The Unfinished Harauld Hughes: Richard Ayoade's hilarious fictional quest to rescue a mythical mid-century playwright from obscurity

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'So funny - Nabokov meets Spinal Tap.' STEPHEN MERCHANT
'Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.' TIM KEY
'Absolutely miraculous.' JESSE EISENBERG
'A brain-swirlingly funny quest.' ROBERT POPPER

Richard Ayoade's fictional quest to rescue Harauld Hughes - the almost mythical mid-century playwright - from obscurity.

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 mind of the most furious British writer since the Boer War.

This is the story of the story of that quest.

Readers love The Unfinished Harauld Hughes:

'Buy it, it's hilarious.'
'Intelligent humour at its best.'
'Terrific, funny, nuts!'
'I was snorting with laughter.'
'Very clever, very funny.'

Reviews

"Richard Ayoade is my favourite writer, and The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is the Rosetta Stone for his brain. Absolutely miraculously rendered nonsense." - Jesse Eisenberg

"Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant." - Tim Key

"So funny and brilliantly rendered -- Nabokov meets Spinal Tap." - Stephen Merchant

"A sparkling odyssey into the back story of our most criminally-overlooked screen and stage writer... Fictional film-making has never been so funny." - David Baddiel

"A brain-swirlingly funny quest." - Robert Popper

Author Bio

RICHARD AYOADE is a writer and director. In addition to directing and co-writing Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, he has adapted and directed Joe Dunthorne's novel Submarine for the screen and is the co-writer (with Avi Korine) and director of the film The Double. As an actor he is best known for his roles as Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Maurice Moss in the Emmy Award-winning The IT Crowd, for which he was awarded a BAFTA for Best Performance in a Comedy.