Richard Ayoade’s biography of a bad writer is completely fake

The IT Crowd star’s spoof life of a Pinter-esque writer, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, offers a hilarious parody of the 1960s film world

4/5
Surely you remember Harauld Hughes? Unread today, alas, but in the 1960s he bestrode literary London like a turtlenecked colossus. Hughes was a poet, a playwright, “a political polemicist who loved badminton and did so much to restore the game to social prominence”, and a schlock screenwriter, as the IT Crowd star Richard Ayoade recalls, in this memoir of Ayoade’s doomed attempt to make a documentary about Hughes’s final film, the unfinished masterpiece O Bedlam! O Bedlam!.
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes joins a rich tradition of fake biographies – think of William Boyd’s Nat Tate – but Ayoade’s jeu d’esprit is more knockabout spoof than credible hoax. It’s not always subtle, but it’s often very, very funny.
The portrait of Hughes on this book’s jacket bears an eerie resemblance to Ayoade, but in every other respect he’s the spit of Harold Pinter, with his pause-laden plays and tempestuous personal life. Some of the silliest details – such as the giant portrait of himself in sporting gear that Hughes displays on his wall – are lifted straight from Pinter’s biography. And like Pinter, Hughes divorces his first wife, an actress who starred in his dramas, for a titled aristocrat, “Lady Virginia Lovilocke”. We’re treated to her hilarious, cloying prose via quotations from her (also confected) autobiography.
Ayoade has a perfect ear for all kinds of bad writing, a gift evident ever since his first TV series, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004), a pin-sharp parody of sub-Stephen King horror. Here, he channels Alan Partridge-like bathos. Explaining his love for Hughes, he gasps: “How could someone write for the theatre and for the screen? It seemed impossible.” He has great fun parodying the weakness of literary biographers for pointless detail and laboured metaphors: “The house in which [Hughes] lived has since been demolished to accommodate a new trampoline park called Flip Zone (‘For kids aged 9-99!’). With his broiling temperament and tendency for explosive outbursts, Hughes was his own kind of ‘Flip Zone’.”
Ayoade is – or was – a very promising writer-director himself. But it’s a decade since his last feature, The Double, and some fans may wish he’d stop writing about writing about films and actually make one. This is, now, the comedian’s fourth book of intentionally terrible film criticism. The first, Ayoade on Ayoade (2014), was a delicious send-up of fawning auteur interviews, but the others – all peppered with jokes for people who have a strong opinion about Mark Cousins – suffered from diminishing returns. I’d be intrigued to see him write something sincerely good rather than ironically bad (he’s reportedly co-writing a script with Booker-winner George Saunders, which bodes well.)
But until he does, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is a droll return to form. The early chapters have laugh-out-loud lines on almost every page. You’ll feel pleased with yourself for spotting who or what is being spoofed in a given line (we meet a director “famous for And…?! (1969), about a scout-group militia who attack the House of Lords”), but more often, the characters are composites – it’s the whole not-very-Swinging Sixties milieu he’s mocking.
I loved singer Donny Chapel, with “his singular brand of socially committed skiffle”, and Hughes’s half-brother, the cockney Svengali Mickie Perch, who might be the missing link between Ronnie Scott and Ronnie Kray. Perch runs a chain of nightclubs that owe their success to the winning combination of “all-day fry-ups, hard bop and topless waitresses”, a concept made even funnier by Ayoade’s poker-faced note: “Because of the rules of public decency imposed by the Lord Chamberlain, the waitresses could be nude only if they were stationary, which meant that service was slow, but no one seemed to mind.”
The jokes thin out later, when Ayoade puts more focus onto the plot, a shaggy dog story about the mystery of O Bedlam! O Bedlam!’s nightmare shoot and missing script – but the silly conceit just about sustains 200 pages. Can it stretch even further? Faber certainly think so. Ayoade’s publishers – who are playing the whole thing straight – have gone to the extraordinary length of producing not one but three books “by” Hughes, long out of print but now soon to be published “in all new fonts, and exhaustively punctuated”. Hughsians, rejoice.
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is published by Faber at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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