The Crystal Maze 2017: everything you need to know about host Richard Ayoade

As The Crystal Maze returns to Channel 4, all eyes are on its host: the effortlessly charming actor, filmmaker and comic Richard Ayoade. With his mass of curly hair and thick-rimmed glasses, Ayoade has become something of a comedy TV staple over the past decade. But while he is likely best known as the insecure tech nerd Moss on the long-running sitcom The IT Crowd, Ayoade is also something of a jack of all trades, directing hit movies, writing books and infuriating journalists, all with universal aplomb… even if he’d never admit to being good at any of it.

With The Crystal Maze returning on Friday June 23, here are six things you may not know about its new host.

1. He had some famous friends at Cambridge

Ayoade studied at Cambridge, where he was voted president of the Footlights, the famous theatrical club that holds Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Sacha Baron Cohen and Olivia Colman as alumni, along with practically half the British comedy elite.

His experiences in the Footlights were also documented on a TV documentary in 1997, which was recently unearthed and posted on YouTube. It features skits involving Ayoade and fellow members during his year, including John Oliver and Matthew Holness, and ends with Ayoade performing an uncanny impersonation of Mick Jagger’s dance moves. Ayoade deeply regretted the documentary, however, and told The Guardian that it partly motivated his reluctance to appear as himself on-camera since.

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“It was literally one of the things that made me not want to do interviews again,” he said. “You have to imagine: a bunch of 21-year-olds, never-been-out-of-the-house type people. Our tour manager is another 21-year-old saying, ‘This is very important publicity, Anglia television want to do a feature.’ It was awful. They’d ask us to do a sketch while walking and if we complained they’d say, ‘Trust us, we’re professionals, we won’t make you look ridiculous’. It’s really humiliating.”

2. He was working in TV long before The IT Crowd

It was Graham Linehan’s gloriously silly Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd that made Ayoade’s name, but he had in fact been bouncing around television for nearly a decade prior. Upon graduating from Cambridge, Ayoade secured a job working as a writer for the Channel 4 morning show The Big Breakfast, while he performed twice at the Edinburgh Fringe alongside Footlights friend Matthew Holness.

Those shows, Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight and Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, the latter of which won the prestigious Perrier Award for best comedy at the festival, saw Holness play the fictional horror writer Garth Marenghi, with Ayoade as his publisher Dean Learner. Their Edinburgh success convinced Channel 4 to commission the show as a TV comedy.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a spoof horror series mimicking bad Eighties television, interspersed with behind-the-scenes commentary from the show’s stars, wasn’t a ratings hit, but has since earned a cult following. Darkplace wasn’t renewed for a second series, but Channel 4 did later commission a spin-off, Man to Man with Dean Learner, a spoof chat show in which Ayoade’s character interviews a different famous male every week, all of whom were played by Holness.

Ayoade was also a recurring cast member on BBC2’s The Mighty Boosh, on which he also served as script editor for its third series.

3. He’s not the best of interview subjects

Ayoade is a notoriously difficult interviewee, self-deprecating almost to the point of sabotage, and largely unwilling to talk about himself or his personal life -- which explains why you hear so little about his family life, being a father of three and married to actress Lydia Fox, member of the illustrious Fox acting dynasty, which includes brother Laurence and father James.

Speaking to The Guardian, Ayoade explained that he refuses to discuss politics or much about his own feelings on things as he struggles to rectify having an intellectual conversation with a journalist with the need to sell a product, of which the interview is ultimately driven by.

“I feel you need to earn the right to weigh in on complex issues, and that right is probably not granted to you by being moderately efficient at imparting words so that they’re amusing,” he said. “On some level, I can’t get away from the undertone that exists, which is, ‘Out on Monday’. The danger is, you trivialise what you’re saying, because there’s a commercial element attached, you might have something to gain.”

In 2014, a TV interview Ayoade took part in with Channel 4 News’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy went viral, with Ayoade seemingly eager to deconstruct the interview forma. He refused to answer Guru-Murthy’s questions about Norwegian representation in the UK, and denied that the project he was appearing to promote, his book Ayoade on Ayoade, was autobiographical.

Guru-Murthy later clarified on the official Channel 4 site that the interview was partly a set-up, claiming that he knew Ayoade wouldn’t want to talk about his book, and that the pair were “having a laugh”. He also claimed that they intentionally decided the interview would go out live rather than be pre-recorded in order to increase the “jeopardy” of the situation. 

Aside from an illuminating interview with Adam Buxton, Ayoade is also the one comedian of his generation who actively avoids appearing on podcasts.

4. He’s a successful music video director

Along with television, Ayoade is also a prolific director of music videos, responsible for clips for some of the most acclaimed indie of the past decade. Ayoade first broke into videos courtesy of Arctic Monkeys, with their reticence to actually appear in their videos working nicely with Ayoade’s somewhat abstract ambitions for his work.

Ayoade directed the video for the band’s Fluorescent Adolescent in 2007, a Sweeney-inspired clip featuring an all-out brawl between gang members and a group of clowns. Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner to this day considers it his favourite of the band’s videos.

“[Fluorescent Adolescent] was the first time we’d put out a single like that, major key and quite poppy,” Turner told The Independent. “We were probably a bit reluctant to do that. And almost as part of, like, a condition of putting the single out, the deal was that we’d have a video that was sorta the opposite of it.”

“I think the band wanted clowns,” Ayoade recalled. “Often with a video, people say they want this story and this one idea, and you think of a structure for it. So clowns were a prerequisite – maybe cos there was a fairground-y sound to some of the song.”

“That was it, there was a bit of that," Turner added. "And maybe Jamie [Cook, guitarist] was quite up for there being a scrap..."

Ayoade would go on to direct several more videos in collaboration with Turner, from additional Arctic Monkeys work (notably the wonderfully low-fi Cornerstone) to Turner’s side project The Last Shadow Puppets. Ayoade has also directed videos for other acts, among them Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Heads Will Roll and Kasabian’s Vlad the Impaler. Last year he directed a short film for Radiohead’s last album, A Moon Shaped Pool.

5. He’s also got "film director" and "TV host" on his CV

After starting out in music videos, Ayoade graduated to filmmaking in 2010 with the coming-of-age comedy Submarine, which earned rave reviews and an American release courtesy of Harvey Weinstein, who adored Darkplace and had at one point hoped to turn it into a movie. Despite the success of Submarine, however, Ayoade has conceded that he never expected to be a film director.

“I didn’t particularly view it as a possibility at all,” he told The Guardian. "No, I wasn't someone who had a Super-8 camera when he was seven and was making films. I more wanted to be [Stone Roses guitarist] John Squire, and that proved impossible."

In spite of his modesty, Ayoade is a noted cinephile, his adolescent love for Woody Allen leading him to discover Allen’s own idols, among them Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles, and subsequently arthouse legends like Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Ayoade followed up Submarine with 2013’s The Double, a black comedy based on the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella of the same name, which starred Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska.

Along with film directing, Ayoade has in recent years become a regular on Channel 4 documentary series. The Crystal Maze marks Ayoade’s third gig as a Channel 4 TV presenter, having hosted the technology series Gadget Man and the documentary series Travel Man, in which he tours different parts of the world alongside celebrity guests. While Ayoade has expressed anxiety about being himself when appearing on television, he has claimed that each presenting role he’s taken has involved him, to some extent, playing a character, which makes it easier.

6. He half-heartedly attempted to crack America

Ayoade was the only cast member from The IT Crowd to be asked to participate in a proposed American remake of the series, Chris O’Dowd replaced by Community star Joel McHale, and Katherine Parkinson replaced by Jessica St. Clair. A pilot was shot, lifting the script directly from the Channel 4 version’s first episode, but a regime change at American network NBC meant it never saw the light of day.

Five years later, Ayoade made his Hollywood debut in the 2012 comedy The Watch alongside Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill, playing a member of a neighbourhood watch group who are forced to prevent an alien invasion. The film was a major bomb in the USA, where it was also savaged by critics, and to this day is Ayoade’s sole major American credit.

“It felt a bit like winning a radio phone-in competition to be in a film with movie stars,” he told Time Out. “I was essentially a speaking extra.”

He also told the magazine that he hasn’t seen the film, joking “I heard that it’s the best movie of all time. I’m too frightened to see it because I love Citizen Kane so much, I don’t want it toppled.”