The Unfinished Harauld Hughes

Richard Ayoade’s dogged quest to rescue Harauld Hughes - the great mid-century playwright, and Ayoade’s uncanny doppelganger - 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 most furious British writer since the Boer War.

This is the story of the story of that quest.

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.