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Close-up: Adam Buxton

The spoofmeister is on the radio, YouTube and the big screen – so why not the telly?

Esther Walker
Saturday 26 January 2008 20:00 EST
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The Bring Back Buxton campaign starts here... For most of the 1990s, Buxton, together with Joe Cornish, brought cheap, scrappy but very funny comedy to the darker recesses of Channel 4's schedules with Takeover TV and The Adam and Joe Show. Buxton once defined the latter as Wayne's World crossed with The Late Review, which is one way to describe their best-known creation, a series of spoofs involving stuffed toys.

After an unfortunate experience fronting the Glastonbury Festival coverage in 2002 (they got right up Rolf Harris's nose), the pair have been gracing the small screen rather less. They still work together on a Saturday morning show for Radio 6 Music, but Buxton has been spending more timeon the big screen (appearing in Hot Fuzz and Stardust), while Cornish has retreated behind the scenes, writing for Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright.

Buxton also hosts Bug – the British Film Institute's sell-out music-video show – every other month. "I do it with David Knight, the king of pop-video journalists. I host and show some of my stuff." Buxton's "stuff" includes the video he made recently for Radiohead: after meeting the band he was asked to apply his hand-made style to a music video for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place".

This year could see more of Buxton on the box if his pilot for BBC3, MeeBOX, is commissioned. The show includes material he has been posting on YouTube, including a sketch where he changes the subtitles to Songs of Praise hymns. "Someone said, 'Gosh, that must have been expensive, hiring a church full of people to sing your hymn,'" he says. "I had to tell him I'd just changed the subtitles. It's not exactly a new joke." No, but it is funny.

Bug 05: British Film Institute, London WC1, 020 7928 3232,

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