Great supporting actors: Richmond Avenal ("The IT crowd")

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Yes Minister, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, The fffice, Black books and so many other outstanding TV shows along the last decades have been raising the genre of British comedy until it was turned into a real reverential totem in television history. The IT crowd, born in 2006 and its fifth season waiting for broadcast this 2011, has been one of the last pieces to join such prestigious humorous building. Even though, now, it has from the basement. Because it's in the IT department (IT: information technology) located in the deepest of Reynholm Industries' building where the hilarious misfortunes of Roy, the lazy immature Irish man, get sparked; Moss, the misfit naïf geek; and the boss of these ones, Jenn, superficial, incompetent and obsessed to be successful in a company that practically disregards her existence. In a microworld of extreme personalities and insane situations it could look unlikely that someone showed up to surprise with their eccentricity. But then Richmond showed up.


Richmond Avenal is the fourth pillar of the very unbalanced IT Department. Episodic character, he lets himself be seen just in some episodes of the first two seasons but such is his charisma that he's capable of turning each one of his appearances into a gallant exhibition and genuine supplier of gags. Pale and gaunt, always in black clothing, he's drawn up as a nonsensical performance of a perfect subcultural Goth, halfway among a take-off of a classic vampire, a phantom of the opera's and design Tim Burton's. Melodramatic, spiritless and depressive, he gets to be anticlimax become humor. Permanently putting it the unexpected black effect to the chromatic frenzy which makes up the mixture of characters and plots of The IT crowd. But as every projected goth, Richmond wasn't always like that.

As it's told to us in his first appearance in the show, Richmond, some years before, was a talented hard-working yuppie whose feats had led him to a meteoric major in Reynholm Industries till he became president Denholm Reynholm's right hand. Everything was running smoothly, feeling fulfilled with the professional successes and ambitious projects to command, until, a fateful night, he discovered Craddle of Fith. Little by little, with the blow of extreme metal songs, the dark goth mutation was happening in him, which finally made incompatible his work among the well-dressed minds of the corporate height. Fallen from grace, he was degraded into the IT department, where, in turn, Roy and Moss, quickly fed up with their new partner's behavior, set him aside to the "important mission" of supervising a little dark room where the old central computers are located. And there he remained forgotten for a long time until one day Jenn discovered him by accident and invited him to get back to the living world. This way, Richmond gets to embody the misfit among misfits, the last element of the social and labor structure. And from there, he rises up touching for defenseless, but gloomily comical at the same time, in order to perform in a magnificent way the role of sad clown inside of the The IT crowd circus. A series of compulsory view that, to that person whom it doesn't work as great amusement, there is only one solution to set out: did you try to turn it off and to turn it on again?