Richard Ayoade brings a strange sense of dislocation with him everywhere he goes – as a presenter on The Crystal Maze, a panellist on quizshows and in characters such as Moss in The IT Crowd and Dean Learner and Thornton Reed in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. It jibed particularly well with his stint as Channel 4’s eponymous Travel Man, a role from which he has stepped down. His detached oddity added a much-needed freshness to the travelogue format and gave his weekly companion a challenge to which to rise, lending each episode of the nine series he hosted a bit of bite.
This episode welcomes the new presenter, Joe Lycett, with what is effectively a Christmas special. Travel Man: 96 Hours in Iceland follows the usual format, but the participants – Lycett’s companion here is the suitably trollish Bill Bailey – get double the usual 48 hours to sample the delights of their destination.
It is a perfectly enjoyable hour in their company. They journey – partly by husky-drawn sledge – around a country that spreads 200 active volcanoes and a population the size of Coventry’s across nearly 100,000 gorgeously frozen square kilometres. They visit geothermally heated waters, eat in an all-tomato restaurant (within an enormous greenhouse that produces one-fifth of Iceland’s annual fruit production), watch the aurora borealis from a transparent hotel pod and jam as “Rancid Minibreak” in the sound booth of the Icelandic Punk Museum, which is housed in a repurposed public toilet.
They travel to Dimmuborgir, where the earth is said to meet the underworld, and to the Cave of the Yule Lads. These are 13 mischievous figures (with names such as Sausage Swiper, Door Slammer and Spoon Licker) of seasonal folklore. They put toys in the shoes of good children on Christmas Eve and leave potatoes in those of the others. They are – at least for the purposes of cameras and/or December – embodied by 13 men who seem very happy making believe in their rustic-elf costumes. Lycett looks discomfited by it all. Bailey looks as if he has come home.
It is a busy but essentially soothing 96 hours. As ever, the sights are captioned with salient facts and labelled with prices, giving us the total cost of the trip at the end of the show, in case we wish to get off our bums and – pandemic permitting – emulate it.
Lycett is a perfectly good presenter and Bailey a perfectly good guest. They alternate as foil and comedian while felting miniature troll-Baileys, boiling eggs on the ends of fishing lines dropped into thermal vents (“That’s what I got into showbiz for”) and gazing up at Guðjón Samúelsson’s extraordinary concrete church, Hallgrímskirkja, which towers over Reykjavik.
There are moments when the pair stray into strained banter territory, but there is also plenty of good, easy stuff. Emerging from a tiny earthquake simulator in a shopping centre after an underwhelming seismic simulation, Lycett says thoughtfully: “I would say, in a shopping centre, this would be a space a Timpson could take.” As they fly in a tiny plane along Iceland’s longest fjord, Lycett notes that he is hoping to see a whale, but there appear to be none. “They’re famously very hard to book,” Bailey says, with the air of a father eager not to assuage a child’s disappointment. There is profound, visceral truth in Lycett’s comment that the stark, brutal Sun Voyager sculpture by Jón Gunnar Árnason, overlooking the glittering sea, looks like one of the Loose Women.
This is all fine – and may improve further with different guests bringing different energies to proceedings. Lycett is a sufficiently flexible and generous performer to embrace them. But if you were an Ayoade fan, you will miss his quirks, eccentricity and scalpel-sharp wit. The new version does not have the snap and crackle of the original. The change occasioned in me the kind of mild sorrow that discovering your favourite cafe has been take over by Starbucks might. We will all survive, obviously. Life will go on. But just a bit – a very little bit – flatter than before.
