Ramble Book: Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and 80s Pop Culture

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Well, it doesn’t much matter. But that’s why we make things and organise things, isn’t it? Otherwise, of course it’s all meaningless.” He plays me – with delight – a new jingle he’s been working on. It’s about Covid-19 and contains the lyric “I have to wear a mask because IIIIIII am toxic/ Terrible things are spilling out of me…” When he played it to his eldest son, Natty, he told him it could be funnier. “And I had to resist the temptation to say, ‘You don’t know anything! Play me some of your funny jingles, 18-year-old!’ I didn’t say that, I just said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right…’” This is Lemn’s story: a story of neglect and determination, misfortune and hope, cruelty and triumph.

Buxton’s emotional openness is surely partly a reaction against his father; despite being sent to boarding school when he was nine, I have rarely met a man less afraid to show his vulnerabilities. Another reaction against his father is Buxton’s marriage. He and Sarah have been married for 19 years, after meeting through another school friend. “She looked like Sean Young in Blade Runner, and we were both a little oversensitive, so we bonded. Also, she’s tall. Joe’s tall, Louis’s tall, I do seem to be attracted to tall people because I’m short.” It was Sarah who forced him to look at how harsh his father could be to his mother. “At first I was defensive, but then I understood that she just doesn’t want me to turn out like that,” Buxton says. The case with me is, I have no relevance. If it weren’t for the fact that there would be a response from you, I wouldn’t speak. Because that would remind me that I was the only person left in the world and that would remind me that I didn’t exist.” So, he did what he does best and talked about it, on his podcast. He started The Adam Buxton Podcast, in which he interviews comedians, actors, writers and musicians over the course of an hour’s “ramble chat”, almost exactly five years ago. Over time, ever so gently, listeners learn as much about Buxton’s life and worldview (and dog) as they do about that of his guests. He figured he would have to talk about his mother eventually and he would rather do it with his erstwhile comedy partner, oldest friend and “go-to glib-chat guy”, Joe Cornish. The Adam and Joe Show (Photo: Channel 4)

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But just before he had zoned out completely, Dad slowly reached out his arm, took my hand and brought it to his face. “He probably wants me to wipe his mouth or scratch his ear or something,” I thought, but to my surprise he gave my hand a kiss. Oh shit! I thought. This is it. Closure time! That was the thing that really crushed him. I found his notebook after he died and it was semi-coded, and the code he had for feeling depressed or like a failure was ‘Haileyburyitis’. I felt terrible for him because, really, Dave’s totally fine,” Buxton says. Thing is, you’re unlikely to strike up a heart-to-heart chat with your son for the first time while he’s standing over you until you’ve finished your smoothie, getting annoyed when you don’t take your pills or hoisting your nappy on before bed. Also you’re more or less deaf. And you’ve got cancer. In the end we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own.

They had become virtually estranged until Nigel was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and Adam took him in during his last months. Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West. He has always been “Mr Emotional”, as he puts it, whereas Cornish is more teasing, and at times on the radio you could hear Buxton’s hurt bafflement at his friend’s blunter comments. Buxton recalls that soon after they left school he asked Cornish if they’d still be friends in 10 years. “I don’t know, man, probably not,” he casually replied. Thirty years later, the comment burned enough for Buxton to put it in his book.You describe yourself as “a chronic over-thinker”. Have you become even more introspective this past year?

After close to 200 episodes, he left to pursue other interests, and eventually found himself elected to the European Parliament, representing the seat of West Midlands. He was a spokesperson on human rights and, before his time in Brussels drew to a close in 2014, he’d been awarded a CBE for public and political service. Returning to Britain wasn’t the end of his political career, nor of his campaigning, and he took his seat in the House of Lords as a life peer. We are talking in the flat attached to Buxton’s recording studio, which is filled with his father’s furniture. Nigel died in 2015, several months after he came to live with Buxton and his family. Something of a hoarder, his oldest son, who “definitely shares that tendency”, can’t bear to throw away his father’s things. So, on a lovely summer’s day, the two of us sit in what is undeniably an old person’s flat, my feet on a needlepoint footrest. Behind Buxton is a bookcase filled with his father’s books. All around us are photos of Nigel. “I thought, well, this could be a cool place for my children to hang out,” he says, but then adds, “I’m worried it’s slightly mad that I’m building this weird museum in here.” Today, as the host of The Daily Show, Noah has been named as one of the most powerful people in New York media. To have reached such heights after so difficult a start in life makes this story all the more remarkable. Even at school, Louis and Joe were the two funniest people to hang out with. I can see why he went down the serious documentary route – good for you, enjoy your Baftas – so it’s nice to showcase his stupid side. My chest elevator dropped a few floors. I had been so focused on Dad’s physical deterioration, I hadn’t considered what might be happening to his mind.

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That was bad news for me. I’m not fond of dairy products, and cheese makes me especially sad. In the months that followed, I found cleaning up after toilet accidents infinitely preferable to preparing cheesy noodles, cheesy scrambled eggs, cheesy liver and other cheese nightmares for Dad, which, more often than not, he didn’t even eat. It’s not the first time Buxton Sr has figured in his work. On The Adam and Joe Show, Nigel appeared as BaaaDad, reviewing contemporary youth culture with high-handed bafflement (On Louise’s “Naked”: “It’s a fun tune, the dancing is very competent and she’s a fox”) . In Ramble Book, Buxton fleshes the caricature out. While Nigel appeared the “old-school toff”, after he died Buxton discovered that Nigel’s father, Gordon, had been a servant. The family he worked for sent Nigel to grammar school, from where he went to boarding school, then Oxford. We went and sat in the living room. I made some tea and set it down for Dad with a couple of milk chocolate Hobnobs, hoping to refocus his mind on a simple pleasure. “Have you ever dunked a biscuit?” I asked, prepared for him to tell me that dunking biscuits was vulgar, barbaric or grotesque. It’s easy to imagine that investigative presenters like Theroux simply swoop in, do their jobs and move on to the next subject, the next programme or the next big thing with barely a thought for the one they’re leaving behind. This autobiography proves that not to be the case at all. Not only are there real people behind the stories; there are real people presenting them, too.

And hurrah for this book. An amazing project that must have added several grey hairs to the skulls of all concerned. Galactic Ramble a fascinating book and, unlike some reference publications, one that, I very much fear, I’ll have to read from cover to cover. See you in a year or two then. READ NEXT: Best poetry books to buy The best autobiographies to read in 2023 1. One of Them by Michael Cashman: Best showbiz autobiography

Aside from his father, the other leading characters in Ramble Book are Cornish and Louis Theroux, Buxton’s friends since Westminster. When they were 15, Buxton and Cornish invented their own fantasy media empire, called Joe/Adz Corporate; their first productions were sketches, parodies of the Gold Blend Advert and Monty Python tributes, filmed on Buxton’s father’s video camera. Within a decade they were broadcasting similar things on Channel 4 on The Adam and Joe Show, which is where Ramble Book ends. Buxton would now like to write more – about working with Cornish, and his “hair-raising 90s”. At the end of the audio version of Ramble Book, there is a conversation between the pair in which Cornish brings up that comment, which he had long forgotten: “I think I was probably looking for the most provocative answer. My brain issues the true standard answer and then thinks, well, that’s a bit boring, what would be more interesting?” You can hear Buxton gasp, re-evaluating 40 years of casual banter. “I think the relationship worked creatively because we are very different, but I never understood that,” he says now, smiling. When I was little I thought Dad was just the absolute best guy around: clever, handsome, funny and successful. He was a columnist and travel editor on the Sunday Telegraph and I loved travelling with him, seeing him charm hotel managers, flight attendants and heads of tourism who fell over themselves to do his bidding. In those days, no problem was too big for Dad to solve and no opportunity to make our lives more exciting was missed.