Well, it’s taken long enough, but finally someone has seized upon the limitless comic potential of a life spent fixing computers and configuring routers. I speak of course of new comedy series The IT Crowd, which recently finished its first season – there’s nothing like being timely, but hey, that’s the price you pay when Channel 4 doesn’t send you preview tapes.

There’s a lot to like about the show, but top of the list is the fact that it’s not malicious. It’s one of the first sitcoms in… ooh… literally ages that aims for good-natured humour and the old-school telling of jokes instead of spitting vitriol or trying to curl your toes into spirals of embarrassment. Main characters Roy and Moss are unquestionably IT geeks, their dank corporate basement stuffed with obscure toys and magazines and the combined filth of a thousand Quake sessions. But, and this makes a refreshing change, in this instance they’re geeks who are driving and setting up the gags, rather than just being the butt of them.

The most surprising part of the whole thing is how non-techy it is. The jokes almost all emerge from dialogue and surreal situations rather than the subject matter. The genuine highlights (such as Messigo’s fine English cuisine, the wall-mounted Profanity Button, and every word that barks out of Chris Morris’ mouth) could just as easily apply to a team of butchers, bakers or outcast Irish priests as they do to a basement full of tech-support types. The only real weak link in the chain is Jen, ‘relationship manager’ of the tech support department and let’s be honest, the token woman of the group, who spends most of her time drooling over shoes or shrieking like a harridan. While she’s portrayed as having as many flaws and neuroses as everyone else, it’s hard to shake the niggling feeling that she should have been, well, a geek of some kind, not an outsider brought in purely to reinforce the boys’ club theme with some truly eye-rolling clichés.

On the plus side, when the tech jokes come, they’re funny – the perfectly retro titles crashing, or a blazing monitor dismissed with an impressed bark of “nice screensaver!” are just two particularly good moments on offer. True, that kind of gag doesn’t sound so great on paper, but believe me, it’s a breath of fresh air after an eternity of pathetic jokes about CD drives being used as cupholders or computers full of bugs (only instead of bugs, like the computer kind, they’re bugs like insects! Do you get it? Huh? Huh!?), and of course, the Grand High Poobah of Unfunny Computing Jokes, the words ‘Press Any Key To Continue’ being misunderstood and all manner of wackiness ensuing. Ho-ho-ho. No.

Still, by far the funniest bit of computing comedy comes from Channel 4 itself – to be more accurate, its decision to inflict DRM on its freely webcasted episodes. A show about geeks, targeted at geeks – geeks on the internet, no less – and wrapped in protected WMV format! Seriously, in the whole history of mankind has energy ever been so liberally urinated against the wall? There were unprotected torrents zinging round the web within femtoseconds of each new release – although hopefully it’s the number of people rushing to download copies, not the number of evil pirated versions, that will get the commissioning guys’ attention.

The IT Crowd is far from a classic comedy series – certainly, it’s no Father Ted - but it is extremely funny, and I’m definitely up for a second series of the same. Every episode has had at least one genuinely great, memorable moment, and you know, it’s good to have a laughter track that actually sounds like audience laughter. Bear in mind, however, that I was one of the few people who didn’t get anything out of The Office apart from the desire to hunt for coins behind my sofa. While your results may therefore vary, and though the format and gags are undeniably old, The IT Crowd makes me laugh a lot, and shouldn’t that be what anyone looks for in a comedy?

Our normal rating system isn’t really appropriate for judging TV, so instead I hereby award it a firm six out of ten, where ten is solid-gold broadcasting, and one is having your internal organs plucked out by a team of rabid circus monkeys with leprosy, whipped to a fine paste in Satan’s own demonic blender, and then forcefully reinserted into your chest via rectal pump. BBC2’s Hyperdrive, by way of a comparison, scores -34.

Oh, and for the record, it’s pronounced ‘The I.T. Crowd’. Whatever the continuity announcer says.