Linehan turns IT Crowd off but NOT on again

Fans of Channel 4 sitcom IT Crowd will be crying into their customised motherboards this morning after the show's mastermind confirmed it won't be returning for a fifth series after all.

Graham Linehan had said in May 2010 that he was working on another run of the programme, which brought the ridiculed-but-actually-extremely-helpful term used among IT support nerds across the land "turn it off and on again" to our telly screens.

A fifth series of the Bafta-winning IT Crowd had been commissioned, but Linehan - who wrote all 24 episodes of the sitcom - has run out of enthusiasm for Roy, Moss and Jen.

He told readers of online forum Reddit that "the chief reason was the fact that I just wasn't looking forward to it the way I used to.

"I felt that the last series was a nice strong point to go out on, and anything further might just be running on the spot. You don't do your best work when you're running on the spot."

Linehan, who also co-wrote Father Ted, added that it felt "like a natural time to wind things down".

For the fifth series, he had planned to share the mammoth script-writing task with other contributors to ease the workload burden.

"I had a great gang of people, but in the end we weren't able to meet often enough to create the proper atmosphere of friendly rivalry and one-upmanship to provide the amount of material I needed," he said.

"It was always first and foremost an experiment and part of [that] experiment was seeing if it was possible to create a 'virtual' writer's room, and in the end I wasn't able to."

Linehan is hoping to work with this bloke next:

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