Ayoade on Top

by Richard Ayoade

Stow it, like you’d stow something in your own home, or in an Edwardian novel.

‘doors’ to have no real relevance within this piece of high-wire idiomatic world building.

Top is a rare, breathless work of honesty, directness and integrity, a film that celebrates capitalism in all its victimless glory, and one I can imagine Donald Trump himself half watching on his private jet’s gold-plated flat screen, while his other puffy eye scans the cabin for fresh young prey.

When I was six, I didn’t even know it was possible to be anywhere else. All I did was stay in the car. My parents were always in the car, going to places, getting out of the car at those places and asking me to stay in the car until they got back from those places. But they needn’t have asked. Where else would I go? It never occurred to me to leave the car. The only reason I wasn’t still in bed was because I was told it was time to get out of bed and get in the car.

I opted for a look which said, ‘Youth is wasted on me!’ – baggy corduroy, tucked-in checked shirts and tweed jackets. I looked like my own supply teacher.

this is God asking you to leave His kingdom, and by all accounts He’s not a Huge One for self-doubt.

your man could be maxin’ in Mustique, but if the Lord of the Flies is on the adjacent lounger, your man may as well be in a bay of turd. Or Ibiza.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s slumber party Stalker (which I thought would be a slasher film, not a challenge to my desire to remain conscious).

still close enough to the A12 that you could forever hear its roar in your dreams. Every day, when we drove to school or to the nearest shop for fresh earplugs,

When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.

but in an Eater or Chef you were witnessing the outworking of a master–servant relationship as old as the Mesopotamians (but this time with air conditioning at selected outlets). By feting my naissance at an Eater, I would move up the dominance hierarchy from Boy Held Down and Farted On to International Sophisticate Laughing at Prior Subjugation with New-Found Friends. ‘Was this the boy whose head we used to flush down the toilet?’ my oppressors would ask. ‘This bon viveur so suavely swirling his Thousand Island dressing with a carrot baton?’

the carcinogenic cardio I so desperately craved.

Why would they entice you with pictures of food that they hadn’t even started to make? That would be like going to the newsagent and waiting for the journalists to finish writing the captions.

I too know the terror of unexpected gusts, be they environmental or alimentary. I too know what it’s like to want to leave somewhere. My main problem is knowing where to go once I’ve left.

This is the bedrock of great directing – translating ideas into images. Donna needs to get off her ass and reach for the sky, or she’ll end up here for ever!

Sisyphus is going places, it’s just that the route is quite up and down.

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.

(who alternates between a pout that says ‘thinking is hard’ and the smile of a post-poo baby basking in gooey relief)

Why are people playing table tennis during Easter-egg hunts?

Why would the Peach-Skinned Prom Queen leave with someone who doesn’t care enough about the planet to offer her an eco-friendly transportation option? If he was a Real Man, why would he want their unconceived children to breathe in those fumes?

Nothing is more sensual than solvency.

She has centredness, wellness and mindfulness, along with other ‘nesses’ we probably won’t even hear about until the next newsletter. For Donna Jensen to even dream of such a woman would be beyond her capacity. GP’s life is Olympian, a true View from the Top. A view that only one super-special old soul with youthful glow-y skin can command.

Getting your foreword game tight is one of the most important things you can do as a prominent media figure. You don’t have time to write a book. You’re a prominent media figure. But you sure as hell have time to say that this book you haven’t written is the kind of book you would have written if you weren’t so busy living a life that would make the tedious task of organising extended passages of words a fatal distraction.

her face crumples, like a drained can of Fanta under a Cuban heel.

like something Beckett might have written if he’d had ever had the balls to come up with a plot,

Want to know the difference between a commercial aeroplane and communist China? You can smoke, guff and make consensual love in communist China without fear of reproach!

(why should I call the pilot ‘captain’ – I didn’t join his army)

When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.

David ‘Cannonball’ Smith Sr, is rumoured to have travelled 61 metres at the Steele County Free Fair in Owatonna, Minnesota, but the distance was never verified, and the date never specified. In Minnesota, one imagines, days can drag. Perhaps that’s why Smith Sr took to blasting himself as far away from the arid sod as he could get and encouraged his son to do the same.

Before long, National Airlines replaced the ‘Fly me’ ad, this time using one with a more Heraclitus-like tone: ‘We’ll fly you like you’ve never been flown before.’ Aviation regulations would dictate otherwise.

You are one hundred times more likely to catch a cold on a plane; you’re exposed to more radiation than you would be if you stood next to a nuclear reactor; and perhaps most pressingly, it makes a man mighty windy. The moment right before flatus passes through the rectum is one of tension and intense self-hatred.

Why don’t they just call it Caligulair? ‘Our seats are wipe-clean for a reason …’

When something really is important, you don’t rely on ‘sex appeal’. If there were print ads for brain surgery, you wouldn’t show a picture of a glamour model, next to the caption, ‘Meet Cindy, she’ll be holding the forceps …’

As far as I’m concerned, this here’s our pool party: we can do whatever the flip we want. If we want to lay a log in the lagoon, pas de prob. (cf. my monograph: ‘POO(LS) – A New Approach’).

The only way to have prevented Donald Trump’s election would have been to bankrupt him, but he has too many bushels. That tangerine man’s lousy with bushels.

(the trick of fiction is to convince us that life spills out beyond the narrative’s frame),

Part of the job of Female Protagonist is to choose which Supporting Male to allow into your character’s private thicket, and one way you can always tell whether a chap’s the ticket is if he compliments you on your intelligence before your looks.

teeth that don’t seem to be playing on the same team,

when faced with something smooth, symmetrical and clean, one gets a distinct whiff of the divine, a celestial scent that lets you know God’s done His work and all is well.

wonders whether there is a danger in turning human relationships into ‘assets’.

8‘There’s a pilot and co-pilot. That’s different to two pilots and it’s different to two co-pilots. Just as Ant and Ant is not the same as Dec and Dec, nor is Dec without Ant Ant ’n’ Dec, but something other, and not the One True Union, no matter how good Holly Willoughby might be,’ said Jesus. 9When the chief priests heard this, they were amazed, and not only because they wondered how long before the reference would date. 10And they phoned their Uncle Levi and told him what Jesus had said, which took quite a while, because he said he didn’t know who Holly Willoughby was, and they didn’t believe him.

The cover by Katie Cook is so faithful that it’s only on the level of your subconscious that you realise something’s missing. This dissatisfaction cleverly mimics the thoughts that we might read into Ted’s face, if we weren’t so angry with him.

Have there been troubled waters over which he’s had to do a little bridge work?

single glycerine tear fights its way through foundation so thick it might need its own foundation,

Purported ‘loved ones’ won’t stop laughing until I prove to them that the puddling blood is mine, and even then it’s not a given.

subtextually thwacks any nails not yet hit squarely on their heads by the audible gasps.

He asked for a surfeit of warm nuts, and she realised that what he wanted wasn’t safe to put in a microwave.

The savagery of moth is chilling. The only way to beat the bastards is to encase everything you own in plastic and suck out all the air; you have to live like a budget astronaut. But the alternative is that the bastards win.

On my first watch of View from the Top (how I envy me then, as the film unspooled for the first time!) I was 120 per cent behind Donna, even though that’s mathematically impossible.

STEVIE: I never liked that stupid arm anyway. Stimpson managed to persuade Boeing’s board to go with the idea, but only if the nurses weren’t so young that their tits hadn’t had a chance to grow. Within a few years, the need for nursing qualifications was dropped – youth, tailored uniforms and attractiveness being deemed more than sufficient replacements for the ability to save lives.