Review by Annabel
Underneath the comic, often socially awkward, character exterior of Richard Ayoade lives a real intellectual and talented writer, who puts on a clever act to fool us all on TV in The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Travel Man, The Crystal Maze etc. And just to pick out a few of his other credits, he’s a director of many pop videos and two excellent movies (Submarine and The Double (the latter based on a Dostoyevsky novella)). He was President of Footlights at Cambridge, where he met Matthew Holness. Together they created the cringemakingly funny Garth Marenghi, a horror writer and Dean Learner, his publisher, taking the characters to the Fringe and then Channel 4. He’s also written several other books – including Ayoade on Ayoade – parodying Fabers’ Directors on Directors series, which is particularly pertinent to his latest creation…
Where to begin with Harauld Hughes? Ayoade is on a quest to rescue this mythical playwright who died in 2006 from obscurity, a darling of the 1960s whose career foundered at its pinnacle when he left his actress wife for Lady Virginia Lovilocke. It’s when someone remarks that Ayoade is the dead spit of Hughes, that he is compelled to discover more. The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is thus Ayoade’s account of his quest to uncover the life and works of his doppelgänger, chronicled as he attempts to make a documentary about him, interviewing his family, wives, collaborators etc. if they’ll talk, and especially about his last unreleased film script O Bedlam! O Bedlam!.
All of this is profoundly meta, totally fictional, and absolutely hilarious!
What is more though, this was a lockdown project, and Ayoade has also written all of Hughes’ complete works, and Faber, bless them, has published them in three volumes! Initially, released as signed limited editions, sadly I was too late to snaffle any of them now, but they will be published as standard paperbacks in the spring.
Although whether I’d want to read a whole Hughes play or screenplay after reading the quotes in Ayoade’s book is another matter. They’re distinctly arch and Pinter-esque with nods to the great kitchen sink dramas of the period, and not a little Carry On, dare I say it, in the imagination as he moved from stage to big screen! Here’s an example from Platform (1960), Hughes’ first play:
ACTRESS:
I think you might be the most conceited man I’ve ever met.ROCKER
So you do agree we’ve met? We have become acquainted?ACTRESS
We’re on the same platform.
See what I mean? The part of the actress was played by Felicity Stoat, Hughes’ first wife, whom Virginia Lovilocke hated with a vengeance and detailed in her memoir of her life with Hughes, Herstory, which Ayoade quotes from extensively.
“… There are those who find Felicity attractive, and I suppose Harauld must have been among their number, at least when he was very young, almost a boy. But Felicity lacks the capacity for reciprocal flourishing.
Herstory, Lady Virginia Lovilocke.
Harauld had a complicated family. His mother was a lapsed nun from Wales, he never knew his father. He had twin half-brothers, Mickie and Colin Perch. Mickie was a ‘producer, night-club owner, Svengali,’. Colin an accountant. They lived with his stepfather Clifton ‘Monkey’ Perch at the Elephant & Castle in South London. Mickie got Harauld off the ground, financing his productions, which Harauld kept quiet about, Mickie being dodgy. Ayoade does manage to talk about him to Hughes best friend Mickie Barrett, who would play Rocker in Platform, finding him a tricky geezer, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Ayoade has clearly had great fun, and in the case of this book, has the good sense to know that to make it any longer would be too much of a good thing. At 180 or so pages, including lots of white space, it’s just right. It’s witty, clever, hilarious, twisted, meta and I loved it.
(If you have BBC iPlayer, he was on Graham Norton talking about it, and he and Colin Farrell performed one of Harauld’s ‘muscular’ poems – brilliant! From 32 mins in – click here.)
Annabel is a co-founder of Shiny and one of its editors.
Richard Ayoade, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes (Faber, 2024). 978-0571377893, 192pp., hardback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
