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. There are moments when the pair stray into strained banter territory, but there is also plenty of good, easy stuff. 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. Lycett is a perfectly good presenter and Bailey a perfectly good guest. 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. It is a busy but essentially soothing 96 hours. 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. They put toys in the shoes of good children on Christmas Eve and leave potatoes in those of the others. These are 13 mischievous figures (with names such as Sausage Swiper, Door Slammer and Spoon Licker) of seasonal folklore. They travel to Dimmuborgir, where the earth is said to meet the underworld, and to the Cave of the Yule Lads. 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 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. It is a perfectly enjoyable hour in their company. 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. This episode welcomes the new presenter, Joe Lycett, with what is effectively a Christmas special. HELLO DARLING MOVIE SERIESHis 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. It jibed particularly well with his stint as Channel 4’s eponymous Travel Man, a role from which he has stepped down. 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.
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