The Adam and Joe Show

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The Adam and Joe Show was a British comedy television show, written and presented by Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish ('Adam and Joe'), which ran for four series on Channel 4 between 1996 and 2001.

1 Format
2 Memorable Sketches
3 History and other projects
4 External links

[edit] Format

The show took the form of short, condensed sketches interspersed with links filmed in what was purportedly Adam and Joe's bed sit in Brixton, but was actually a shared "performance space" above a Body Shop there. Although the two comedians were involved in other projects before and after it was aired, The Adam and Joe Show is their most popular and known creation, and its unique brand of humour gained a cult following with young twenty-somethings. The show is often described as one of the definitive pop culture parodies of recent times.

[edit] Memorable Sketches

[edit] Toymovies

Each week, Adam and Joe would re-create a popular current feature film using stuffed toys and elaborate cardboard sets. These ‘Toymovies’ condensed the story, look and action of each film into a couple of minutes. The most memorable included spoofs of Titanic, The English Patient and Trainspotting.

[edit] Baaadad

In this segment, Adam’s pensioner father Nigel Buxton (aka Baaadad) reviewed music videos by contemporary groups that he knew nothing about. In later shows he ventured out of his fireside armchair and into the field, going on a Club 18-30 holiday in Ibiza, undercover at a public school ball, and smoking marijuana for the first time at The Big Chill music festival.

[edit] Vinyl Justice

Dressed as policemen, Adam and Joe would raid rock stars’ homes, then examine their record collections for embarrassing or surprising items. The star would then be forced to dance to the shameful discoveries. Victims included Frank Black, Gary Numan, Dave Navarro, Cerys Matthews, Nick Heyward, Thomas Dolby, Ray Manzarek of The Doors and Mark E Smith of The Fall.

[edit] Songs

The Adam and Joe Show regularly included songs on random pop cultural themes, co-written with school friend Zac Sandler. The most memorable included 'The Footie Song', an ode to football written by people who know nothing about it, 'The Robert De Niro Calypso', a tribute to the famous actor, and 'My Name is Roscoe', a country and western song whose lyrics included the theory of relativity.

[edit] Star Wars TV

In this segment, Adam and Joe used 80’s Star Wars action figures to parody current British TV shows. Targets included You’ve Been Framed, Stars in Their Eyes and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Throughout these sketches, Obi Wan Kenobi was memorably portrayed as a drunk vagrant.

[edit] Ken Korda

Ken Korda, a character played by Adam Buxton, was an obnoxious, idiotic media entrepreneur who undertook absurd pop cultural projects in the real world. These schemes included the production of a short film about criminal junkies called 'Speeding on the Needlebliss', and the formation of a teen band called 1471. By the fourth series, the segment had become a parody of The South Bank Show, with Korda fronting overly serious profiles of TV celebrities including Pat Sharp and Handy Andy.

[edit] Pranks

Adam and Joe would regularly film eachother performing camcorder pranks in the real world. In the first series, they ventured into a supermarket in Brixton and started helping themselves the free percentage from packages marked '20% Free'. In the second series, they ruined an unsuspecting man's front room while posing as designers from a home makeover show, then broke into a brewery to see how easy it would be to organise a piss up. In the third series they built an elaborate movie themed animatronic wax museum from mannequins and charged tourists for entry, as well as competing as street mimes in Covent Garden Market.

[edit] Links

Adam and Joe's links were performed sitting on their bed, in front of a crowded backdrop of contemporary pop cultural clutter. Memorable links included a guide of ways to fiddle with a candle while in a restaurant with a boring person, the most entertaining household objects to put in your microwave oven, and an experiment to see if eating Coca-cola and Space Dust really does make your stomach explode.

In 2004, a DVD of selected sketches from all four series called The Adam and Joe DVD was released. It included some previously unbroadcast material and other extras.

[edit] History and other projects

Adam and Joe began working on humorous material during their time at Westminster School together, where they created numerous amateur films along with their friend Louis Theroux, some of which they submitted to Channel 4’s home video showcase 'Takeover TV' in 1994. Their submissions lead to the duo hosting that show in 1995 and eventually being offered their own show the following year.

They won the Royal Television Society Best Newcomers Award in 1998, published The Adam and Joe Book in 1999, and presented BBC Three’s coverage of the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 and 2002. Other spin-off projects included 'Adam & Joe’s Fourmative Years' in 1998 and 'Adam and Joe’s American Animation Adventure' in 2001. They also directed pop promos for Frank Black and Gorkys Zygotic Mynci, as well as appearing in two Surf washing powder commercials, in which they comically brutalised Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and Keith Harris and Orville.

In 2003, Buxton and Cornish presented Adam and Joe Go Tokyo for BBC Three and BBC One, a Tokyo based magazine show covering Japanese pop culture. The same year they began hosting a show on UK radio station XFM, filling in for Ricky Gervais on Saturday afternoons. When Gervais left the station they took over permanently, and continue to present the saturday morning show, the best parts of which are condensed into a podcast.

The Adam and Joe DVD, containing highlights from the original four series and some new extra material, was released in 2004. They are sometimes involved with The Idler, a biannual literary magazine.