Richard Ayoade hosts the 2021 BAFTA Awards. Photo: BAFTA/Guy Levy
In the first episode of The IT Crowd, techies in the basement raise their popularity by throwing parties. Everything is going incredibly well, everyone is happy and laughing until they drop. Moss, who has a true nerd's inability to calculate human emotions, then tells the story of how he and his colleague Roy hired two prostitutes in Amsterdam. The mood instantly deteriorates.
Moss was played by award-winning Richard Ayoade, who did the same thing this week and told the story. He provided a supporting quote for a new book by Graham Linehan, creator of The IT Crowd. Linehan's views on trans issues have long been the reason for the end of his once sky-high career. That's what his book is about.
When the cover design with quotes from Ayoade and Jonathan Ross was released on Thursday, the powerful lobby that canceled The IT Crowd writer-director has now included one of its stars. Suddenly, one of the most impeccable people in show business became an object of hatred.
To be the latest victim of the culture wars is an extraordinary situation in which Ayoade finds himself. His public image was carefully built on the idea that he shouldn't be there at all. On Channel 4 he presented nine episodes of The Traveler as a man who doesn't like to travel. In 8 Out of 10 Cats Countdown or on Graham Norton's Sofa, he is a conflict-avoiding beta male, the polar opposite of Tall Poppy.
Imagine being Richard Ayoade and undermining your public image so you can share cover space with Doyle and Joyce and praise the guy who compares trans medicine to Mengele.
Just imagine.
— Dr. Body A. Ashton (@manwithoutatan) September 14, 2023
It's the feeling he exudes of being noticed that makes him the perfect host for the Bafta TV Awards. “Thank you for not judging me,” he said as he opened last year’s ceremony. “I, like many of you, need – or feel the need – for money.” And he spread his arms wide, unapologetic.
Even though he looks like a person with limited interpersonal skills, he is too astute not to know how some of the X/Twitter users will react to his Linehan quote . This could be seen as payback for the writer and director whose comedy series made him a star back in 2006. Ayoade's eye manages to keep almost everything about him to himself.
What is known is that he is the only child of a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father who worked as a television engineer. Raised in Ipswich, he did well enough at school to go to Cambridge, where, somewhat under pressure, he studied law. “I think this happens to a lot of children whose parents are not English,” he once said. “There is a feeling that you are not doing this for your own personal interests. This is for work. But I didn’t want to be a lawyer.”
He was president of Footlights, worked briefly as a writer on The Big Breakfast, then became a stand-up comedian and moved on to television comedy until Linehan noticed that he would make the perfect nerd.
He has been playing a version of this expressionless adenoid character ever since. It even led him to Hollywood, where he became the saving grace in The Watch, the 2012 alien invasion comedy starring Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Ben Stiller. “The audience decides a lot about who you are,” he said with standard self-deprecation. “I was lucky that I acted at all, given my limited range of action.”
So it came as a big surprise to Moss fans when, in 2011, Ayoade, who had directed music videos for bands like Kasabian and Arctic Monkeys, suddenly unleashed his inner cinematographer, emerging as an elegant and original filmmaker. His adaptation of Joe Dunthorne's novel Submarine, told from the point of view of a bumbling Swansea schoolboy who thinks he's a hero, was a sly, twisted delight. “You are who you pretend to be,” Oliver says. Ayoade to three.
Richard Ayoade with Dawn French in The Journey Photo: Channel 4
His next film was an updated version of Dostoevsky. Once again the appeal was obvious. In the movie The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg, an introvert discovers that his life is being controlled by a more socially successful doppelgänger. Ayoade lived through a version of this story. Truly shy—»I'm pretty bad at maintaining eye contact for more than four seconds,» he said—he dons bright, eye-catching suits and projects a more confident version of himself into the world.
Even when they couldn't be more deserved, his default setting is not to celebrate his triumphs. “Has anyone seen this movie before?” he asked the audience attending a sold-out screening of Submarine to celebrate the film's 10th anniversary. “Well,” he said calmly as the applause died down, “it’s the same.”
Richard Ayoade and his wife Lydia Fox in 2022 Photo: Getty
Shyness means he prefers to avoid scrutiny during interviews. “This one-sidedness seems to go against every aspect of parenting,” he said during one brief meeting. Where he can, he turns them into a game, like his 2014 meta duel with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News. It became an interview about an interview done to promote Ayoade on Ayoade, a book-length interview with himself.
It was a parody of Faber & Faber's series of memoirs to great directors. The joke was that Ayoade has only two films to his credit so far. The title also had fun with his last name, which has a lot of vowels. «My name is Richard Ayoade,» he said while introducing Gadget Man on Channel 4. «At least that's how I think it's pronounced.»
In some ways, it is characteristic of Ayoade that, having married into England's most famous acting dynasty in 2007, he chose the less visible Fox, who remains under the radar. Lydia Fox, whom he met at Cambridge and with whom he has three children, has acted here and there, mostly in things he's also involved in or as a director. They appeared as a couple in both parts of Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir. “It’s very important that I want to thank my wife more than anything,” he said when accepting the Bafta in 2014.
Avoiding interviews means he'll never have to dodge questions about his notorious son-in-law. On Question Time in 2020, Laurence Fox accused a woman of color of racism. We only know how Ayoade reacted because Fox talked about it, yes, in an interview. «You've never experienced racism,» Ayoade apparently told Fox, refusing to come to his aid on Twitter.
He kept his head down then. He has it now. Does Linehan's public show of support spell troubled waters ahead? We must hope not. However, this seems like a good time to quote Lou Sanders, Ayoade's guest when Travel Man visited Bergen. As he prepared to fly off into the clouds on a zipline, she waved him off, preemptively writing an epitaph. “If you die, you will create a magnificent work!”
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