Richard Ayoade

Video: Creating the agonising moments of film Submarine

The British film "Submarine" tells the heart warming tale of a young man's first experience of love and has already had rave reviews at this year's Toronto, London and Sundance film festivals.

It is directed by the Perrier award winning comedian Richard Ayoade, known for his roles in shows such as The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd, and stars Craig Roberts as 15-year-old Oliver Tate.

They spoke to BBC Breakfast about what it was like to make the film.

Submarine review

You might just want to stop everything and get yourself a ticket to Richard Ayoade's film of Submarine. We might just be talking about this one for a long time...

Richard Ayoade interview

In person, Richard Ayoade's the world's most softly-spoken man, analysing every word, considering every syllable, visibly agonising over being misconstrued and taken out of context...

Richard Ayoade takes the helm for Submarine

Not since The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole has there been a teenage character like Oliver Tate - whose self-obsessed and sometimes hilarious inner monologues are the subject of Submarine.

Submarine - Richard Ayoade

Already a contender for film of the year.

Richard Ayoade: Meet Mr Modest

He's The IT Crowd über-geek who has been labelled the 'coolest man in London'. Now Richard Ayoade has made his first feature film. But it's not something to boast about, he tells Alexis Petridis.

So numerous and so pronounced are the foibles of the modern celebrity chef that this sitcom manages to satirise most of them without ever making it seem as if it's going after a particular individual. Tonight, Roland (played by Alan Davies; but increasingly using the mannerisms of Richard Ayoade) finds his patience sorely tested when superchef Shay Marshall pays the restaurant a visit. Interestingly, he decides now is the time to greenlight Bib's pretentious new menu.

The fourth series of Graham Linehan's workplace comedy continues. In tonight's episode, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) finally decides to attend the weekly head-of-department meetings she's been avoiding. She arrives to find a mysterious gathering of women in dressing gowns. Meanwhile, geeky Moss (Richard Ayoade) triumphs as a contestant on Countdown and gains access to a secret nightclub for past winners.

The adorable Moss (Richard Ayoade) goes from loser to schmoozer when a string of victories on TV's Countdown gains him admittance to a secret, exclusive club where men in jam-jar specs, checked shirts and fabric ties are fawned over by scantily clad women. Lunatic flights of fancy are what this series does best and Moss's experiences in this Bizarro-style universe don't disappoint. Sure, the typically odd twists of fate that afflict his luckless colleagues Jen (Katherine Parkinson) and Roy (Chris O'Dowd) back in the real world feel tacked on, but the sight of Moss playing the urban "Street Countdown" around burning braziers, a baying mob and wire fencing is a winningly loopy one. I can certainly see his clear-eyed threat to a slang-talking opponent of "I came here to drink milk and kick ass... and I've just finished my milk" finding its way on to geek chic T-shirts.

There can't be many sitcom characters as lovably innocent as Moss, the bespectacled nerd in The IT Crowd.

The problem is that innocence so easily shades over into stupidity and then our affection becomes a different, compromised thing. Bubbles, the dimwitted PA in Absolutely Fabulous, was lovable, I guess, but part of what we loved about her was her unerring ability to grasp the wrong end of the stick. Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do Ave 'Em was also lovable in his way, but there was a whisper of contempt somewhere in the mix. In both cases, we fondly felt our superiority enlarged by their cluelessness. Moss, though, is significantly different. We're still laughing at him, rather than with him most of the time; but it's not because he's stupid exactly, just that his intelligence operates in a world several degrees to the left of the one the rest of us are in. There's something touching about how unbesmirched he is, so that even jokes about his sexual inexperience confirm his standing as a holy fool. I love him anyway - and feel more cheerful as soon as I see his face.

He was on good form in the first of the new series of Graham Linehan's comedy, sweetly attempting to be knowing and manly in order to help Roy through a bad relationship breakup, but flubbing it hopelessly because pretence of any kind is quite beyond him: "Women, eh!" he said, adopting his own weird version of a laddish posture, "Can't live with them... Can't find them sometimes". And whereas both Roy and Jen are funny in ways that you can imagine inserted into more conventional (and lesser) comedies, Moss could only really exist here. He is, in Linehan's script and Richard Ayoade's brilliantly naïve delivery, a unique comic creation. It isn't easy to back this up with evidence, to be honest. There are quotably funny lines in The IT Crowd (such as the boorish executive who is grievously disappointed to find that The Vagina Monologues isn't a sex show: "You get there and it's just women talking... it's false advertising!"). But far more often, the laughs sit in the junction between dialogue and expression. I can't think of any way to effectively paraphrase the long and delightful sequence in which Moss employs a game of Dungeons & Dragons as emotional therapy, since most of it consisted of jokes not being made and the absurdity simply being relished. But it was very funny.