Richard Ayoade

Moss in The IT Crowd approaches situations with a precision that often fails to account for what everyone else expects socially. The Dinner Party places him outside the familiar computer-support office and inside an event organised around impressions and conversation. Ayoade's controlled delivery is the useful thing to watch: he does not need to signal a joke loudly when the character's reasoning is already out of step with the room. The performance makes the gap between technical competence and social fluency unusually clear.