Ayoade on Top is a satirical monograph by comedian Richard Ayoade (whom you’ll know as Moss from The IT Crowd) on the American aeroplane romcom View from the Top, starring Gwyneth Paltrow. View from the Top has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 14%, just to give you an idea of the calibre of work we’re talking about here.
Ayoade has some fair if obvious points to make about this genre of film:
Cinema helps us to remember that although we all have the right to shine, some of us must shine in the background, out of focus, and not too brightly.
And I can’t help but admire the sheer randomness of this project: a parody of a type of writing most people don’t ever read, about an obscure film most people will never see? How does one even go about selling that? let alone convincing people to buy it? I suspect name recognition helps, but still, the market for this book must be less than enormous – it’s a refreshing change from big-name commercial cash-grabs like The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet.
It’s an entertaining enough read, in other words (especially if you can do Ayoade’s deadpan voice in your head), but the joke does become – a little laboured. 250 pages is about 150 pages too long for this particular gag. For all its originality, I think Ayoade on Top is destined to go down in the annals of publishing as no more than a minor work.
The English Student 