⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 – It is an easy listen, silly and short, but I didn’t get it!
Format: Audio (Audible)
Read: January 2026
After I enjoyed my re-read of Ayoade on Top at the end of last year, I saw this one in the 2-for-1 Audible credit sale and decided to give it a go. I got this one (4 hours) and Les Misérables (67 hours), so I thought that balanced out! Ayoade on Top is a non-fiction but very tongue-in-cheek critical essay of the 2003 movie View From The Top (an overlooked air-hostess based rom-com starring Gwyneth Paltrow). The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is complete fiction dressed up as non-fiction, told from the point of view of a fictionalised version of Ayoade himself.
I don’t normally bother to include the blurb for the book, but in this case, this is perfectly succinct, and I think it gets across the tone well:
The gifted filmmaker, corduroy activist and amateur dentist, Richard Ayoade, first chanced upon a copy of The Two-Hander Trilogy by Harauld Hughes in a second-hand bookshop. At first startled by his uncanny resemblance to the author’s photo, he opened the volume and was electrified. Terse, aggressive, and elliptical, what was true of Ayoade was also true of Hughes’s writing, which encompassed stage, screen, and some of the shortest poems ever published.
Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes’s final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War.
This is the story of the story of that quest.
The audiobook has a great cast of British comedians – Noel Fielding, Stephen Merchant, David Mitchell, and Chris Morris; plus Ayoade’s wife, actress Lydia Fox and actress Sally Hawkins. They provide voices for the various characters interviewed by Ayoade as he pieces together the story for his documentary, and Merchant is the voice of his producer.
I have to say I didn’t really get this one. It was mild fun, and I do really enjoy Ayoade’s brand of wry humour (I’m still considering the implications of a “crippling mince addiction”), but in the end, this whole thing felt a bit pointless, and I felt like I missed something! For me, I think a large part of the problem is that this is just the story of a bunch of “artistic” twats with their heads up their own arses, all awful people being different degrees of awful to each other, and so I just didn’t care about the Truth of anything! I actually think that was Ayoade’s point; it just didn’t land in a way that resonated for me.
Funnily, my husband was listening to Garth Merenghi’s Terrortome at the same time, so I very much had thoughts of Garth Merenghi in my head. This was an absolute cult classic horror parody sitcom from 2004, really must give that a rewatch, it’s been years! Of course, Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace is about the making of a fictional TV supernatural hospital drama called Darkplace. I remembered that Ayoda was in this, playing the unforgettable Dean Learner, the author Garth Merenghi’s publisher, who also has a part in the TV show. Matthew Holness plays Garth Merenghi and to this day stays in character as Garth when promoting the series of books he’s writing at the moment (proudly, the only author who has written more books than he has read). Seeing the obviously similar themes and subjects in their work (parodies focused on fictional writers!), it made me look up whether Ayoade also wrote for Garth Marenghi‘s Darkplace, and he did! The two co-wrote the series.
This doesn’t have much to do with this book, but I found it interesting to discover something new about Richard Ayoade that I didn’t know, having known him mostly from The IT Crowd and Travel Man. I have one other book of his in the queue, The Grip of Film, which I believe is Ayoade adopting a parody persona again but this time an 80s action movie director.
As for this one, it’s fun. It was only 4 hours on audio, but it’s weird. I would not make this your first Richard Ayaode book. Oh, and Husband doesn’t recommend Garth Merenghi’s Terrortome. The joke wears thin, and then you’re actually just reading a badly written trashy horror book.
