‘W arning: The Adam and Joe Show is a high-density programme.” In the late 90s, that was your Friday-night cue to press record on the video player for Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish’s pop-culture potpourri of sketches, pranks and lovingly crafted, lo-fi movie parodies featuring figurines and cuddly toys. Thirty years after its debut, the duo – now both 57 – recreated their old den in the improbable environs of the Royal Albert Hall for a three-hour anniversary show as packed as the rapid-fire series. Here’s a select few things we learned from an evening of clips, chat and ridiculously catchy songs …
The pair’s first TV episode featured Trainspotting recreated with knitted animals addicted to sherbert and their later spoofs included Toytanic. On Wednesday night, Buxton presented a first look at his new epic pastiching The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan – or “Christopher No-Laughs” as Cornish had it. A toy of Zendaya’s Athena holds a poster from the high-street chain of that name, there’s a longship with a crew of toys and the Sirens are played by Party Rings and other tempting snacks.
Cornish had a hit movie with Attack the Block in 2011 and was a writer that year on Steven Spielberg’s Tintin film. Encouraged to show the Hollywood heavyweight one of the toy parodies, he feared insulting him with the bad-taste riff on Saving Private Ryan. He plumped instead for the sweary “Shakesbeare” in Love, with its subplot about Romeo and Juliet Bravo, gags about British theatrical royalty and copious soft-toy sex. “He found it funny for a minute,” said Cornish. “Then he stopped laughing. And there were two minutes left …”
A&J’s rise meant they ended up meeting many other celebrities whom they’d spoofed. Their Star Trek Next Generation sketch, set aboard the Kinder Surprise on the fluffy frontier, had a tennis-playing Borg with Björn-style headbands and a porcine version of Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard. Cornish recounted meeting Stewart and expecting him to be a master of rational thinking. However: “The first thing he said to me was how heavily his house was haunted.”
Buxton and Cornish met as teenagers at Westminster School alongside Nick Clegg and, somewhat more influentially for them, Louis Theroux . In the duo’s early film Twitch of the Death Nerve, named after a Mario Bava horror movie, Theroux can be seen chewing the scenery in his best hard-boiled manner. When Theroux found work on Michael Moore’s TV Nation, he introduced the pair to the cult US public access show Squirt TV which would influence them along with American zine culture. It was Theroux’s idea for Adam and Joe to go into their local Brixton minimarket and devour the “10% free” bit of various snacks until slurping the 15% free bit of a Ribena carton proved the last straw for the staff. The sketch could have been longer but nervous Buxton’s hand was shaking so much when he filmed that they couldn’t use all the material.
The duo’s Channel 4 boss was Peter Grimsdale, head of history, religion (much to their amusement) and features. His vision for the show was “layers of minutiae” and it was at one point going to be called Stüffe. (Other rejected titles, listed in the first episode: Vidiosynchracy, Slackervision, Nocturnal Emission.) The show was essentially an analogue pick’n’mix of the kind of short, sharable content that would soon explode online. And with the weekly pop culture critiques by Adam’s father, ex-Sunday Telegraph journalist Nigel Buxton – aka BaaadDad who I’d forgotten even starred in a Frank Black video – they were ahead of the trend for comedians roping in their parents. BaaadDad would have approved of the Albert Hall setting, the duo agreed – and for any 90s teenagers like me who’d hit record on Friday night to see what they’d cooked up that week, it was certainly surreal to join a Bobby De Niro calypso singalong at the home of the Proms.
