I wanted to avoid writing about my show 'The It Crowd' on this blog, because I thought it might be opening a big old can of worms, but then I thought, I'll just turn off the comments feature! Hurray!

Basically, I've come across so many people saying the show uses 'canned laughter', I just had to write something. With the extra traffic the Boing Boing mention will possibly bring in, this suddenly seemed the best place to do it.

Once and (hopefully) for all, the laughter on 'The IT Crowd' is not canned. The show was filmed in front of a live studio audience at Teddington Studios.

This is how it works...we film a bunch of stuff on location (examples from the show; Roy and Moss in the stress class, Jen in the shoe shop, Jen and Roy in the family restaurant) and then cut it together.

A few weeks later, we start to rehearse the shows. Mondays, we have a readthrough, by Friday, the show has to be ready to shoot.

On Friday (and Thursday, if we're lucky), during the day, we shoot the remaining cutaways that we'll need to have the show make sense to a studio audience.

Friday evening, the audience comes in around 7PM. A warm-up comedian greets them and tells them what to expect. He points out the sets, the five studio cameras, and then the monitors over their heads, on which they will see the cutaways and location scenes that have been assembled in story order.

We then shoot the episode, scene by scene, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes, we have to do retakes. We ask the audience to pretend they're watching the scene for the first time, and laugh at the jokes they liked as if it's the first time they heard them.

Can any fans of the show who hear this nonsense being put about please copy and paste this post as they see fit. I don't honestly think it'll do any good, because the canned laughter myth is one of those hardy ones, but still...at least we gave it a shot.

(Side note--I would love to know how many people who think the laughter is canned also believe that the moon landings were faked. I would imagine it's a high percentage).

...sorry to all the nice people who now can't post comments.

The show is called 'The IT Crowd'. To my mind, this means that you can pronounce it 'The Eye Tee Crowd' or 'The It Crowd'. I wanted to use both pronounciations in the trailers/announcements but Channel 4 thought it would be confusing. However, they did start announcing it as 'The Eye Tee Crowd' so when I had to decide, I went the other way.