Yardsticks For Failure

Adventures in Friendship and Fluster: the hilarious debut from the Taskmaster Season 15 contestant

By: Ivo Graham

Narrated by: Ivo Graham

'A hilarious and original voice' Josh Widdicombe

'Delightfully smart and impossibly charming' Dolly Alderton

'His writing is as unpredictable and brilliant as he is' Sophie Duker

'I've got nothing but love for Mr Ivo Graham' Frankie Boyle

Yardsticks For Failure is the story of the most frantic two years of Ivo Graham's already quite frantic life, 2022-2024, two years of tasks and tears and everything in between.

The amount of stuff Ivo packs into these two years will excite you and exhaust you, enthral you and appal you, and many more carefully choreographed pairs of verbs if you'd like this sentence to be even longer. There are some short sentences in this book, such as this one. And this one. But there are some long old sentences too, sentences that take you on whole thrilling adventures all by themselves, sentences that are rich in music and memory, mischief and mourning, sentences that bring you right alongside Ivo in his train-chasing, gamefacing,
name-dropping, heart-stopping chaos of an existence. No one lives like Ivo does, and no one writes like him either. There are failures in his life but this book is not one of them. Come on in.

'Not a complete waste of his school fees' Jenny Eclair

'A trash man from a trash family' James Acaster©2024 Ivo Graham

AnnOK book. Hard to relate to it all. Narration gets tiresome.

I came to this book because of ("naturally", Ivo would say) Taskmaster. Some bit are fun, some are interesting, and some are genuinely moving (he does hos friend Tom an excellent service).

But large chunks of it are names and clubs and places and shows that - possibly on account of me not being British - I just don't know, nor care about.

And his narration, though heartfelt at points, does get grating. For most of the book, it follows the same pattern: overstressed alliterations, rolling Rs, seeming (but unjustified) rage at specific words and the same flow, over and over, of overly dramatic grave intonation at the conclusion of a sentence. Sort of what you'd expect from seeing him on taskmaster and live shows, but on an entire book it gets annoying. I thought of forwarding or even stopping at points, though, to the book's credit, I didn't.