Episode 2 was a bit tougher than the season opener because of that damned pixelated Kermit the Frog tee, but I did find it eventually, so all is good. Pretty funny episode too, I loved that when I was in the pub on Sunday watching the Arsenal game (between furious bouts of shopping in Manchester) we came scarily close to having the same football conversation as they did in the show, even though none of the people I was with watch The IT Crowd.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, the pixelated/censored Kermit the Frog ‘Witness Protection Program’ t-shirt is made by Chunk, who do lots of retro/pop culture tees, but it isn’t available on their website. I’ve only been able to find it for sale at Urban Outfitters for the rather ludicrous price of £28. I was about to go on a rant about UO and their prices now, but I’ve just noticed that Chunk sell other Witness Protection tees (with characters like Batman & Superman on them) on their own site for £24.95, so I can’t get too annoyed with ‘hipster mecca’ this time around.

Next up was a tee that I recognised immediately, as it is a bit of a classic in the world of indie tees. The t-shirt with the Japanese schoolgirl getting shot on it is an homage to Battle Royale, the fantastic, and fantastically violent Japanese film, and is made by Airside. The tee is also worn by Roy in Channel 4’s press material for the show. This one will set you back £24.95, which is pretty much par for the course in Britain, sorry Americans. Buy it here.

The third and final tee that Roy wore on the show was one I already knew about as well, which probably suggests that I do spend a bit too much looking at t-shirts, as I knew that those firefighters were the work of Derek over at Enclothe. It’s nice to see a friend of the blog getting some great exposure on a TV show watched by millions of people here in the UK. The tee is called 451, which is a reference to Fahrenheit 451 (I think), and I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the idea of a guy who works in IT wearing a t-shirt about the temperature that paper/books burn at is very cool. It costs $19 and can be bought here.

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Tags » Airside • Battle Royal • blue • Chunk • enclothe • it crowd • kermit • red • Seen on TV • T-shirts • The IT Crowd

Friday night saw the return of Graham Lineham’s excellent ‘The IT Crowd‘ for it’s third season. Over the past few seasons I think I may well have enjoyed all the geeky in-jokes, references and props more than the storylines and acting (though I still enjoy that too), and it seems that this year is no exception as the IT department has had a makeover that seems to involve even more stickers than the back of my laptop.

Following on with a grand tradition, I Sky+’d the episode (though forgot to record the HD version) so that I could go back and chronicle the tees Roy wore in S3E1. The first one was really easy, I’d actually already spotted it in the advert. It’s a bit of a classic in the indie tee world, “Musical Elitism Venn Diagram Shirt (Music I Used to Like)” by Diesel Sweeties, who I noticed also have an ‘I [screw] robots’ sticker lurking in the background too.

The second was a bit harder, a black and orange tee where you never really got a decent look at the design. I was about you give up hope when I noticed that there was a shot taken from behind Roy’s head that revealed a J!NX logo on the neck of the tee, which actually made it very easy to find the tee. It’s called “The Cake is a Lie,” which is a statement that left me slightly perplexed, so I Googled it as they suggested, and now I get it. What? You thought I was going to explain it to you?

So, not exactly a huge amount of tee-sleuthing to be done this week, a nice gentle starter I guess, let’s see what comes up next week in episode 2. There’s not too much else in the gallery, just a few shots from different angles, but I figure that since I’ve taken the pictures I might as well upload them.

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Tags » geek • it crowd • Roy • T-shirts • television

Remember how I became mildly obsessed with writing about and hunting down the t-shirts that were featured in the Channel 4 comedy show The IT Crowd? Well, series three has been written, and now the producers want public help in dressing the set with large amounts of geeky goodness.

How would you like to help in designing the look of series 3? Specifically, you’d be helping us choose the stuff that litters the main set. I’m talking about posters, comics, fanzines, T-shirts… anything you’ve seen in the last few months that you think is pretty cool or captures the spirit of the show or a particular character. By now, most of you know the kind of things I like…weird toys, indie comics, sci-fi, geek references, internet memes, boardgames…normally I’d delight in tracking down the stuff myself, but as I say, it’s just not going to happen this time round.

In the very first draft of the show I described the set as looking like “a cross between a comics shop and the batcave”. I wanted it to feel like a geek Shangri-La, and in each series I’ve felt we nearly got there. Maybe this time, with you guys involved, we’ll finally nail it.

Please send your suggestions to ben.capel@talkbackthames.tv

There are loads of suggestions for what should be in the office on the BoingBoing post where this whole thing originated at (BB Cory is a consultant on the show, I think), but I’m sure a few of you tee designers/sellers might fancy seeing your tees up on screen. The show is pretty popular in the UK, and I get a surprisingly large amount of traffic from people searching for IT crowd shirts, so it could actually end up being fairly profitable for you if you were to end up on the show.

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Tags » it crowd • T-shirts • television

After last weeks 7 tee marathon, The IT Crowd took things easier with an episode that took place over the course of one day in TV time, which meant no wardrobe changes for Roy, and resulted in me finding the tee before the credits had even rolled on the sixth and final episode of the second series.

It’s quite a cool tee, if that’s your sort of thing, I like the size of the graphic and the colours are pretty complimentary, although I’m not really a fan of the text that’s on the back (”Guns don’t kill people magic missiles do”) since it takes this tee from having a bit of 8-bit charm to being straight up nerdy, but I guess that if you’re buying tees from J!NX then you’ve accepted your geeky fate already.

The tee that Roy is wearing in the episode appears to be slightly lighter than the one on the product page, suggesting that its from the now discontinued ‘forest green’ colourway (available in 2XL and small till they run out I guess), but you can buy the same design in the slightly darker ‘deep forest’ colourway.

So, are there any other shows you guys think I should be tracking?

Costiness=$14.95 Link

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Tags » Celebrities • geek • it crowd • T-shirts

Damn you IT Crowd! Hunting down tees was easy when he was only wearing one or two a week, but then they had to go and through me a curve ball (although, they are in the IT department, so the throw might not have reached) and make Roy wear 7 tees. One of them was totally covered by a track jacket so I’m not attempting to find it or even putting up a picture here, because that would just be silly.

1. A fairly appropriate design considering had just come back from a stag weekend and by the looks of it was fairly hungover. Available from J!NX from $14.95 URL

2. My prediction last week was spot on, and Insanely Great Tees popped up again with another Mac-referencing tee. $17 URL

3.Roy also appeared wearing a 2nd shirt from Bestario, a Spreadshirt shop of human animal hybrids. I can’t actually see the colourway on their site, but there is a grey version available. The Spreadblog has coverage of Bestario’s first outing on the premiere episode of this season. €25 URL

4. I’ve got no idea where this tee comes from, which is a pity because the camera design actually looks pretty cool. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts where it might be from, or even what kind of camera it might be since it looks fairly unusual in shape and maybe knowing the model would lead to the tee. No Star have a tee with a camera on it that looks nothing like the one above, but it’s a pretty nice design.

5. No idea where this one comes from either I’m afraid. It appears to be a dark blue or maybe black tee with a rounded orange television set on it, the kind with two antennae sticking out the top. Any ideas? Comment away.

6. This tee is all about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force promo campaign that got the wrong kind of reaction in Boston, a reaction of “OMG its bomb!” not, “oh look, a circuit board with some LEDs on it that look like a character from a cartoon show flipping the bird.” Disappointingly, I can’t find this exact shirt, I can find loads of other that have the same image, but none in that exact colourway and with just ‘Never Forget’ written underneath as most have the date instead, or the date above the image. So here’s a few different tee’s that are pretty similar to the one Roy’s wearing, feel free to add any you know in the comments: Threadpit, Raplica, Lucky Threadz.

There’s a surprisingly large amount of artwork on the walls of the IT Department at Renham Industries (its not all EFF material), and I noticed that one of the pieces was Bunnies Fall by Kozyndan, which is available as a poster for the very reasonable sum of $15, here.

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Tags » Celebrities • geek • it crowd • T-shirts

Hmmmm, I think that the producers of the show might have got a few tees from IGT since they’ve already featured one of their tees on the show in episode 2 of this series, so maybe we’ll be seeing more of them in the next few episodes.

I actually watched this episode with my camera by my side since I knew I’d end up writing a post about it and didn’t want to get screengrabs from Youtube again (even on a friday night I can’t get HYA* off my brain!). As soon as I saw the pixelated pirate flag I thought it might be from Diesel Sweeties, but a little digging around found me at Insanely Great Tees Jolly Roger tee.

There was another tee during the credit sequence at the end of the show, but I couldn’t really make out the design on it due its faintness and my lack of a HD TV. Playing around with the levels in Photoshop it would appear that there’s some wing on the tee, perhaps its a bat? If anyone has any idea where this tee might be from then feel free to drop in a comment.

Costiness=$17 URL

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Tags » Celebrities • geek • it crowd • T-shirts

(sorry about the quality of the screengrab, I had to take it from YouTube)

I know that traditionally people move forward when it comes to t-shirts, but since I’d already found the tee from episode 3 of the second series I thought I might try my luck at finding some others from the increasingly popular sitcom. Roy spent quite a lot of his time in this episode (titled “Return of The Golden Child”) wearing a suit, but he also found time to wear a couple of tees.

This was the first t-shirt he wore, it’s not exactly a great tee, and the reference is far too old for my liking, but hey, each to their own. As you can imagine, it’s called “I see dumb people” and is available from ThinkGeek for $14.99 but if you search for the name then you’ll find many other versions of it.

I recognised the Futurism tee by Insanely Great Tees as soon as it popped on screen, although the print does look disappointingly small compared to how it looks in the product photos. The tee costs $17

Just in case anyone fancies watching the episode, I’ve embedded it after the break, although it is on YouTube, so expect it to disappear pretty rapidly.
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Tags » Celebrities • geek • it crowd • T-shirts

Does anyone watch The IT Crowd? The second series has been going for a few weeks here in the UK, and I really enjoy all the little geek in-jokes and spotting things that they’ve dotted about the set, and apparently so do the people of Make, especially so since they spotted themselves (I also swiped the above picture from them, because I couldn’t think of another way to make my own picture of the show). I’ve noticed that in a lot of the episodes Roy wears tees that I recognise, and with a little bit of investigation I can usually find them online, so why not give them a mention here?

Roy’s tee this week isn’t exactly a work of design genius, but I’m sure that there’s some people out there that’ll get a kick out of it. It seems to be available all over the place, but ThinkGeek feels like its the spiritual home of this tee.

Costiness=$14.99 URL

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Tags » Celebrities • geek • it crowd • T-shirts