The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade: 4-star review

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! Oh Bedlam!.

The Unfinished Harauld Hughes joins a rich tradition of fake biographies – think of William Boyd’s Nat Tate – but Ayoade’s game of mind 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 theater and for the screen? It seemed impossible.” He has great fun parodying the weakness of literary biographers for pointless detail and labored 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’.”