Adam Buxton is not my friend

And neither is Joe Cornish

Adam Buxton is not my friend. He feels like he is, but he is not. I’ve never met him, spoken to him or corresponded with him. I’ve never texted the nation (as the 6Music show used to insist) or given him a little pat while his bum’s up (as his podcast theme suggests). I don’t even know him, not in any real sense. I know the ‘him’ he plays on screen or in my ears, but not the real him that he actually is. He definitely doesn’t know me. Nor would he, I suspect, wish to. He has intimated frequently that he’s a little fed up with being buttonholed by his bearded, middle-aged fan base; men who simply want to shout catch phrases at him and show him their own, weird little middle-life crisis projects.

Adam Buxton is very much not my friend. But he feels like he is, because he’s accompanied me through most of my adult life. We’ve grown up together.

In the mid-‘90s I was a callow youth with a camcorder, trying to figure out how I might get a job in media. In the mid-‘90s Adam Buxton was also a callow youth with a camcorder, except that he had already jammed a foot in the door. He appeared on and hosted some episodes of the Channel 4 series Takeover TV, a programme dedicated to callow youths with camcorders.

In the late ‘90s I was living in 20-something squalor, working at a web design company where I was basically being paid to tit about with my friends. And there was Buxton, titting about with his school friend Joe Cornish on a set designed to look like a squalid 20-something bedroom, on Channel 4’s The Adam and Joe Show. At this point Channel 4 was very much intended to be an alternative to mainstream broadcast television and were funding lots of weird little shows and importing even weirder ones (and developing an excellent website, built by the friends with whom I was titting about). This meant that. amazingly, Channel 4 gave them almost no brief. They took two slackers with no experience in stand-up and very little in TV, gave them some money, and told them to make something they thought was funny. Equally amazingly, it worked.

In the early ‘00s, I was in my ‘30s and slightly adrift after my own small adventures in television had crashed and burned. And Channel 4 had equally decided that Adam and Joe, now in their ‘30s, were no longer cool, and cast them adrift. They ended up sitting in for a pre-Office Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on their Xfm radio show, which probably felt like something of a comedown from a nationally broadcast TV slot.

This led, however, to probably their greatest work together, their Saturday morning show on BBC 6Music. Adam Buxton has said that working at 6Music rekindled his friendship with Joe Cornish after the pressures of making their TV show, and you could hear it. It was a delightful thing: two old friends, sitting in a radio studio, making each other and thousands of listeners laugh. And then Joe Cornish had to go and leave to be a movie director and sit on couches with Tom Cruise, and, to be fair, I’d probably drop my friends to do the same.

These days I am largely paid to sit on Zoom or go to strange places about the country and talk to interesting people. While travelling to these appointments I listen to Adam Buxton’s podcast, in which Buxton sits on Zoom or goes to strange places about the country to talk to interesting people. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most popular podcasts in the UK. 

There is a reason that so many bearded, middle-aged men have a deep parasocial relationship with Adam Buxton: he reminds them of them. Their lives and spotty Gen X careers have had a similar shape. They – we – have to remind ourselves that, in reality, Adam Buxton is not our friend.

But he feels like he is.

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In his recent book Be Funny or Die, comedy writer Joel Morris points out that all comedy is tribal. Even the simplest joke relies on shared knowledge and unspoken cultural associations. It doesn’t have to be mean about it, but comedy is by its nature exclusive and – like music and films and books – becomes part of our tribal expression. Shared references and jokes signal the shared conspiracy of a friendship group. And my friendship group is full of Adam and Joe. We still quote the phrase ‘I want you to stick your pictures up my book’ from their plush toy version of The English Patient. I still sing The Footie Song when I find myself in a room with people watching sport.

Part of the appeal, particularly of their 6Music show, was being included in their friendship, enrolled in one of those virtual villages in which we became honorary friends. In some ways, in fact, the listeners took charge. The watchword of the tribe, the identifier, was to shout ‘Stephen!’ in a crowded place. If someone in the venue/bar/festival/nightbus called back the ritual response ‘Just coming!’, you knew that you were not alone. Somewhere out there was a fellow member of the Adam and Joe tribe. And the crucial thing was that this weird exchange came from something a listener had sent in, on which Adam and Joe had built a further layer of lunatic fantasy and which the tribe had taken up with glee.

Buxton and I are both at the older end of Gen X. We were children before the Internet, and before the development of the toyetic entertainment complex. But we were there for Star Wars, for the VCR, for camcorders and electronic keyboards and video games. We could record, cut up and reconfigure to our own uses. We could commandeer the living room TV, that implacable receiver of mainstream broadcasting, and turn it into our own tool. It is hard to credit now how media-saturated we felt in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and how significant it felt that we were able not only to consume culture, but to make it. The consumers had seized the means of production.

The Adam and Joe Show amplified these trends. It was the logical consequence of our generational urge; a recognisable kind of mucking about turned into an actual broadcast TV show, one that combined a ‘90s punk-DIY media aesthetic with a branding and design sensibility that was thoroughly ‘80s. Sketches were interspersed with strikingly designed ‘A & J’ idents: butter shapes unmelting themselves out of toast, ice cubes bobbing to the top of a glass of Coke. They were inserting themselves into the everyday.

Each show started with a warning that ‘the Adam and Joe Show is a high-density programme; start taping now’. It is full of flash frames and high-speed sequences that can only be understood when paused. This was TV for the VCR generation, created with the understanding that its audience is watching actively. Joe Cornish has said that The Adam and Joe Show was paid for out of the Channel 4 religious programming budget, the religion in question being pop culture. 

In the late ‘90s the web design agency I worked at built and maintained the Channel 4 website. The channel had rebranded, and we had to redesign and rebuild all the individual show pages. I made sure I got the page for The Adam and Joe Show and designed it as a deliberately homemade version of the Channel 4 style. I enjoyed myself, but it was largely pointless because The Adam and Joe Show already had its own, separate website. Like the rest of us they were evidently fascinated by the possibilities of this new medium.

But Adam Buxton is not my Facebook friend; no one is. He has largely removed himself from social media, recognising it as an unhappy and fruitless place. The medium at which he now excels, podcasting, is probably the last remnant of the pre-social networking age. It still runs on RSS feeds, an ancient technology (in Internet years) that allows anyone to syndicate content, and anyone to pick up the feed however they like. (Substack offers an RSS feed for all newsletters; you can find ours here). It is free and open, outside the control of the big tech conglomerates, a vestige of the days when the Web was homemade and playful.

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The first series of The Adam and Joe Show came out in 1996, three years before The Phantom Menace (1999), the first of the Star Wars prequels. These were wilderness years for the Jedi. People – like Adam Buxton – who still treasured their old Star Wars toys were weirdos. Adam and Joe, making parody videos with their Darth Vader and Yoda figurines, were the John the Baptists of this forgotten sect of Generation X pop culture religion, wandering the deserts of Tatooine, prophesying the return of George Lucas.

You will have guessed by now that Adam Buxton was not the only 20-something to have held on to his Star Wars toys. Mine were displayed along the entry staircase to the house I shared with friends in the late ‘90s: a ceremonial plastic parade, a weirdo welcome. Watching The Adam and Joe Show was like being invited to a playdate with a school friend.

Banter, as a behaviour, has got itself a bad name. It has become synonymous with a certain kind of masculine casual cruelty, conversational negging and unfunny repartee, but it is a core part of male relationships. Often, after I’ve been out with friends for the evening, Rowan will ask me if there’s any news. There’ll be a couple of headlines: sick parents, work hassles, grumpy teenagers. But not much. ‘What did you talk about all evening?’ The answer is: we bantered. A joyful swirl of jokes, references and anecdotes, picked up, sat upon, called back to, spliced and mutated, a sprawling selection of characters, catch phrases and stories.

The parasocial relationship with Adam Buxton is not fervent or fanatical; it is friendly. There are shared jokes and cultural references, a history of experience, small intimacies. At the end of his podcasts Buxton gives his listeners a hug. It's a virtual hug, the sound effect of a hug. But this is a podcast, the most intimate of all media, an experience happening across the distance of your skull, inside your own head; that sound effect is extraordinarily like the real thing. It is the sound of hugging your own real friends. We all now live in different cities, and we’re all occupied with work and children and sick parents, and we don’t see each other as often as we’d like. But here they are, patting your back and telling you they love you.

And again, I have to remind myself that Adam Buxton is not one of my friends.

But he feels like he is.

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Here, though, is someone who absolutely in real life my friend, Jamie Lenman, animating one of Adam & Joe’s unhinged interviews with the ‘Queen’

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There’s more Adam & Joe in Rowan’s piece on the appeal of male friendships. Although, weirdly, she doesn’t mention Chandler Bing and Joey Tribianni, given that the essay is entitled: ‘Friends’