Unsolicited Advice

2012's Big Fat Quiz  was rather notable -- aside from Jack and James pulling the pizza stunt, which apparently really did take everyone by surprise, I am flabbergasted by how much they managed to actually get Richard Ayoade to talk . He's generally quite terrified of unscripted TV, as he will note right out loud if you ever ask him. He's been doing this for years, and continues to be terrified of having to wing an entire appearance, which generally leads me to conclude that he's shy as a character trait and not as a specific insecurity about his appearance or acting, particularly since he seems to do fine when he's applying himself to fully-scripted endeavours like The IT Crowd, or things where large chunks of his presentation already exist for him to ad-lib around with people he already knows, like the time he popped up on Buzzcocks .  (Confession: I really hate The IT Crowd . I dislike sitcoms in general. A lot of the individual exchanges are amusing, but the t...

Hey, for anyone else who missed it, here's the Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2012 : One of this year's panelists is Jack Whitehall. I fucking love Jack Whitehall. He's, I don't know, like twelve? and he's absolutely hilarious . One of the running jokes is that Whitehall comes from ludicrous kinds of money -- he does; his father is the agent for several tremendously famous people, and his mother is (was?) a successful actress -- and instead of coming out of his cocoon and being confused by normal people who, like, shop at Tesco, he's picked up the real world with a breathtaking quickness.  He's based a large part of his schtick on going, "Oh my god, you guys, I grew up on a different fucking planet , let me tell you how mad it is there." He does rather acutely embarrass himself with it from time to time, but he gets away with a lot, on account of one of the things he never  had to buy was brains. Whitehall is extremely quick, which results in ...

Sometimes I wonder if other people can even see the subtitles I keep getting on conversations. One of the recent eps of NMTB was hosted by Richard Ayoade, whom you might recognize from the Boosh stuffs and also The IT Crowd . He has a positively superhuman deadpan, resistant to almost anything thrown his way -- although if you watch the gag reels for The IT Crowd , on the rare occasion that he does crack, Ayoade can't quit laughing and usually wrecks a dozen takes in a row. This episode is uniquely hilarious for the complete lack  of jokes from the host. Even if you didn't know they'd worked together before, it's easy to tell that Fielding at least knows of  Ayoade; he starts hiding behind his coffee mug and trying not to die laughing before anything's even really happened. Given whatever brief context you've picked up here from my babbling, what might the following exchange lead you to guess about Ayoade? My observations below.