Graham Linehan - The IT Crowd

Graham Linehan's new sitcom, The IT Crowd (update: you can watch the show online now), starts on Channel 4 this week. He's interviewed by Jasper Ress in The Daily Telegraph.

It's hard to regard a man who was a stripling of 25 when he co-wrote a surreal sitcom about the Irish priesthood as a traditionalist. But that is the role in which Linehan is defiantly, almost seditiously casting himself. "I feel like I'm going to be carrying around Mary Whitehouse's handbags here. I really want to try and buck against current trends. Things that 10 or 15 years ago would probably have been in video nasty trials are now the stuff of eight o'clock viewing. Imagine if Last of the Summer Wine had loads of references to periods. That's what comedy seems to be like at the moment."

Linehan also turns up on tomorrow night's BBC documentary about the state of the sitcom, part of Alan Yentob's Imagine series (Tuesday 31 Jan, BBC ONE, 22.45pm).