Richard Ayoade Audiobooks

Future Tense, the comic mind behind The IT Crowd turned loose on technology

1 audiobook reviewed

Who is Richard Ayoade?

Richard Ayoade, born in 1977, is a British comedian, actor, writer, director and presenter – one of those performers whose CV reads like several careers stacked in a trench coat. He is best known as Maurice Moss, the gloriously awkward IT technician in The IT Crowd, a role that won him the BAFTA for Best Male Comedy Performance in 2014. Before that came the presidency of the Cambridge Footlights, the cult horror spoof Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and appearances in The Mighty Boosh.

The other Ayoade is the film obsessive: director of Submarine and the Dostoevsky-inspired The Double, maker of music videos for the Arctic Monkeys and Vampire Weekend, and author of a run of comedic books about cinema, among them Ayoade on Ayoade and The Grip of Film, plus a children’s book. Add the presenting work – Travel Man, Gadget Man, The Crystal Maze – and the panel-show ubiquity, and you have one of Britain’s most distinctive comic voices.

Richard Ayoade in audiobooks

Future Tense, his title in our catalogue, arrives with a particular promise: Ayoade’s comedy is built on precision of language – the over-formal phrase deployed at the perfect moment – and that is a quality audio serves better than any other format. On the page and on screen alike, the persona is erudite, self-deprecating and faintly absurd, usually all in the same sentence.

For UK listeners the appeal is straightforward: this is the wit familiar from a decade and a half of television, without the interruptions. Fans of his film books and his presenting work will recognise the register at once; newcomers should expect cleverness worn lightly, irony worn heavily, and a strong urge to hear it all again.