The undeniable genius of Richard Ayoade making me wait to enjoy the undeniable genius of Richard Ayoade.
Late last week I picked up Richard Ayoade’s most recent book The Unfinished Harauld Hughes.
I’ve been a fan of Ayoade’s for decades, whether I knew it or not: I don’t know if I saw the video for Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Heads Will Roll before I saw The IT Crowd, but if so I almost certainly wouldn’t have known who the video’s director was. Regardless, my dear friend Talal and I obsessed over IT Crowd, watching and rewatching the series throughout our tenure as roommates. It would be a few years before I cottoned on to Ayoade’s larger career as a filmmaker and larger British TV personality, but the hours and hours I’ve spent watching YouTube clips of panel shows, Travel Man, and the Big Fat Quiz of the Year are without number. I come for the Ayoade, I stay for the Ayoade.
The man’s writing career is a unique, bizarre thing, often filled with metanarratives about fictional creators, critics, and critique. In Ayoade on Ayoade, Richard interviews himself about cinema, and finds himself a frustrating bore. In Ayoade on Top, he dedicates an entire book to an exacting examination of the 2003 Gwenyth Paltrow/Mark Ruffalo romcom View From the Top, investing an altogether unwieldy amount of consideration to a film that he — and we, the reader — understand to be not very good.
Harauld Hughes is much more aligned to Ayoade’s 2017 book Richard Ayoade Presents The Grip of Film by Gordy LaSure, which introduces the titular LaSure, an overthinking critic whose examination of films tends toward the lowbrow. The gag is that this critical genius despises what are generally agreed to be works of art, and loves films like Porky’s.
Hughes creates another artistic outsider, this time a “talented” playwright who, through a series of debts, finds himself writing exploitation films with titles like THE AWFUL WOMAN FROM SPACE and THE ESPECIALLY WAYWARD GIRL. It’s a very, very Ayoade concept, and I was very eager to dig into it.
The trouble is that I got about halfway through the book before I realized that Ayoade hadn’t just written a book about this taciturn man’s career — the book frames the narrative as if Ayoade himself has discovered a lost body of work from a prodigious creator — he had gone ahead and written the entire body of work by that creator.
Over three other volumes, Ayoade has published the plays, poems, and screenplays of a man who doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t feel right to read about the man without first experiencing his work; The Unfinished Harauld Hughes has been put aside while my copies of Harauld Hughes’ Plays, Prose, Pieces, Poetry, The Models Trilogy, and Four Films wing their way over from Oxford-based Blackwell’s Books — because these books weren’t released in the states (or, if they were, they were incredibly hard to find here).
It isn’t that I couldn’t have finished the book without the near thousand extra pages of content — Unfinished Harauld Hughes is written as forthright (if hilariously) as any of the critical examinations of media I read for Publisher’s Weekly. Many of those books are about artists I know just as little about as this fictional playwright that sprang from Ayoade’s mind.
The pressing concern is, of course, that without them I wouldn’t be in the know. It is a curse that I have that I often feel the need to be in the know when it comes to all things that I’ve grown even partially interested in. Through the power of ADHD I’m cursed forever to throw myself completely into whatever minor and momentary interest I’ve discovered; this is how I’ve read hundreds of DC Comics back issues, some or all featuring minor characters about whom no one else seems all too compelled to research or care about.
Now without an Ayoade to read, I’ve turned my reading elsewhere.
My Work This Week at AIPT:
My time on Judging by the Cover continues!
The recent Daredevil: Woman Without Fear miniseries did little with the character.
I finally got to reading the first chunk of Ultimate Spider-Man, first published 20-odd years ago. I liked it!