91Èȱ¬

In her 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4 podcast Young Again, journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young asks fascinating people what advice they would like to give their younger self.

Adam Buxton is a writer, podcaster and comedian. He first found fame with his friend Joe Cornish – together, they made the TV series The Adam And Joe Show and the 91Èȱ¬ 6 Music show Adam and Joe.

As a solo creator, Adam is the host of The Adam Buxton Podcast. He’s directed music videos for Radiohead and toured his own live show, Bug. He’s also an author, with his second memoir, I Love You, Byeee, out later this year.

He talks to Kirsty about falling in love with Joe Cornish, caring for dying parents, and how podcasting got him through grief. Here are six things we learned.

Kirsty describes Adam as having a “hand-knitted” quality, which he doesn’t mind at all. He’s always enjoyed making things.

“I went to art school,” he says, “and I’ve realised recently that I feel like I am an artist. I never wanted to call myself an artist, because that’s too embarrassing and requires too much hubris. But I do feel like that’s how I want to do things, like an artist. I pay attention to all the details. When you make a podcast, you have to concentrate on every detail.”

While he studied sculpture, his tutors always suspected his ambitions lay elsewhere. “What I generally did was, I made videos and then retrofitted them into sculptural objects… One of the tutors said, ‘I think you might be using this as a stepping stone to getting on TV.’”

Aged nine, Adam was sent to boarding school. He hated it. “I’d get so sad and worried when it was the end of the holidays,” he says. “I had a lovely, beautiful childhood until I was nine… and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh we’re going to send you off to school where you don’t know anyone and we won’t be there and some of the children will be horrible to you.”

Photo © Ben Catchpole

He says it’s affected his relationships as an adult. “It’s very hard not to join the dots between being sent off as a nine-year-old and… being quite a needy person to go out with.”

3. He fell in love with Joe Cornish

Adam met Joe Cornish at school. In his memoir, Adam describes it as falling in love. “I don’t think [Joe] would necessarily put it in those terms himself, but it is like romantic love, except for the physical aspect,” he says. “We didn’t snog, but I loved him. I just loved being with him and I thought he was so funny, and I thought he was pretty good looking. You’re sort of aware of that. I just thought, ‘Yeah, you look cool. I like your hair. I like what you’re wearing. I like the way you say things.’ All the things you think about when you meet someone and you form a romantic attachment to them. When I thought about Joe, I thought, ‘You were thinking about all those things. It was like you were in love.’ So that’s why I wrote that.”

4. He felt insecure when his working partnership with Joe Cornish halted

Adam and Joe had a successful partnership for several years, and continue to work together occasionally, but when it came time to doing separate projects, Adam was upset. “He’d always wanted to direct movies, ever since we got together,” he says. “I think being on TV was a bit of a side track, which really ended up delaying his film career in some ways… It didn’t feel good because originally we fantasised about [making movies together].”

They made films together at school. “We imagined ourselves as heads of this big multimedia empire one day. Then it was like, ‘Oh you’re doing the multimedia empire with Edgar Wright now?’” Joe wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Tintin with Edgar Wright and Steven Moffat. “It made sense, because I knew at that point that I didn’t have the wherewithal to contribute meaningfully to that… but it certainly tweaked my insecurity nipples.”

“I’m trying to write about my mum at the moment,” says Adam. “It’s really difficult because… [there’s] no info.” Adam’s first memoir, Ramble Book, spoke a lot about his relationship with his father, who died in 2015. His mum told him stories about his dad for that book, but when his mum died in 2020, Adam realised he hadn’t asked her enough about herself.

“After my mum died in lockdown, [I found out] all this stuff about her life in her last 10 years that I didn’t know,” he says. “Not massive, crazy stuff, but the fact she’d had another relationship I didn’t know about. And this guy she’d been seeing had died… I just thought, ‘Oh Mum, why didn’t you talk about this guy?’…But my wife said, ‘Get over yourself… She did what she thought was right, not wang on about herself. She let you live your life and told you things when they were super-important.’”

6. His dad gave him some very useful advice

Adam had a complex relationship with his dad, who kept much of his life private, like his struggles with debt. When Adam’s dad was dying of cancer, he came to live with Adam, who had hopes of resolving their relationship. “You sort of think, ‘Surely it’s going to be like a film?’… I tried to ask him a few of those questions. I wrote down some of the things I wanted to ask him… He just wasn’t up for that level of self-examination.”

But his dad left him with some strong advice that Adam carries with him. “He was so good with words of wisdom… One of his favourites was, ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath’… Beautiful stuff, and true…Turn the temperature down. Soften your voice… Works every time.”