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Travel Man: 48 Hours in...

British comedian Richard Ayoade and a celebrity guest, usually from the comedy world, spend 48 hours in a popular city to discover the must see tourist attractions. British comedian Richard Ayoade and a celebrity guest, usually from the comedy world, spend 48 hours in a popular city to discover the must see tourist attractions. British comedian Richard Ayoade and a celebrity guest, usually from the comedy world, spend 48 hours in a popular city to discover the must see tourist attractions.

• Richard Ayoade
• Stephen Mangan
• 32 User reviews
• 1 nomination total

Episodes 61

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• Connections Referenced in The Last Leg: Episode #19.4 (2019)

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• Jan 1, 2017
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• January 3, 2019 (United States)
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“Travel Man,” Richard Ayoade’s Travel Show for People Who Hate Travel

By Sarah Larson

There are many kinds of travel shows—just as there are many kinds of travellers—and many ways in which they can intrigue or repel us. This summer, I watched quite a few, as I was taking an uncharacteristically ambitious trip and wanted a sense of what I was in for. I set my DVR to auto-record shows about Copenhagen, the Faroe Islands, Tuscany, and France, and then marvelled at the breadth of its harvest. There was “ The Wine Show ,” in which the actors Matthew Goode and Matthew Rhys bopped around Tuscany, sampling vintages and rolling a wine barrel up a hill; the peppily question-and-answer-filled “ Curious Traveler ,” with Christine van Blokland, punctuated with “Huh?” and “Ah!” sound effects; “ Parts Unknown ,” Anthony Bourdain ’s singular cultural reconnaissance via food; and the ubiquitous Rick Steves , bringing his bountiful tips and deflatingly Stevesian sensibility to every corner of Europe. All of this was informative but alienating: these travellers were nothing like me, and I wouldn’t travel like them. It was hard to imagine myself in their shoes. Then I discovered “Travel Man.”

“ Travel Man: 48 Hours in . . . ” is a British series in which the comedian, writer, actor, and director Richard Ayoade spends forty-eight hours in a city, accompanied by various friends—“some of the most available and affordable names in light ent,” as he puts it—and tells us about what to do there. “Mini-breaks are a swirling nebula of nonsense!” he says at the top of “ Copenhagen ,” during a brisk montage of him in Venice, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Moscow. “How can anyone go somewhere new and be expected to enjoy themselves without a decade to decompress?” Exactly , I thought. This is the show for me. Ayoade is perhaps best known from the beloved British sitcom “ The IT Crowd ,” in which he and Chris O’Dowd co-starred as I.T. guys, and for his films “ Submarine ” (2010) and “ The Double ” (2013), which he wrote and directed. “Travel Man” began in 2015, as a spinoff of a show called “ Gadget Man ,” which Ayoade had taken over, as host, from Stephen Fry . He’s far more ubiquitous in the U.K. than he is in the States, but he seems due for an American embiggening .

On “Travel Man,” Ayoade is fun to look at (snappy suits, thick-framed glasses, expression of amused diffidence) and fun to listen to. (Of a monastery turned hotel in Naples, he says, “As well as modish guff, like a rooftop pool and a spa, it retains attractive old shiz, like staircases dug into the hillside.”) His persona is warmly amused, broadly skeptical, and gently astringent—i.e., British. He’s not a joiner. His intros conclude with him saying, in that episode’s particular city and with that episode’s particular guest, “We’re here, but should we have come?” It’s a refreshing tone for a travel series—somewhere between jumping in with both feet and looking askance at everything on earth, including the notion of fun on a weekend getaway. Where Rick Steves adopts an attitude of agreeable derring-do—in Siena, while wearing a Drago contrada neckerchief at a Drago contrada feast before the inter- contrada horse race, Steves says, “Even if I don’t fully understand what’s happening, the excitement is contagious and the wine is delightful!”—Ayoade does things like approach a toboggan on a snowy Norwegian hillside while muttering, “Generally, anything that requires a helmet, I avoid.” He makes it known that he’s happiest in bookstores, not in pre-vomit scenarios or places where lots of people are screaming, and then dutifully boards a hundred-year-old wooden roller coaster in Tivoli Gardens, looking apprehensive.

“Travel Man” is helpful, too. Ayoade gives practical information up top, such as the city’s population, the annual number of tourists, and historic cultural distinctions—which include, for Copenhagen, “Hans Christian Andersen, Sandi Toksvig , Lego, the pedal bin, and my old adversary, the pH scale.” Little price tags pop up onscreen to indicate how many pounds things cost—flights, hotels, food, handy gear. Whether it’s relevant to you or not, the practical information helps create a vivid impression. Ayoade and his guest tend to stay in hotels that are unusual and fancier than I can afford, but pleasing to vicariously enjoy. “The luxury Belvedere suite offers a well-wide view of Vienna, as well as a display hammock,” Ayoade says, entering his hotel room. “But I have no time for display hammocks!” He bats aside the hammock as he breezes past it. “Unpacking squanders time and is a bourgeois indulgence,” he says, briskly hanging up his clothes rack-cum-duffel bag (“£90 approx”). He sometimes claims the fancier lodgings for himself, part of an amusing recurring tactic of being discourteous to his companion. (His comic rudeness can remind me of Jemaine on “ Flight of the Conchords ,” if Jemaine were not such a dim bulb.) In Vienna, Ayoade has “arranged something bespoke,” outside, for Chris O’Dowd: an Airstream trailer from 1952. (“I know how much you like to be near a major highway,” he says.) In Marrakech, when Stephen Mangan, trying to navigate them out of an alley, says, “My map says that way, but my heart says that way,” Ayoade, beaming, replies, “Let’s go with the map, rather than your rotten heart.”

Having a companion join in, besides providing “the illusion of bonhomie,” as Ayoade says, is a smart way to offset the slightly embarrassing explanatory nature of a travel show—there’s less of a false intimacy between viewer and host. Instead, we see Ayoade and friend in action together, bombing around town via bicycle, funicular, hot rod, tank taxi, horse-drawn carriage, camel, Vespa, or tuk-tuk (“Lisbon’s steep slopin’ need not ruin your scopin’,” he says). The show’s editing of their adventures is energetic, occasionally near-Eisensteinian; it feels efficient and encourages the notion, however accurate, that travel is bracing and jolly. Ayoade and friend combine visiting attractions that we would expect, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (“It calls for a brief pause in glibness”), with the less expected: golfing in Tenerife, a doll hospital in Lisbon , a cave tour in Slovenia. The show’s most famous scene is undoubtedly its hair-raising trip to a Vienna snow-globe museum —I’ll let you discover it for yourself—but that episode features an equally funny scene at the Sigmund Freud Museum, during a conversation involving Darth Vader’s helmet.

“Travel Man” is not necessarily best enjoyed in a binge. (There are nine short seasons and three Christmas specials.) Too much at once can highlight the effort involved in its stars’ banter, and you occasionally worry that Ayoade’s companion won’t be quite as fun as he is, a worry that is sometimes justified. But enjoyed responsibly, the potent, savory series provides what you most seek from a travel show: a sense of a place and an idea of how you might find yourself in it. It combines TV’s particular efficiency in revealing the sights and sounds of a destination with the sense of what an amiable neurotic might experience there. At this point in my year, having long since returned from my adventures in Europe, I am mere months into the decade I’ll need to decompress from even one fjord. Part of that process involves recreational “Travel Man,” where Ayoade adventures so I don’t have to. “This is the sexiest place on the planet,” a Miami skipper tells him proudly, on a boat tour. “People come here to have a good time and let loose and have fun.”

“Sounds like hell,” Ayoade says.

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Travel Man: 96 Hours in Iceland review – farewell Richard Ayoade, hello Joe Lycett

The Birmingham comic is joined by Bill Bailey to eat tomatoes and form a punk band in his debut as the new host of Channel 4’s holiday show. But Ayoade fans may miss his trademark quirks

R ichard 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.

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• Bill Bailey

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