Ramble Book Adam Buxton
Mudlark £16.99
Self-deprecation is Adam Buxton’s business. He describes himself as ‘a short, hairy man’ and (despite an outwardly impressive career as a comedian, TV presenter, DJ and podcaster) broods over misfires and perceived slights. He has so many unrealised TV projects, he jokes, that he’s been awarded a ‘Failed TV Pilot’s Licence’; his schoolfriends Joe Cornish (Buxton’s longtime collaborator, now a Hollywood director) and documentary-maker Louis Theroux pop up here in warm tones, but Buxton’s jabs about his own comparative lack of accomplishment point to a sincere feeling of deficiency.
So it’s typical of him to have given this memoir a selfdeprecating title like Ramble Book.
It’s typical, too, that the book he’s written is actually an extremely funny and insightful double coming-of-age story about his relationship with the two men in his life he most looked up to: his father (the travel journalist Nigel Buxton, known to followers of Buxton’s television career as BaaadDad), and David Bowie. Chapters alternate between Buxton’s awkward 1980s adolescence, through which he is sustained by Bowie’s music; and the 21st Century, where Buxton cares for his father through the last months of his life. Both died within weeks of each other, leading to the sense of reckoning that runs through this book. Nigel Buxton was a man who wanted upward mobility for his children, but lived with his own abiding sense of failure when he couldn’t maintain the life of private schools and privilege he intended for them (what Buxton calls ‘some dank Death Of A Salesman s**t). That sense of disappointment made him a distant and difficult father. It also left Buxton with a satirist’s sense of social class – some of his anecdotes have the sharpness of Reginald Perrin. There’s no Hollywood reconciliation here, but a touching understanding is reached between father and son, which gives this book substance within the hilarity.