the champagne glasses of Roy, Moss and Jen while talking about "these three people," - and then turns to the toilet cleaners. One wonders if he really had been trying to praise them while messing with them. He later sincerely thanks Roy in the corridor later in the episode, so it's possible.
  • Inverted at the end of the episode, when the three unexpectedly show up at a work party at a glitzy nightclub, and Denholm immediately ditches who he's with in order to hang out with them.
• Sophisticated as Hell: "Jorg... such fire! I am too tired for revolution. And we've walked f***ing miles!"
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Subverted mercilessly. After a visiting Japanese executive accidentally stamps on Jen's already mangled foot, she unleashes a vitriolic tirade full of bleeped-out swear words... then Denholm congratulates an employee on "being so quick on the Profanity Buzzer", which we see is a labelled button mounted on the wall nearby. He then immediately tells Jen she fucked up, and and the employee is a second too late on the buzzer.
• Springtime for Hitler: Moss and Roy feed Jen a bunch of ridiculously nonsensical IT 'facts' to use in her Employee of the Month speech, in an attempt to utterly embarrass her. Too bad that nobody in attendance at the speech is computer-literate enough to notice anything remotely wrong. It ends up working out for them when she breaks 'the Internet' and sparks a major panic, however.
• Stage Magician: Jen breaks up with her driving instructor boyfriend because of his uncanny resemblance to a stage magician, looking like an expy of David Blaine.
• Standard Office Setting: The protagonists work in a cluttered basement underneath one of the tallest and most stately skyscrapers in London. They are the only company department with such ugly environment (though Jen, the boss, decorates her office with girly stuff, and Roy and Moss fill their shared room with geeky decoration and collectables). The rest of the office takes this trope up to 11, as it has to be one of the most glamorous workplaces on television (open space bullpen setting, lots of light, lots of windows, green plants everywhere, expensive art in bosses' offices, fancy computers, extremely pretty young women who just seem to hang around, nice benefits for everyone etc.).
• Stand-In Portrait: Moss and Roy do this, not to hide a person behind a picture frame, but to hide a fire behind a monitor frame.
  Denholm: "Nice screen saver!"
• Status Quo Is God:
  • The three will never escape their basement office ghetto or get any respect from the rest of the company. Until the final episode.
  • Despite reporting catastrophic losses nearly every episode in addition to the embezzling of Denholm and squandering of Douglas, Reynholm Industries is still very much in business.
• Stock Sound Effect: There's a surreally justified version in one episode, where Moss has a concussion and has lost his memory. When he knocks his head again and regains it, there's a close-up on his eyes opening, accompanied by the most hilarious possible choice of music: the Windows XP log-on tone...
• Straw Feminist: Jen in "Calendar Geeks", who convinces the girls on seventh to make a nude calender featuring unemployed men or grannies instead of them, arguing it's "oppressive" and "sexist". Of course, when Douglas tells her she'll be accountable if it's not a success, she immediately tells Roy to use them, calling it "empowering". It appears to be a combination of jealousy, and screwing Roy over by forcing him to photograph old women until she is made responsible for it. And when she ropes Roy into not quitting the project because of the old ladies fiasco, she quickly shifts it away from using attractive women to nerdy male geeks. The project fails as badly as you would think.
• Stupid Crooks: The bank robbers dupe Roy into being their getaway driver by keeping him completely oblivious to their motives, and are surprised when he calls the police on what he assumes to be an unrelated robbery.
• Stylistic Suck: Douglas's Star Trek-inspired sex tape; the acting is bad, "female Spock" puts on her ears just as she comes into frame, and the boom mic is briefly visible in a shot.
  • Jen's singing. Her technique isn't the problem.
• Sublime Rhyme: Denholm Reynholm.
• Suicide as Comedy: Denholm Reynholm's suicide is played this way, being more in a "wait, did that just happen?" way than actual sadness, and the audience laugh.
• Super-Senses / The Nose Knows: As shown in one episode, Moss has the ability to smell the ingredients and chemicals in a drink.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Douglas Reynholm will often ask someone out of the blue if they heard the rumor that he murdered his first wife and deny it in the same breath.
• Take Off Your Clothes
  Moss: Take your top off, Jen.
  Jen: Sorry?
  Moss: You heard me: take your top off.
• Take That!:
  • In the bomb disposal robot scene:
  Policeman: I'm just having a couple of problems with it.
  Moss: What kind of operating system does it use?
  Policeman: Vista.
  Moss: We're going to die.
  • In the Series Finale, a video message from a voice-distorted, Guy Fawkes Mask-wearing member of Anonymous is interrupted by his parents coming in, pulling down the white backdrop and taking the mask off to reveal he's a young teenage boy broadcasting from his bedroom.
• Taking the Fight Outside: When Jen (who is single) is invited to a party hosted by an old friend from school, Moss pretends to be her husband. Roy later shows up at the party in an attempt to convince an Abhorrent Admirer that he's dating Jen and the two men get into an argument; each man tries to convince the crowd that Jen is their partner. Roy eventually calls Jen a "bitch" for 'cheating' on him, which causes Moss to slap him in defense of his 'wife's' honour. Roy asks Moss whether he wants to take the fight outside, and when the pair step outside they decide keeping up their ruses is too difficult and they sprint home.
  Moss: [slaps Roy] How dare you call my sexy wife a bitch!
  Roy: Do you want to take this outside?
  Moss: With pleasure, Sir!

• Team Mom: Jen. Roy is offended at Jen's suggestion that he and Moss need her to take care of them, but when she leaves for a job interview at another company, Moss gets concussed, goes amnesiac, and gets his hair singed while Roy becomes homeless and starts sleeping in an old box on the street. All in the span of merely two hours.
• Technobabble: The very first time we meet Moss he gives us an earload ("Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot? You see, the driver hooks the function by patching the system call table so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread is about to jump in there and do its stuff. And you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory!"), which is an accurate description of a common problem with Windows drivers. This is in contrast to Roy's rather more concise troubleshooting.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That:
  • Would you expect anything less at the funeral of a character played by Chris Morris? Later on, his son finds a posthumous letter from him that somehow managed to correctly identify his cause of death, even when his funeral tape couldn't. Seems he was aware that he might be jumping out a window that day. Despite having the service revolver in his desk explicitly because he wasn't planning to jump out the window.
  • Played straight with the recorded phone response of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?", even in cases where the problem is slightly more complicated.
• This Isn't Heaven: In one episode Douglas has a Near-Death Experience. His father is welcoming him towards a big white door, and it's all very white and glowy. Then Hitler pokes his head out, and Reynholm unconvincingly tries to explain that "we're having a Heaven party. That was a Hitlergram".
• Title Drop: Subverted in the finale, during which Moss asks, "Who are we?!" to which Jen and Roy respond, "The IT department."
• Too Dumb to Fool: Why Roy and Moss's plan to humiliate Jen backfires - none of the senior staff know anything about computers either. Some of them do know a bit more then Jen (or at least are less gullible), as none of them bought that when you type Google into Google, it breaks the internet.
• Training from Hell: Nerd-style. In series three, Moss is having trouble with some bullies in the park he walks through to get to the office. Roy tries to help him with some roleplay, upon which Moss bursts into tears as it was "too realistic". He eventually solves the problem when he finds Douglas's grandfather's old service revolver...
• Transhuman Treachery: Douglas experiences a humorous small-scale version of this when he starts destroying his office with his new robot hand and laughs maniacally.
  Moss: I would have used my robot hand for good!
• Trans Relationship Troubles: A infamous example in "The Speech", Douglas dates April, a transgender reporter, who is pleased to find that he is so open-minded about accepting her gender reassignment. Unfortunately, it turns out that this was only due to One Dialogue, Two Conversations: When she told Douglas "I used to be a man," he was only half listening and thought she said "I'm from Iran". He breaks up with upon finding this out, and she proceeds to start a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on him, crashing right through a shareholder meeting.
• Trash the Set: In a series 3 outtake, when Jen gets frustrated at a concussed Moss, she proceeds to destroy every prop on the set she was in... a toilet cubicle.
  Katherine Parkinson: Sorry, was I supposed to do that?
• TV Genius: Averted with Roy, played straight with Moss.

U-Z

• Uncanny Valley Makeup: In "Friendface", Roy dates a girl that puts on so much makeup that he says when he breaks up with her will be like breaking up with The Joker. They show her and his description seems accurate, especially when she starts crying and her makeup gets smeared.
• Unfortunate Names: Peter File. Say it out loud (but only in an English accent - which is lampshaded by Moss, who suggests he move to the US to avoid embarrassment).
  "Yes, I'm Peter File!"
• Urine Trouble: When Moss is stuck in the crane machine, he predicts this is going to happen.
  Moss: These toys may smell of wee come the morn.
• The Unintelligible:
  • Window Washing Willy from West Gibberish.
  Jen: Why'd you let him in?
  Roy: He was very persuasive. I think...
  • The laptop company's phone support agent. Merely asking Jen to hit delete was a two minute ordeal.
• Unperson: Roy photoshops his ex out of all of his pictures in an effort to forget her.
  Moss: It's like someone broke up with Stalin.
• The Unreveal: Moss never reveals what the word "tnetennba" means. When asked to use it in a sentence, he says, "Good morning, that's a nice tnetennba."
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Double Subverted when, in a B-plot, Douglas embarks on a successful relationship with a Transgender woman — but it comes crashing down when he realises that she was saying "I used to be a man," not "I'm from Iran."
• Unusual Euphemism: "I've got a motherflipping gun!" and "I had to walk all the way down the motherfudging stairs."
  • And "Visit from Aunt Irma."
• Vengeful Ghost: Parodied in the episode "The Haunting of Bill Crouse", in which the titular Bill Crouse, believing that Jen has died, falsely claims that he was the last person to sleep with her in order to win sympathy from others. Throughout the episode, Jen tries to confront him about it, but each time, circumstances cause him to believe that she's a vengeful ghost haunting him.
• Verbal Backspace
  Roy: Every man has a story like this.
  Jen: This is not the first story you've told me like this.
  Roy: Every man has a few stories like this.
  • Also happens with Douglas: "Deleting incriminating files ... Ha! Ha! Ha! ... I just mean files."
• Video Wills: Denholm leaves two. One to play at his funeral, the second to play if his son dramatically gate-crashes the funeral.
• Voice of the Legion: Jen talks this way when she gets irritable from having a visit from Aunt Irma.
• Wall Crawl: Richmond occasionally does this. He has magic goth powers or something.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Richmond has no idea what his job is. He learned the pattern of blinking lights on the servers, but he doesn't know what any of it means, and pretty much everybody had forgotten he was even there aside from Roy and Moss who did everything they could to prevent him from leaving his room to depress everyone.
• What Happened To The Moss?: He's still stuck in the grabber game, of course.
  Jen: MOSS!!
• Written-In Absence: Noel Fielding appeared in only one episode of the third season because of schedule conflicts with The Mighty Boosh. Richmond's long absence was explained as having scurvy.
• Wrongfully Attributed: To Moss, "Fredo" is just a mispronunciation of "Frodo".
  Roy: Fredo, in the film, he was essentially a pimp.
  Moss: No. He took the ring to Mordor!
• The Wrong Way on the Escalator: In "Bad Boys", after shoplifting the Grand Designs DVDs, Moss tries to escape from store security by running up the down escalator.
• Your Mom: Moss has been bullied and Roy attempts to help him stand up for himself by role-playing:
  Roy: Nice glasses!
  Moss: Not as nice as your mum's glasses!
  Roy: Still a little bit complimentary, but it's getting better.
• You Say Tomato:
  • Jen pronounces "computer" with the emphasis on the first and third syllables (rather than as more commonly on the second syllable). This serves to highlight her lack of expertise and interest in the area.
  • One episode has a running gag about how to properly pronounce "tapas." The normal (in English) pronunciation is "TAP-ass." Moss insists it's "TAPE-ass." Jen tells him: "You're a tape-ass."
  • In series two, when discussing Jen's boyfriend Peter File's unfortunate name, Moss mentions the US pronunciation "PED-oh-file" (in comparison to the UK's "PEE-da-file") and suggests he move there to avoid embarrassment.

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"I'm sorry, are you from the past?"

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