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I Spent a Day with Adam Buxton, Inspiration to Teenage Slackers Everywhere

I spent the day with the man who puts the "Adam" in "Adam & Joe".

Adam Buxton on his bike outside the ICA

Adam Buxton turns up to the pub with half a carrot in his hand. He has eaten the other half. It’s not even midday and already he’s into the vegetables.

“I’m not sure Samuel Smith’s will let you bring your own carrots in,” I warn.

“Yeah, well, you know – I’m sticking it to that Samuel Smith guy…”

Over on the wall, he has balanced his bright pink Brompton bike above his yellow helmet. He wears a blue Gore-tex jacket and blue sports shoes. He looks like a Millets fruit salad. He has just come from rehearsing his new show, Kernel Panic (which he describes as being “like a funny TED Talk”), in the West End. Within a couple of hours he'll be back on the train to Norfolk, where he lives in a caricature of domestic bliss with His Lovely Wife and Three Wonderful Children.

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Some men just have families. But somewhere along the line, Adam Buxton has become A Family Man. This is his brand now – taking a deep pleasure in being content. What a contrast, then, with his long-time ampersand-sharer Joe Cornish – the co-presenter of The Adam & Joe Show – who is now out in Hollywood, the spiritual home of snorting whatever out of whoever’s wherever, working on the new Ant Man film with Edgar Wright. Presumably the studio system is squeezing the last of the boyish optimism out of him, I ask Adam.

“I spoke to Joe two weeks ago,” he replies. “I was out in LA doing my show. He seems to like it there, but I dunno… I’m not sure it’s for me. I envy his first-class travel privileges, but I’m not so sure about the rest. It seems like way too much pressure.”

Ever since Cornish’s bumper 2011 – writing and directing Attack the Block, and co-writing the screenplay for The Adventures of Tintin – Buxton has had to take his solo self and turn it into a headline item if he is to continue to afford the children he has made. This is still something of a challenge to him. Because, as not many realise, Adam’s a bit bashful. He can turn it on, froth through being a movie man or in a Ken Korda skit – or prance around to Grace Jones in stockings and suspenders – but, away from the work, the real Adam Buxton is a man who can’t always turn off his self-doubts.

The paradox is that he has a wonky homemade style, but also a neurotic perfectionist’s temper. Right now, he doesn’t appear to be the sort of comedian who comes rushing at you with gag after gag; if anything, he's the opposite, considering the questions that don’t deserve considering. I ask him if AIDS is funny and he tells me it depends. Later, on the steps opposite the ICA, he confesses to being a poor interview. “I tend to just follow my train of thought and ramble a lot.” I tell him it was like listening to an audiobook of Finnegan’s Wake. I’m not entirely sure if he takes this as a joke.

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“Some people,” he considers, “just have it. They arrive fully-formed. You throw them in front of a [camera] and everything works from the off – they’re charismatic, natural performers. I’m not that. It takes me about five years to get good at something, then I suddenly hit on a seam of goodness and I can mine it.”

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has a theory about how creativity is not so much getting to good ideas, as squeezing the bad ideas out of your brain until you happen upon the one in ten that is good. Buxton seems to be in that camp, breaking a lot of rocks to turn up one tiny nugget of gold. He still keeps journals where he writes everything down.

“That was one great thing in art school. Right from the start, they tell you: ‘This is a sketch-book. This is your new best friend. Write everything down.’ Because that’s the difference between a good artist and a bad one. My friend [TV writer] Graham Linehan thinks that, too – that if you don’t write your ideas down, they might as well never have existed.”

Re-listening to some of the Adam & Joe 6 Music stuff with that in mind, you can almost see the journals laid out in front of him. It’s all there in the have-you-ever-noticed urbanity of his style: the queue altercation at the theme park, the riff on the cornball songs in the middle of kids' films, pissy people on trains. You sense that if he had an altercation over a restaurant bill his first act would be to reach for a jotter. He goes back over the last 20 years' worth of journals from time to time.

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“It’s always interesting. I think some of the stuff in there, I look at it and think, ‘Yup, you were on to something there.’ Whereas, when I look back at how I was on TV in the early days, I see someone who was self-conscious and trying too hard. I dunno… I feel like, as you get older, you sort of want to get divorced from yourself every ten years.”

Adam & Joe's "People Place" 

To the people who didn’t have to live inside him, the young Adam Buxton was a delight. So was the young Joe Cornish. They turned up on our screens in 1996 and instantly became Elvis to a generation of over-educated under-employed children of the VHS age. Nowadays, the high-culture-via-low-culture blender thing is a media staple.

But, back then, carving up the tropes of daytime TV on “People Place” or skewering pompous poet Tom Paulin on their toy-based Late Review take-off felt like a fresh kind of comedy. The new generation of kids whose diets were already made up of both high-brow and low-brow cheered them on, but mainstream audiences never quite caught up for the usual boring reasons (scheduling, mainstream audiences).

At one point it looked as though they would get all their just rewards. In 2002, they ended up presenting the Glastonbury coverage, forcing Orbital to play an acoustic version of “Satan” on an Argos toy drum kit and staking out the human waste removal tanker backstage to speculate on which celebrities' turds it contained. Looking back from the eternal present of Fearne, Reggie and Zane, it’s enough to make anyone weep for better age.

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After that, their wave ran its course and, soon enough, they were hanging around on Xfm, then 6 Music, talking to each other to pay the bills. Adam still feels this was for the best. “It’s the most authentic version of what we do. In terms of our friendship, how we talk to each other… It’s a source of wonder to me sometimes that, 20 years on, I’m still mining a seam of friendship from my teenage years.”

Adam, Joe and Louis Theroux dancing to "Groove Is in the Heart" (1990)

Joe and Adam met at Westminster School. Their best bud was Louis Theroux. Giles Coren was there somewhere. Nick Clegg was a couple of years above them. Your bog-standard high school, basically. But while everyone else around them left and got internships at merchant banks or staff jobs on "Insight" at the Sunday Times, Buxton and Cornish were never part of that tribe of thrusting young bucks. Instead, they spent years living an arrested adolescence. Adam did one term at Warwick University, then dropped out.

He spent a further five years being a drunk and tending bars, occasionally making little videos with Joe for the amusement of a handful of friends. They were losers, back when it was just an annoying part of their real-lives, rather than their own highly marketable brand. Louis Theroux would come round for pre-Christmas dinner and Adam’s dad (a former Telegraph wine critic, later immortalised as "BaaadDad") would take an interest in him, because Louis was evidently a proper person who’d been to Oxford and was doing things. Whereas Adam and Joe…

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In his mid-twenties, finally deciding he needed to get serious and kick himself into the grey workaday world, Adam went to art school to study video sculpture. “Art school was wonderful, really. It was a very nurturing environment, where, for three years, you could just do whatever you wanted, safe from the real world. A lot of girls especially sat round doing performance pieces about their bodies. There was nudity sometimes, which is always good, obviously.”

In the last days of Adam’s final term, they saw an ad for Takeover TV – a showcase of home-filmed skits – in the back of NME and sent a tape into Channel 4. The producers flipped out.

In those days, he and Joe used to have one of those endearingly creepy relationships that went beyond simply finishing each others’ sentences to the feeling that only their incompatible genitals barred them from forming the deepest relationship two humans are capable of. They lived near each other in Stockwell and hung out in each other’s living rooms at odd hours. But now that Joe is a voice down the phone, Adam has had to build his own platform. He has brought in Edith Bowman to talk on the radio with him, because he hates talking to himself on the radio, and he did a pilot for BBC3 – MeeBox – which was basically a bag of sketches.

Episode 3 of Adam's Bug

For the past six years, however, his key project has been Bug – a concept so simple that half the genius was just putting it onstage. It takes the fungus of commentariat that grows under YouTube music videos and puts it under the microscope, affording a magnification that draws all of the comedy out of situations like “guywithacoolusername” and “megadreamer86” arguing whether or not Grimes is gay. “I think people respond to it because everyone has had a scrape online. Everyone’s been there, and hopefully come out of it chastened and a little wiser.”

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Have you?

“Well, there was this bodybuilder guy who started posting stuff under my YouTube channel. And I, very foolishly, replied. Which egged him on. Then he started getting quite personal. Talking about my family. Where I lived. Then one day I spent quite a few hours trying to track him down. And quite easily you’re able to go and see what this person is like by going and checking out other things he’d said online. And I started to pull up his friends, and realised that he was part of this slightly strange, trollish bodybuilder community. I think I even found some pictures of the guy, just to be able to see him, see where he lives, see he’s got a kid. It was very comforting to put a human face back on him, and after that I was OK with it. I realised it was just a vibe he was plugged into rather than a real threat.”

I tell him that seems very modern – the idea of a celebrity expected to be your mate and forced to go through endless rounds of social interaction, but also to be invulnerable somehow. Imagining that no matter how much hate you throw at them, it’s never actually going to hurt someone ringed in a force-field of celebrity.

A segment of "Vinyl Justice" from The Adam & Joe Show, where the pair would dress up as police and raid musicians' record collections – in this case Mark E Smith – for embarrassing items.

“You know, you’ll say anything in your twenties. But in your thirties, that changes. The older you get, the more you realise people are all the same. They’re just presenting different versions of themselves. And then when you meet someone face to face, that’s an unavoidable conclusion. I met Robbie Williams at an awards show yesterday. I’d spent the 90s never missing a chance to kick him, and even at the time I did wonder whether he ever saw it and how he’d react if I actually met him.

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"So when Robbie shook my hand I was looking for a little glint of, ‘Yeah, I know who you are, you little twat.’ But I don’t think it was there. You meet people in real life and they’re nice. That’s what winds me up; sometimes people reserve all of their chippy little comments for social networking. As angry and chippy as I was in my teens, I wasn’t going around writing letters to people telling them I thought they were twats.”

You get the sense that Buxton has pretty thin skin for all of that. That when someone tells him he’s unfunny – a greasy little dwarf, or suchlike – part of him instinctively defers to their opinion. For all the fanatical legions of indie nerds in his fan-base, he can’t shake a certain imposter syndrome when it comes to his own work. What, I wonder, would he class as the worst thing he’s ever done? (For the record, it was probably acting in BBC Two shitcom The Persuasionists.)

“Honestly, there’s too much to talk about. But, in the end, I have to ignore the bad and go with the good… I’m very proud of my Bowie documentary I did. I was very gratified by the reception that got.  And, actually, the 6 Music podcasts I’m very proud of. Occasionally I will listen to them in my shed with a glass of wine if the day has gone sufficiently well.”

You have a literal shed?

“Oh, I have loads of sheds. I live in the countryside. It’s great.”

We head down to the steps of the ICA so he can balance on his bike for hilarious comedy photos. The art student in him stops off to admire the Mark Wallinger statue of a big white horse at the start of The Mall, and somewhere along the road he explains True Detective to a man who has never seen it before (me). “The Matthew McConaughey character goes on these long rants about how bleak life is… I get really into it. Sometimes I start to convince myself he’s right – Yeah, what is the point?”

I’m not sure what happened to the other half of the carrot, but it’s nowhere to be seen as he speeds off towards Liverpool Street, a yellow and blue and pink blur. He’s a blissed-out middle-aged man rolling back to his East Anglian shed life, but, somehow, Adam Buxton has pulled off the trick of still seeming like an outsider. Despite all the evidence to suggest he is the backbone of the establishment, he’s too unassuming – too naively driven by whatever he happens to be into – to ever seem like anything but an eternal interloper in the British comedy scene; at heart, the same direction-free 26-year-old video-sculptor who thought it’d be a laugh to send some dicking around into an audition show.

That’s why people are so protective of him and his team-mate. They’ll always be the us inside the them.

Adam's Kernel Panic is on at the Duchess Theatre until Friday the 25th of April.

@gavhaynes / @Jake_Photo

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