Adam Buxton: ‘Being a carer is the right thing to do – but it’s so hard, especially if it’s your parents’

Adam Buxton was born in London in June 1969. He teamed up with school friend Joe Cornish for The Adam and Joe Show, which ran from 1996 to 1999 on Channel 4. The pair went on to host a hugely popular radio show for BBC Radio 6 Music between 2007-2009. Buxton went it alone for the award-winning The Adam Buxton Podcast in 2015, establishing himself as one of the most popular podcasters in the country.

Since 2007 Buxton has hosted BUG, a live show that combines music videos and comedy that became a TV series on Sky Atlantic in 2012. His comedic memoir Ramble Book was published in 2020 and has gone on to become audiobook best seller. Buxton has also appeared in films such as Hot Fuzz, Stardust and Son of Rambow, as well as a variety of TV shows in the UK. 

In his Letter to My Younger Self, Adam Buxton recalls his early friendship with Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux, teenage years of angst and worry and caring for his father.

When I was 16 there were David Bowie and Talking Heads posters on my wall. There were lots of film posters too. Me and Joe Cornish, my comedy wife, used to hang around on the London Underground and, to my shame, steal film posters. They used to be glued on with really bad glue, so we used to go around and either pick up the ones that had fallen off or tease the ones that were half falling off and roll them up and run away with them. This was until we got caught one day by the police, and we just had to talk our way out of it by being as posh as we possibly could, relying on the innate class prejudice of the cops. That’s not a story that reflects well on us. 

In those days me and Joe, who I met at school, were thinking that we would start a media company one day. We liked advertising. We were going to set up a big multimedia corporation in a very aspirational 80s way. I think we imagined that we would make TV shows and films, and we’d also have a kind of advertising wing, because in those days advertising was quite cool, and lots of talented people made adverts. It was something to aspire to, rather than to be vilified. We put on plays, and we made short films, and a lot of those things got us closer to what we ended up doing, which was working on TV, in the late 90s. 

Louis [Theroux] was around then, but we weren’t so friendly with him until later on, until we were in the sixth form. He kind of hung out with a different group. He was, it’s no surprise, very smart, and he’d been accelerated from the year below. We always felt slightly suspicious of him, or maybe a bit superior to him. We thought he was a bit immature, not like us cool, sophisticated guys. But when we were around 16, 17, we started hanging out together and going to a lot of films, and we had the same kind of sense of humour as well. Louis was good fun. 

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Joe made a film called Twitch of the Death Nerve. He stole the title off an Italian horror film director, and it was kind of like the Sweeney Todd story. I played a tough cop, and Louis played my violent psychopathic sidekick, Bobby. 

I think I was a pretty friendly teenager. I got on with most people. I liked hanging out with people and meeting people and having a laugh and being silly. I didn’t like cool people, people who were up themselves or didn’t smile, the hard lads we used to call them – they were the kind of Jesus and Mary Chain brigade with the bird’s nest hair and Winklepickers, and they just seemed a little dour. So I was a bit wary of those. I was a soft lad, really.  

I had loads of angst. Absolutely. I worried about everything. I still do, maybe to a lesser degree, but I’ve always been very… I worry a lot. So anything that I could worry about, whether it was my parents arguing or whether it was me going to doing badly in exams, which I did. I was always jealous of Joe and Louis, because it felt to me that they knew exactly what they were going to do with their life, and they were going to be good at it. They were very clear, focused, just very confident. They didn’t spend a lot of time, as far as I could tell, worrying about the same shit that I did. Now that I know them so well, I think they probably did. They just worried in different ways. I was a surface worrier. 

Read more:

• David Mitchell: ‘I wanted to be prime minister when I was a teenager – like Winston Churchill’
• Joe Cornish: ‘Revolution brought on by young people is very attractive’
• Louis Theroux on childhood worries: ‘I wondered if I would ever get any proper tackle’

Mum and dad weren’t getting on. They had money problems. When I was a teenager it wasn’t that fun to be at home, because there was always just stress about money. So there were even more reasons to go and hang out in the West End with Joe and Louis and sit in Burger King and read magazines and smoke and go and see films, which is what we mainly did. I was out of the house whenever I could be. 

If you met the teenage Adam I hope that you’d meet someone friendly and only moderately annoying, quite funny. He might be disappointed that I never did more acting. Those were the things I really thought that I might do or dreamed of doing. I have been in a few films, but it would have been nice to do more. Who knows, it might still happen. I might have a late-period section of my career where I play lots of old guys. I think that my 16-year-old self would have been very impressed by some of the people that I’ve met in the music world and some of the people I’ve talked to on my podcast. I met David Byrne the other day, and we sat down and talked for a couple of hours and that was amazing. It was extraordinary. You know, this is a guy who’s made so much music that’s been a soundtrack to my whole life and meant such a lot to me. And he was really nice; it couldn’t have been better. My teenage self would not believe that.  

The breakthrough for Joe and me was sending a tape in to Channel 4 when I was at art school. We got our own show which was really just taking the piss out of popular culture. In the end though, I think Channel 4 just got frustrated with us. It used to take a long time for us to make the show [The Adam and Joe Show]. That was half the problem. We would do like, 95% of it ourselves. We were really, really keen. We wanted to have control over every single aspect of it, and it was so impractical that everyone got a bit fucked off with us. I think the production company tried. They said, tell us what you need. We’ll get people to help you. And we’re like, no, no, we’ve got to do it ourselves. So it took ages and ages to make each series. We wanted to craft it like you were making it for your best friend or your lover or something, make it full of details and lots of heart and lots of little in-jokes. But that’s not a practical way to proceed.

I have a podcast now. I like having the control. It’s really fun. But I do miss working with people. I love it when I get the opportunity to do stuff with other people. At the moment, I’m playing with a band. I have an album out. I got the opportunity. Someone who worked at Decca who used to listen to my podcast said I like your jingles. Have you ever thought of doing an album? I said no, but I’ll have a go.  

I was a carer for my dad for a little while. I think I would tell myself about that time – lower your expectations. I mean, the thing is, it’s so fucking hard. You know it’s the right thing to do, and the main thing is just to be loving and patient. But it’s so fucking hard, especially if it’s your parents, because they push all your buttons the whole time. I would go out for walks with Rosie, my dog, and I would say to myself out loud, stop being so impatient with him. You’ve got to go back and whatever he said and whatever mood he’s in, just take it and just be saintly and you’ll feel better about yourself. And you know, I managed it some of the time, but probably most of the time not really. 

If I could go back to any time it would be when Joe and I put on a play when we were at school. We did a version of Bugsy Malone, and that was pure joy, we loved every minute. I mean, it was stressful in the build up to it. There were quite a few points where we thought this is going to be the most embarrassing and worst thing that anyone has ever seen, because we’re trying to do all the music and everything. There were quite a few times where it looked pretty bad, but then it all came together and all our friends helped with it. They hadn’t really seen anything like that at school before. Most of the plays they would put on would be Tom Stoppard or Antigone, or Shakespeare or whatever, and here we are doing Bugsy Malone. I’d love to do that again. 

Adam Buxton’s debut album Buckle Up is out now on Decca.

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