Loaded review: This IT crowd need to reboot their one liners

Forget fantasies of building another Facebook. App development has made wealth tantalisingly tangible to anybody with half a semester of coding under their belts. Stitching together a few scrolling pixels and cashing out once one of the tech giants comes biting? "I could've been a coder" is the new "I could've been a contender."

The premiere episode of new comedy Loaded (Monday, Channel 4, 10pm) opens with Josh (Jim Howick) anxiously rechecking his bank account over the phone, waiting to hear that his own fortune has been deposited. Josh and his three business partners/friends have just sold their company Idyl Hands and its flagship app Cat Factory to a huge American company. There's no deep meditation on what this might mean for their product. Selling high was always the point.

From bathing in Champagne, to buying huge arcade machines, the lads seem determined to act out their own digital age version of Brewster's Millions. But the new Ferraris have barely rolled out of the car dealership before the four entrepreneurs are being sued by an ex-drug dealer who wants to claim partial credit on the basis that he sports a cat tattoo. Mo' money, mo' problems.

Monopoly man

In the grand tradition of debut episodes showing far too much bombast, an early scene sees sharply-dressed showman Leon (Samuel Anderson) – “the least subtle millionaire since the Monopoly man,” Josh quips – deploy a barbershop quartet to sing “f**k you” at the front door of an investor who had previously turned the company down. It’s silly and contrived – an odd counterpoint to what the show actually does well.

Loaded is at its best when it maintains more poise. Writer Jon Brown's dialogue is snappy, and the quirky London office setting is an amusingly dead-on depiction of the modern creative workplace that's seemingly as important to a tech start-up as the return key.

But while there are some sharp features here to nod to approvingly, with the set pieces mostly falling flat, the show doesn’t provide its quota of laughs.

There’s also the running joke that Josh’s one purchase for himself, a new pair of jeans, causes him nothing but discomfort. This might prove an ironic foreshadowing of how his newly acquired wealth will play out over the rest of the series, but it’ll take more than some sight gags of him fiddling with his wardrobe to maintain viewers’ interest.