The IT Crowd

Season 1

Yesterday's Jam

1. Roy's shirt displays the acronym "RTFM" above a picture of Chairman Mao holding up a book. RTFM is a popular acronym in IT that means "Read the F*cking Manual", since many problems encountered by those who call tech support could be solved easily if the customer would only take time to read the instructions that came with the device. Related acronyms include PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) and I.D.-10-T (idiot) Error.
2. Behind Roy's desk is a standalone toy often confused with Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. It is actually Jimmy Corrigan, a character from a comic series predating Family Guy. On the wall behind Maurice is a sketch of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
3. It's established that Moss carries around a spray canister of water to cool his ear when it gets hot. That trait was dropped from the entire show's run afterwards, but it came back one more time in the final episode of the show.
4. The gag with Reynholm talking into the mouse of his computer to try out the "new voice activation system" is a reference to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), where Scotty does the same thing when the Star Trek crew travels back in time into the 20th century.
5. Jen shows her poor command of language when she says "You're used to being social piranhas". A piranha is a small voracious fish. A pariah is a social outcast, not merely disliked but someone to be actively avoided.

Calamity Jen

1. The new emergency number from the advertisement instead of 999 is 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.
2. The gag with the long and complicated new phone number for emergency services is a veiled jab at "public-private partnership" (ppp), the selling off of public goods and services, to the detriment of the public good, and at the expense of the taxpayer who paid for their procurement in the first place. Many such measures were implemented in Britain by conservative governments in the early 1990s, like the water privatization in England and Wales, and were deeply unpopular with wide segments of the population.
3. The fictional address of the office is given as 123 Carendon Road. While there is a Clarendon Road in London, there is no Carendon Road.
4. When Moss and Roy enter the stress class it is a fairly exact re-creation of Laurel and Hardy entering the fraternal meeting at the beginning of The Sons of the Desert (1933). Reference or rip-off? You decide!
5. Reynholm knocks on the IT office door, and when Jen goes out later, he is a few doors down. This means that if Jen hadn't gone out to stall him, he probably would have walked away, and he wouldn't have entered the office, avoiding all the stressful cover ups to hide the fire and the stress machine.

Fifty-Fifty

1. The creator and director of the series, Graham Linehan, appears in Messy Joe's as one of the mariachi band members.
2. On his 'Lonely Faces' ad, Moss' likes are computers, Masters of the Universe, Tek Wars (which is also Father Ted Crilly's specialist subject when he partakes in a quiz in the programme Father Ted, also created by Graham Linnehan), Magic The Darkening and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. His dislikes are football, most telly, non-computer things and the countryside.
3. Oliver Chris's character, Daniel, comes in and asks Jen a series of trivia questions. His character, Ricky, on The Office (2001) was known for being good at trivia, having appeared on the quiz show Blockbusters (1983) and winning the Wernham Hogg office quiz night.
4. Messy Joe's scenes were shot in Texas Lone Star, a now-closed Tex-Mex restaurant that existed in Turnham Green, Chiswick, west London. The actual shooting must have occurred shortly before or after its closing down in late 2005. Apart from extra props, most of the decoration was the premise's own. The accompanying external shots of Jen and Roy waving a cab were actually shot half a mile further south, across Chiswick High Road, on Devonshire Road, where both W4 Bathrooms's (reflected) and the London Zu gift shop's facades (also now closed) can be seen.
5. Jen foreshadowed what Daniel will do at the restaurant. She tells Moss she's hoping that if he likes the food, he won't beat her to death with a shoe. At the kid's restaurant the Clown starts laughing at Daniel (for losing his streak on "Who wants to be a Millionaire"), at which point he loses it and ends up beating the Clown with the clown shoe. He also accidentally hits Jen in the face with the shoe when confronted by Roy.

The Red Door

1. The image on Roy's t-shirt is the "kill screen" from level 256 of the Pac-Man arcade game. When the game was only available in arcade cabinets it lacked the memory (RAM) to display the entire screen, causing the right half of the maze to become corrupted.
2. Recording artist Tino Ghost wrote a song based on the Richmond character. The song, "Richmond Syndrome", was released on his third album "3".
3. Richmond's real name is shown to be "Richmond Avenal".

The Haunting of Bill Crouse

1. The ending is an allusion to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
2. Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy wrote and sung the 'Small Paul' song.
3. The title of this show is a play on the title of the Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which has been adapted into film twice as The Haunting (1963) and The Haunting (1999).
4. Jen calls a waiter "Mick Hucknall". Years later, Katherine Parkinson appeared in Series 9, Episode 2 of comedy game show Would I Lie To You in which she had to lie that she was incapable of saying the name "Mick Hucknall" whenever it appeared in a script.
5. Jen looks at the waiter and says, 'Mick Hucknall'. Mick Hucknall was the lead singer of Simply Red, so named for his curly, flame-red hair. Simply Red had a number of hits in the 1980s and 1990s such as 'Holding Back the Years' and a well-received cover of 'If You Don't Know Me by Now'.

Aunt Irma Visits

1. Roy wears a T-shirt with '42' on it, a nod to Douglas Adams' 'Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy'.
2. It's learned that Moss wears clip-on neckties.
3. The episode ends in an apparent cliffhanger, with Jen and Moss, Denholm and Richmond, and Roy and the psychiatrist who reminds him of his mother, respectively, each waking to discover themselves in bed together, followed by 'To Be Continued'. The cliffhanger is never resolved in subsequent series.