How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S9, Ep1 How to Fail: Adam Buxton

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

IT'S SEASON NINE AND I FEEL FINE, BABY! And we open with a humdinger - the podcasting king, comedy legend and all-round thoroughly decent bloke that is...[drum roll + X Factor announcer voice]...ADAM BUXTON.Adam joins me to talk about misdirected perfectionism, dropping out of university, mid-life crises and what it means to be a parent after the death of your own. We talk about privilege, being sent to boarding school aged nine, whether he feels rivalry with his astonishingly successful friends (*coughs* Louis Theroux *coughs*) and about what makes a bad spoon. That's not a euphemism, by the way, we do literally talk about bad spoons.Adam is such a lovely man and it was an honour to have him on How To Fail, especially given that his podcast always charts higher than mine, the bastard. He is so funny - listen out for the anecdote involving wrapping scaffolding in multi-coloured ribbon - and he introduced me to the brilliant concept of having a mind like a sat nav, which is to say: if something doesn't go according to plan, the challenge is to find another route to the destination.I like that. I hope you like the episode. It's good to be back.*PLEASE PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK! Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong is available here*Ramble Book by Adam Buxton is out (in physical form) next week. You can pre-order it here.*How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you! To contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayAdam Buxton IS NOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA...wowHow To Fail @howtofailpod     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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wants you to start living a more fulfilled life today. Visit betterhelp.com forward slash HTF. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P. And join the over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. There is a special offer for How to Fail listeners where you can get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com forward slash HTF. Thank you so much to BetterHelp. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding

that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Part of learning from failure also includes accepting and sometimes even being happy for the success of one's peers. So it is for this opening episode of the new season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, my guest is someone who also has a podcast with their name on it, but who is vastly more successful than I am. I'd like to claim some cosmic injustice was at play here, but unluckily for me, he's just really, really good at what he

does. And funny too, which is annoying. Plus, he seems nice, which is now just showing off. He is Adam Buxton, comedy legend, podcasting granddaddy, and as his newly published memoir reveals, a man with a borderline obsessive love for the quiet carriage on a train. For years, Buxton was part of the Adam and Joe comedy duo, formed with his longtime collaborator and former school friend Joe Cornish. The two of them met at Westminster, where Buxton's first impression of Cornish was that he was tall and haughty. But he had other qualities too, and their TV show, followed by their regular slot on Six Music, won them legions of devoted fans. Buxton started his podcast in 2015, interviewing other people in his trademark

humorous, interested and somewhat tangential style, which makes for entertaining and revealing conversations with the likes of Zadie Smith, Greta Gerwig and Louis Theroux. Buxton's first book, Ramble Book, Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and Pop Culture, is published in physical form next week. In it, he details his love of David Bowie, a stint stealing film posters from underground stations as a teenager, and the death of his father in 2015. It also includes a running log of arguments with his wife. I think I'm having a midlife crisis, the now 51-year-old Buxton writes in the introduction.

I'm not having affairs with models, buying motorbikes and jumping out of airplanes, but I am often in a state of self-indulgent melancholy introspection despite a life of abundant privilege. Does that count? Adam Buxton, welcome to How to Fail. Hey, thanks, Elizabeth. Wow, this is great. I couldn't wait. You know, I listened to your podcast and I'm always impressed by your generous and thorough introductions. And I thought I'd love a generous and thorough introduction like that. And now I've got one. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. However, you did describe me as vastly more successful than you. I don't know if you said vastly, but I mean, I don't know if that's true. And also, don't you think,

though, that that kind of thing is very relative, as indeed is the whole concept of failure? Yes, that is true. I mean, as you know, from kindly listening to the podcast, I do like to do a generous introduction because we do go on to talk about vulnerable things. So I like to kind of sideswipe people with kindness, make them feel comfortable, and then just, you know, zoom in with the really harsh questions. That's true. Yeah, fair enough. And I wanted to start by asking you about your midlife crisis. Oh, yeah. How's it going? Are you still in it?

How's it going? Yes, mate. I thought that I'd pulled out of it. I thought I was in deep dive for a while after 2015. Bowie checks out. My dad checks out. Trump gets in. I mean, name it. It's been an eventful five years. And then I thought, oh, I think I'm coming through this. And then there was like a pandemic.

I don't know if you heard about it. And then my mum died during the pandemic. I mean, it's been a stressful year for all of us, right? And it's just everything's upside down. And I know a lot of people have lost loved ones. And I always feel, rightly or wrongly, that losing a parent is somehow in a slightly different category to a lot of other types of deaths in that hopefully assuming that the child doesn't die before the parent everyone experiences a parent dying it's

something that's coming to all of us and we all have to deal with it and we don't want to just bore on the whole time about how sad it is because we all have to get through it, but it really does knock you out. And also because now I've got no parents, they're both gone. Damn it. I haven't got any spares. And what I'm saying is that it sort of plunged me back in to the crisis for a little bit. And then I was talking to a friend the other day who said, oh, it takes five years. Everyone's got maths, death maths that they like to wheel out. Originally, I heard someone talking about losing their dad and they said, oh, it takes two years. So I was like, oh, two years, that's all right. And I found that to be

more or less true to get over the initial stages of grief and just feeling constantly melancholy, just feeling like nothing's as fun as it used to be. But with my mom, I was talking to someone and she was saying, oh, it takes five years. So I hope it doesn't take five. On the other hand, I'm adjusting to the fact that this is what it's like. I think once you're over 50, once you're over a certain age, it's just a series of recalibrations. I feel like I'm a sat nav, quite a good sat nav. And one of the ones that recalculates your route once you run into a dead end or whatever. Hopefully I'm not one of the sat navs that just keeps telling you to go round and round because it's determined that you follow the original route that it's set for you.

So you sort of drive down the road for a while and then you realise that it's making you do a massive U-turn back to the place you didn't want to get to because they closed the road. Hopefully, I'm one of the ones that is now finding a new route to somewhere different. Like Waze. You're like Waze. Waze. Is that a good one? Yeah. I used to have TomTom.

Yeah, it's a really good one. Well, Waze factors in traffic as well because it's used by other drivers so they warn you if there's a lot of traffic on a particular road but Adam I'm so sorry about your mother because you talk so affectionately about both of your parents actually in your book it's a really really lovely and honest portrait did she read the book no she didn she didn't actually. Her last couple of years, she was sort of deteriorating and she had cancer and that affected all sorts of things, even though we thought she was really nailing the cancer. But anyway, she was a trooper. She was old school.

I'm fine. I'm fine. Oh, don't stop fussing about me. Honestly, I wish you'd stop going on all this kind of thing. But meanwhile, she was struggling and she wasn't having such a good time and her memory was going and all sorts of things. But she was excited that I'd done it and she was excited to read it in a way. I don't know. She didn't really have to read it. I think she knew most of the stuff in there and she was was proud that I'd done it. And she was impressed that it was coming out. And I think I even managed to tell her that it was going to be Book of the Week on Radio 4 before she died. And so that's a great thing for a middle class mum to hear. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, I referred to it in the introduction

that you met Joe Cornish at Westminster, where Louis Theroux was also in your year. So a fairly talented bunch. I mean, not that I've heard that at Westminster where Louis Theroux was also in your year. So a fairly talented bunch. I mean, not that I've heard that much about what Louis Theroux has been up to lately, but is there any rivalry between you? Were you really annoyed when Louis launched the podcast? I was. Was I annoyed? The only thing I was annoyed about was that he used a microphone that i had sent him

at the beginning of the lockdown i sent out microphones to some of my friends that i knew i would want to talk to on my podcast remotely and louis was one of those people because i knew he didn't have a mic he did his podcast and in the first episode the introduction was something like hi louis through i can't do a good Louis impression. I'm in lockdown like all of us. And I've got a what was the word he used? A crappy mic, basically. I even didn't say crappy, but he's like, I'm just here with a ropey mic or something like that.

And I was like, ropey mic. That is a good top of the line mic that I sent out to you as a gift you dick and uh that was the only thing that annoyed me and then i challenged him on that and then he apologized and groveled which was good i think i made him feel bad which was the object of the exercise if i'm honest there was a moment when i thought you don't need to do a podcast that you stay away you're fine your podcast is gonna do really well and it's gonna be no so basically all it did was that i stopped checking the podcast charts because i used to check the podcast charts when i would put out an episode and see if i was still relevant but then after he started his i thought thought, oh, well, I can't do that anymore because he's just going to be at the top on his sofa looking smugly out and going, look, I can do everything.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who has that degree of rivalry and competitiveness with their dear friends. Yeah, but it was good, though. I listened. I like Louis and I love his stuff. And I listened to every episode and it was really good. Are you jealous of the achievements of another classmate, Jacob Rees-Mogg? Yeah, I think about it all the time. I think, oh, damn it.

I could have been a kind of fusty old dick. And now he's monopolized the whole thing. Now, I found out that Jacob Rees-Mogg was at the same school as me, albeit for one term. This was a school called Westminster Underschool that I went to before I had to go to the big school. I don't remember him. I never had a conversation with him, but evidently he was in my year. And there was quite a few of that kind of person in the school. And it was a shock. I mean, I'd been to a prep school. I'd just come out of a prep school, but it was a co-ed prep school in the countryside. It was a boarding school as well.

No uniforms. It was relatively progressive. Although I've since heard some hair-raising stories about the conduct of certain teachers and things like that from people who were there as well. And I thought, really? I didn't know any of that was going on. I had a nice time. Anyway, that's by the by and possibly litigious. But when I got to Westminster Underschool and suddenly found myself surrounded by full-on public school types and Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk, it was a real shock. And it was the first time I thought, oh, okay, I guess I'm posh, but I don't think I'm that posh. These aren't the kind of people that I particularly have anything in common with, I didn't feel.

Also, sometimes I was shocked by what a caricature of condescending snootiness a lot of them inhabited. Is that the right word? Yeah, that was a shock. I'm not saying all of them were like, there are lots of nice people there as well, but certain people like that were really like, oh, God, you're awful. And when I got to Westminster, I felt the same about a lot of those people. But then I met Joe and very beautifully, and he was travel editor of the Sunday Telegraph. So it wasn't like he was, you know, landed gentry with loads of money that he'd inherited. He worked incredibly hard to send his children to public school. But I wanted to ask you

about privilege, because you do acknowledge it, and you do talk about it in the book. Do you feel that you have to apologise for your privilege? Yes. Great. Now moving on. No, I mean, if I'm going to be honest, the answer is yes. And it's a factor of the way that the internet has put us all in contact and we are now able to look into each other's lives in all sorts of ways and get a sense of how different our lives are. And that old sense of pre-internet relativity has been kind of blasted apart. It used to be that you didn't really think too hard about the lives of people outside your sphere. And there's a good aspect to that as well as a bad one, you know, and the internet is great for reminding us how lucky we are and reminding us how unlucky

other people are and reminding us that we need to modify our behavior in all sorts of ways to be more considerate and kinder to people, you know, and that's a great aspect of the internet. But I think one of the more challenging ones is that it really can remind you in an unhelpful way sometimes that other people are doing better than you and people are having what seems to be a nicer life than you and an easier life than you. And that causes huge amounts of resentment. And in the face of that, you feel naturally that you have to apologize. I mean, there's two ways to do it. You either style it out and you get in your face of that, you feel naturally that you have to apologize. I mean, there's two ways to do it. You either style it out and you get in your face about it and you start folding your arms

and say, I don't have to apologize for anything. It's your problem. But I'm not that kind of person, really. And so, yeah, it does make you feel uncomfortable. You do feel like, oh, life is very unfair in all sorts of ways. And I feel like I don't deserve a lot of the breaks that I've got. So you do shamble through and do a lot of apologizing these days. However, I got this email the other day from a guy and he got in touch and I wanted to read you a little bit of it

because the whole concept of talking about failures and things like that, which I do a lot. And that's one of the reasons I like your podcast and liked it when it came along. I thought that's a great idea. That's exactly the kind of thing I like doing too, because I think it's useful, obviously, the way that you do to examine these things that go wrong and to examine your shortcomings and think about the ways that you could be better as a person. And also it's funny a lot of the time, you know, screwing things up is sort of funny, I think, as long as it's not disastrous and no one gets hurt. But sometimes I think people hear that when I do it on my podcast, when I talk about my failures, sometimes

I think some people hear it and they think, stop whining. And they think you're fine. Anyway, look, this guy sums it up quite well. And this is one section of quite a long message that this guy sent me, which was like a bit of a slap on the wrist. And he mentions me complaining about Twitter, which I have done many times on my podcast. He says, you're crying about Twitter and online comments and yourself sometimes riles me up. comments and yourself sometimes riles me up and here's why it seems very quotes crying from an ivory tower to me you have a wife children a successful podcast very successful actually comedy career you are friends with documentary makers directors comedians that's more than us internet losers will ever have he says self-deprecatingly.

And I could have told him off for that. Your life is awesome. Why on earth would you ever be concerned with what idiots, racists or trolls on Twitter say about you? Someone hates your opinion, your podcast, your face or whatever. What does it matter to you? Why do you keep mentioning it? And I and i thought okay that's fair enough i mean i know why i keep mentioning it and it's sort of what i just said to you about you feel that you keep having to acknowledge your good fortune and how sort of unfair it is in some ways but sometimes it can be a wind-up for people to listen to and they just want you to just carry on and it's like okay let's take it as read that you care about other people and that you think life is unfair all right we're all on

the same page about that now just get on stop whining about how hurt you were by some guy criticizing you on social media and just you know live your life live your nice life that's like saying stop introspecting which means that you'd be a quite a dull person to listen to you on a podcast i mean because you think about the human condition and you think about what you care about and you do consider someone else's opinion then that's dialogue isn't it i think so but you can go too far can't you you can be too introspective you can be too self-critical you can paralyze yourself sometimes and you can be sort of wishy-washy and really not ever commit to one side or the other and that's something that tortures me and that worries me

because my dad was not like that and he was one of these people who had his set of opinions. He pinned his colors to a mast and he pretty much stuck with that. And he was frustrated by people who were flip-flopping and qualifying everything the whole time. But I can't be any other way. I really can't. I feel as if, apart from anything else, it's fun and interesting to see both sides and to be aware that there's always another side to any situation

or any opinion. But yeah, sometimes it is paralyzing. So you quoted an email there from a stranger, but I would also like you to quote your friend who you spoke to before you were coming on to this podcast and what her reaction was when you told her. OK, well, the other thing I should say, by the way, is that the rest of that message I got was really very nice. It took me about three times to read the message that I got from that guy to realize that he didn't hate me. from that guy to realize that he didn't hate me. As soon as I saw that criticism in the first few paragraphs, I recoiled a little bit and thought, ah, here we go. But actually he thought that I needed cheering up and encouraging. That's the other thing is that a lot of people, especially in the podcast medium, they really get inside how you feel, or at least they have that sense. So a lot of the time they get in

touch and they worry about you and they say, are you okay? And come on, cheer up and all this stuff. And mainly I am okay. And it's really nice of people to care, but a lot of the time they overestimate the extent to which I'm in trouble. But my friend, I told her I was going to be on your podcast and she said, oh yeah, but don't be one of those wankers who goes on and says, oh, my biggest failing is that I'm a perfectionist who's too obsessed with detail. And that is exactly what I was going to say. Yes. So that brings us on to your first failure, Adam, which is being a perfectionist who's too obsessed with detail. No, but tell us the story of the scaffolding wrapping at an orion party i mean the thing is that you know this is the thing like i could

have picked any number of failures as i said i'm in sat nav mode my life is a series of dead ends and failures and closed roads and i'm not saying that in order to make myself sound pathetic and, oh, poor me. That's just the way it is. And I'm happy, you know, that's the reality of it. And I'm happy for the sat-nav to recalibrate. But I tend to get everything wrong before I get it right. You know what I mean? First try, definitely I'll get it wrong.

And maybe it'll be more than one try. You know, three times to pass my driving test, I think you were the same. Actually, it was two, Adam. I mean, I don't mean to rub it in, but yeah, only two for me. But I don't trust people who pass their driving test first time. I think it makes them worse drivers. Exactly.

Well, this is a metaphor for your whole podcast. I don't trust anyone who gets it right first time. Who are those people? Did your wife pass first time? No, no, I don't trust anyone who gets it right first time who are those people did your wife pass first time no no i don't think so okay i'm not sure actually i wasn't about to say that i don't trust your wife by the way but she seems like a high achiever yeah she is a high achiever she's definitely cleverer than i am and she is a good driver i'll check okay anyway so this is just one of a number of occasions on which i i sort of overcompensated for feelings of kind of insecurity by sort of obsessing about trying to to get something right and i think you're the same in that respect as far i'm reading your

book are you that's so nice no i i was interested to read it and there's a lot i relate to and a lot of mechanisms that you had and maybe still have for trying to compensate for what you see as your shortcomings and people like us maybe identify areas in their life that maybe they think they can do a good job at and then then they really just obsess over those areas. And I'm going to be the absolute king or queen of this area and get it right. And if I don't, then that's really bad. And for me, that area is sort of arts and crafts in some ways. I went to art school and I do like doing all that kind of thing. And I like creating environments. And when I was at art school, I did lots of installations and I would

build rooms and spaces that altered the way you felt when you went inside them. And when we used to make the Adam and Joe show, it was important to me that that set was a reflection of all our enthusiasms. And it was a lot like the rooms that me and Joe had when we were kids, covered in posters and images and little clues to what we were into and what we loved and also what we thought was stupid and things like that was all hidden away in their set. So I used to take ages decorating that set and cutting everything out. And I love all that, but sometimes it goes too far. And when we used to hang out and get ready for parties, which we did quite a lot,

we had a friend that we met at school called Mark and he was like the party guy. He had a big house and his parents let him throw parties and so we had great times preparing for these big old parties and the preparation was, I would say, almost always more fun than the actual party. We'd hang out for a day before the party we'd decorate the whole place and we'd do these big wall hangings and spray faces on the

on old sheets and stuff like that and put up fairy lights and one time mark said let's have a hawaiian themed party which i'm just thinking like is that cancelable i don't think so we weren't doing any which I'm just thinking like, is that cancelable? I don't think so. We weren't doing any grotesque, traditional Hawaiian religious routines or anything like that. It was just let's wear fun shirts and wear leis and make everything colorful. How old were you? Actually, this was when we'd left school.

So we were in our early 20s by this point. We really went overboard and we bought lots of material that we could jazz up the place with. And the thing is that his house at that time had some scaffolding outside it, out the front, and it looked really ugly. And so I said, we should really do something with those steel bars. And we had all this multicolored ribbon that we'd bought. I said, let's wrap the bars in the ribbon and then they'll be nice. So I was like, yeah, that's a good idea. So we started wrapping. Turns out that wrapping loads of steel bars in ribbon takes absolutely ages. You just go round and round and round

because I started saying like, oh no, no, no, there's gaps there. You're wrapping too loose. You've got to wrap too loose. You've got to wrap really tight. You've got to be really assiduous about your wrapping. Otherwise, it'll be ugly. And that's no good for the Hawaiian party. So it took us absolutely ages to wrap these bars. And at the end of it, we were about an hour away from people actually turning up and everyone was exhausted. But we'd done it. and we stood back and i looked at it and i thought oh it looks a bit tacky and i suddenly realized like oh we should have done it in just shades of green because we had dark green light green we had some sort of nice yellows

i thought if we'd done it in kind of jungle tones then it would have looked sort of hawaiian jungly like creepers and lianas and things like that. I don't know if that's the word. So I said, guys, let's do it again. And they all looked at me and were like, no, it's just taken us two hours to wrap the scaffolding in the stupid ribbon. And now we finally finished and we're all exhausted. We never want to wrap any more scaffolding. I was like, yeah, but, but, but, but but but come on it could be better it would be so good imagine if it all looked like the jungle they're like yeah it would be good but don't be no we're not going to do that and i just said okay well then i'm going to do it and i got a pair of scissors and i just started cutting all the ribbon off the off the bars and i don't know

if they physically restrained me but there was certainly an atmosphere of like you know there's a mad guy and he's trying to destroy all our hard work and what's he doing and people got quite angry and said man it's not necessary you know it's fine it's a party but i just had it in my head like no no no it's it would be better if it looked like the jungle so i must make it look like the jungle i will wrap all the bars in the green and the light green and the yellow it will look nice you see i will show you so i started doing it and then out of pity they helped me to get it done a bit faster and we got it done in an hour or something people were turning up though we were still doing it and it did look good it looked great but i had ruined a good section of the fun prep by just forcing everyone to pursue my mania of trying to make this thing look a bit

nicer i mean people throughout the evening did comment on, wow, this looks like a kind of Hawaiian jungle. I was like, yes, I know it does. Tip. One in your column. Definitely it does. It's like being in Hawaii, I think you'll find. But I felt bad about it afterwards.

I didn't think about it that night, but then afterwards the subject kept coming up like, oh, you remember when Adam went crazy and did the thing. I was like, oh, it was crazy, wasn't it? Yeah, that made me reflect and think sometimes you have to get that stuff in perspective and you have to think like, what's the end goal here and how important is it really? And would it be better to pursue a different path would the net gain be larger if you weren't quite so obsessive i think i had it in my head that

that kind of perfectionism was an end in itself and was worthwhile it didn't cross my mind that maybe it wasn't i'm going to make a huge and potentially offensive cognitive leap here where do it you were kind enough to say that you think we have stuff in common and one of the things that we do have in common is that we experience boarding school and you were sent at the age of nine wasn't it yeah yeah and i started weekly boarding at the age of 10 in belfast and i think part of my drive that similar like scaffolding wrapping drive to get everything perfect is to impose control on the chaos of the universe but also to show that i'm worth loving just to be very sort of deep about it. How much do you think

that that's where your drive comes from? I mean, it's got to be a factor, doesn't it? It just seems to make sense. I mean, I'm very much a nature and nurture guy. You know what I mean? I think both those factors are important in the way a person turns out. I don't think you can discount either one. So when people say, oh, you went to boarding school, so you have separation anxiety, so everything else that you do in your life is going to be a quest for love and comfort and compensation for that trauma of being separated

from your parents who you loved so much at nine. I mean, at that age, it is your worst nightmare to suddenly find yourself separated from them and just with all these strangers in a strange place. But you can overstate that, I think. But yeah, it's got to be a factor, doesn't it? Yeah. Having said all that. And certainly, I think there's that at play.

I mean, that's certainly a factor. I think it must be a factor in the ways that some of my relationships turned out and the extent to which i wanted to make everything perfect and when i didn't get what i thought i wanted from the person i was with it really sent me into a spin and you talk about this in your book if the other person just wants a night off wants to hang out with their friends or whatever, or God forbid, has another friend of the opposite sex or the sex that they're attracted to. That is torture. I mean, I had moments when I was absolutely tortured by that kind of thing. And looking back on it, it just seems like that's got to be something to do with that boarding school experience.

But I'm sure people who didn't go to boarding school also have that kind of thing. You know what I mean? I think maybe that's just a kind of person. So how did your wife break through those barriers? Well, that is a very big question. And one day maybe I'll write a book about that with her authorization. I think she was the same in a lot of ways. So we were attracted to

each other's hangups in some ways, and that can be tricky as well. But I don't know, we're constantly sort of checking in with each other about some of those things. And I mean, clearly, I'm the kind of person that likes talking about this and unpacking it. And I know there are times when she finds that quite exhausting, but other times it's useful. Yeah, I think we bonded over a lot of those hangups and over the kind of people that we liked. We were attracted to other people who seemed hung up and a bit neurotic and were able to be honest about their shortcomings. I think those are the people that we enjoyed being with. Tell us about the cutlery draw. I mean, I do know that other people have this, probably mainly men, not to be too prescriptive and reductionist. But again, it's a sense of wanting to impose order, isn't it,

on a chaotic universe. And I think maybe a lot of men can relate to this that you just pick your little area especially domestically and you want to control that area and if the order is disrupted it becomes very anxious making and so for me it is i've got a knife block on the wall with some ceramic knives. And I thought if I bought a block and mounted it on the wall, then it would be clear that they were my knives. And no one should really, really touch them unless it was a very important ceramic knife job. And then if they did do that, then they would return the knife to the knife block to make sure it was not chipped and put in the dishwasher which it should never be but sadly that is not how it works out and the reason i bought the knife

block was because i had lost the battle of the cutlery drawer which was we've got two drawers and in one drawer the lower drawer is the nice cutlery. Or at least the cutlery that I like, that it has a bit more weight to it. And it's not like super cheap cutlery. And in the upper drawer, it's the super cheap stuff that's like you breathe on it and it bends. And it just drives me nuts. I'm like, why can't they be separated? Why is that so hard?

You know, and apparently it is too hard but it's because everyone loves the dishwasher i don't love the dishwasher i just think what washes you go i was a bartender for a long time and that was the first thing they taught you like clean as you go put everything back where it belongs and that's what i do and i don't like just sticking everything in the dishwasher deferring that job for i'll just stick it in there i'll deal with it later and then you don't deal with it later you think oh god i've got to unload the dishwasher and so everyone quite understandably just shoves everything where there's space rather than in the places they should go but within the

cutlery drawers isn't it all mixed up like knives and that would drive me mad so i'm kind of on your side with this but you didn't your wife in the book make she made the point that it was a bit racist to separate there it's like an apartheid of cutlery but so is yeah because she's talking about the fact that in my mind i I do want to separate. Well, it's more classist. In fact, I want to separate the real cutlery, the toffs. I want to put them in their special public school drawer. I want everyone else in the other drawer. No, I mean, it's not total chaos.

There is general separation of spoons forks and knives i mean i really as i'm explaining it i realize i don't have a leg to stand on i mean that's why i included it in the book i think because it is hopefully something people can relate to but it is mad no it's more i wanted to separate the types the quality of the right yeah that is quite annoying but it's been giving me anxiety ever since i read it so i'm glad that we've been able to clear it up that yeah knives forks and spoons are separated because there is like i don't want to go on too long about this but you know there are great spoons there are spoons that are big enough so that you can take a lovely big spoonful of soup or whatever and it fits just right in your mouth.

And that's just the right amount of soup. And then there are bad spoons that are just a bit too small. They don't have a nice weight to them anyway. So all I'm talking about is wouldn't it be great if there was a place for the great spoons and you could just reach for them and you're going to have soup. You know exactly where the great soup spoon is. That's all I'm talking about. Yeah. When my boyfriend and I moved in together, we only recently discovered that there was one terrible spoon that neither of us would ever use.

It would feel like a failure to have to pick that spoon out because there were no other ones left. And we both thought that it was each other's spoon that we brought into the household. Eventually, we just threw it away. I mean, you know you know what sorry i've got to stop talking about this no no this could be a whole podcast in itself it could yeah spoon chat or cutlery talk and i could just get some like red electrical tape and wrap all my favorite cutlery like just a bit of red tape around the handle that's not a bad idea i might do that later on this afternoon round each individual handle to market as elite or round a bunch of them to keep them no no no round each individual handle but wouldn't that make it less aesthetically pleasing

yes but long-term gain would be massive. Also, it's hard when you talk about the bad spoon, the spoon that no one likes, it's very hard to get rid of those, isn't it? Like unless you just take a load of cutlery to the charity shop, which I have done, you can't throw it away. You can't throw away cutlery. That's too grotesque.

That's a useful item. It is a bit grotesque, but I have to confess that we threw away our bad spoon. Did you? Yeah. I mean, I've thrown away cutlery too, but it's like throwing away coins. I remember my dad, you know, like sometimes you have a bunch of foreign coins. We used to have a foreign coin jar. And when we were little, I just thought, well, what's the point of the foreign coin jar? You know, you can see everything more clearly when you're little so i just chucked a whole load away and my dad found

me chucking away these sort of you know one denari pieces it wasn't denari but whatever it was cents or coins from countries that we were never likely to return to that he'd accumulated over the course of his travels anyway he found me chucking away some of these coins and he went absolutely nuts because to him i was throwing away money and that's all he could see it was like you are throwing away money and i'm like no i'm throwing away something that is useless that we are none of us is ever going to use and it's not even worthwhile to take it to the bank they'd laugh at you like what are you going to do send it back to the people in that country and say look here's enough to buy a grain of rice i don't know i mean that it's funny that we started off this podcast talking about privilege

and now we've got an image of the young adam buxton just casually throwing away money money away i know that's what my dad saw. He just thought it was like, he hated waste. That's the thing is like, he wasn't from a privileged background at all. And he grew up in a family where you had to be very careful about how money was spent and any kind of waste was grotesque to him.

And I feel that myself. I mean, I guess a lot of people do. It leads us onto to your second failure, actually, which is a lot to do with the strain that was placed on your parents' relationship because your father was working so hard to get money to send you to these incredible schools, because your second failure is about dropping out of Warwick University. So tell us what happened there and why you chose it. failure is about dropping out of Warwick University. So tell us what happened there and why you chose it. Well, that was the first time when I really had a sense of screwing up. Before then, I had a general sense of screwing up in that I was never academic. You know,

I was in these schools which were fairly high powered academically, not my first boarding school out in the country so much. Although even there I realized like, oh, I'm not the cleverest guy. In fact, I'm one of the stupidest a lot of the time. I was good at English and things like that. So I was able to have a sense of self-esteem because I was good at English and I did well at art and things like that. So I thought, okay, I'm good at some things. But in most other classes, certainly all the sciences and languages and things like that, I was pretty much always at the bottom. And there were definitely times when I tried much harder to be good.

You know, I felt a sense of competition. I thought, God, I could actually do better if I applied myself. And I did apply myself, but it just didn't work. I just couldn't get my head around maths especially and physics and things like that. And so I did badly in my exams. I did okay at GCSEs or O-levels as they were then known, because you could nail those things by just learning stuff by rote. I don't know if that's still the case, but I was always quite good at just learning things off by heart. So I kind of bluffed my way through O levels and I did okay there.

But when it got to A levels where you have to engage your analytical mind a little bit more, I really struggled and ended up with quite a disastrous set of results. And the school that I went to was very much a kind of Oxbridge sausage factory. If you sent your child there, the understanding was that, okay, this is like bootcamp for Oxbridge. We're going to get your child a place in the kind of elite establishment ranks. And this is why you pay your money. And we're going to do everything we can to get your child ready for action in Oxbridge. And when it became clear that that was not likely to happen for me, everyone got a bit anxious because that was really what my dad wanted. He got a place at Oxford. He went there after the Second World War and he was a little bit older and he was hugely proud of the

fact that he'd been able to get access to that establishment world and he loved meeting all these toffs there and all these interesting people and writers and that's where he met david cornwall um john le carre and suddenly he was hanging out with these giants of the literary world as they would become and he loved it you know and he thought that's what i want for my children. And so I suppose he got a bit of that in that, you know, I met people like Louis and Joe and my friend Mark, and they're still my friends. And so that was fantastic. But as far as the academic side of it, that never really happened. I didn't have the grades to get into the places I'd applied to. And so I had to take a year out. I went and got a job as a

bartender to help pay the bills at home. And because my dad was struggling financially by the time I left school, late eighties, he was in bad debt. Things were getting very tense at home and my mom and he weren't getting on. She was like, this is crazy. You can't afford to send your children to these schools. And that's what my dad's bank manager was saying to him as well. But he was determined. He was like, no, this is the best chance they have of having all the things I didn't have when I was growing up and being the kind of person I think that they should become and all this kind of thing. Anyway, long story short, I eventually got in to Warwick University to study English. And I thought, okay, great. Now I'm back on track. This is the establishment academic path. This is your gateway to sort of

respectability. And my parents are going to be happy. This is great. I did English and American literature. And I had it in my head that we'd all be sat around on beanbags, smoking and drinking coffee and talking about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And I sort of forgot about the English part of it. I focused on the American literature part. But it turned out when we got to the place, it turned out that when I arrived at Warwick, the first term, in fact, maybe the first year of the course was sort of medieval English studies. And we had to do Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is this, I think it's 14th century or something written in Middle English. And it's all kind of Chaucerian. Howe, there, you know, I can't even do a parody.

In he throng there you go i hated studying chaucer when when we had to do it at school and i was like oh no this is like chaucer fuck it was torture and i really hated it and i found it impenetrable and i say in the book that you know i'm aware that it is, there are so many rewards once you get to grips with a text like that and the weave and the weft of the language and all that kind of thing. But I never got to grips with it. And maybe that's my laziness or I don't know what, but it just never clicked with me until

one weekend when I was writing an essay and I was really struggling with it, I was thinking about Withnell and I, one of my favorite films. I thought about that scene. There's a scene in which Withnell is reading from a newspaper and he's reading an article about a shot putter, Jeff Wode. He says, imagine what it would like to be threatened by him. I'm going to pull your head off. No, please don't pull my head off. I'm going to pull your head off because I don't like your head. Anyway, I was thinking about that little bit with Withnell reading the article. And to me, it seemed like, oh, this is a little bit like Gawain and the Green Knight is taunting Sir Gawain and telling him all the terrible things he's going to do to him when they have their big fight. And I thought I could draw a parallel between that and with Null and I, and actually I could do it in kind of a colloquial way and it would lighten this whole essay up and it would be relevant. And yeah, that would be good. And I don't have to write in this kind of stuffy

way as if I'm still doing my A-levels. I'm a grown-up guy now. I'm in my 20s and I've lived and I've been out in the world and this isn't like school. This is a different thing. So just relax and enjoy yourself. So I rewrote the whole essay and it took me much less time and I was like, there you go. That's great. And I handed it in and at the next tutorial our tutor was handing out the essays handing them back to everyone she said well the standard was pretty bad for your first essays you guys are going to have to raise your game but i still hadn't got my essay back and then i was getting more and more jazzed and i was thinking oh i think my essay was pretty good mean, you know where this story is going. But I swear to you that in my head, I thought I had nailed this essay so massively that the tutor was leaving it to last because it was so good.

And then she said, Adam, can I talk to you about yours afterwards? And I was like, oh, my God, she is so impressed with this that she doesn't want to embarrass the others by just telling me how amazing my essay was i swear i thought she was going to say wow this is in a totally different league and i didn't want to embarrass the others but it's so good that i would love it if you could just read it aloud at the next tutorial because i think it would be very instructive for the other students. Anyway, everyone files out. I'm sitting there rubbing my hands thinking, here we go. Next level for buckles. And she says to me, have I done something to offend you? I was like, what? She said, have I done something to offend you? I was like, I don't understand. She said, well,

I mean, I assume that you're upset with me for some reason that's the only reason i could think that you would hand in this essay like what do you how do you mean she's like well it's an insult i thought it was good she's like no it's insultingly bad and you haven't tried and i'm not going to mark it so i want you to go away and and write another one and we'll go from there and we forget this ever happened and buckles i mean it really was unbelievable i was like whoa that is not what i was expecting and i thought you know i did have a moment of humility and i thought well is she right i mean was i really not trying And I really examined my motivation and how I'd approached the essay. And I thought, am I not taking this whole course seriously or what? And I just thought, no, I am fucking taking it fucking seriously. And it took me bloody ages. And I thought it was good. And at the very least, she could acknowledge, she could say could say like okay i see what you're after

but i'm not sure that the approach works for anyway she didn't do any of that she was just like no this is shit do it again and i was like fuck that i'm out because it was no fun anyway i wasn't enjoying myself i didn't have any money my dad couldn't give me any money i didn't get a grant my dad had been made redundant and he declared his kind of severance on the form for the grant. So I didn't qualify for a grant, blah, blah, blah. All the signs were like, get out. So I did, I left. And I was going out with a girl at the time in London who I worked with at a restaurant. She was a bit older than me. And one of the things that had bonded us was art and drawing. And i'd always wanted to go to art school really but no one had ever encouraged me to do so and so i i left and i turned up at her

house and i was like i've left warwick she's like oh good i think she was a little bit alarmed that i was back in her life because i was quite an intense person to go out with but you know at the same time she was like oh it's nice to see you and what are you going to do now and i don't know and she said well you should go to art school i'm going to apply for art school you should come with me so that's what i did and really that set me on the path that i pursued ever since and was great but to my parents it was just a total disaster. And when I told my mom, I got back to Clapham and said, you know, and they hadn't seen me for a few weeks. And they're like, how's Warwick? I was like, yeah, I left.

I left. Sorry about that. And my mom just started crying. And because for them, it was like, oh, Jesus, our marriage is more or less on the rocks. And that's partly because of all these sacrifices my dad has made rightly or wrongly for you guys. And now you've just thrown it away and you're going to go to art school. And they just had it in their head like art schools where losers go. Art schools where you go and you don't have any options left. And that was the whole mindset that everyone had at the

school that I went to. Like, no, no, no, that's not a real option. And that's totally bullshit, of course. And it was the best thing that I could have done. But it took them a while to adjust to it. And I felt really bad. I felt like, oh, yeah, maybe I am a failure. Maybe I really have just taken the easy path because I didn't have what it took to stick with the more challenging option do you think that your parents because they were still around to see the extraordinary success that you became and we all know success is relative but you know success is relative but by any measure you're successful now, I think. Were they proud of you? Could they see the point of you having made that decision in the end? It took a while.

It took a long time, but they were nice about it. When I look back now, my children are now approaching university age, or at least further education age. And we've been through the whole drama that many people have this year of the estimated grades and the algorithms and the fact that it is making it impossible for one of our sons to get a university place that he wanted and it seems massively unfair and there's resits and oh my god i feel so bad for him and for everybody going through that. And as you say in your book, you know, you don't want to be one of those people who just glibly goes, oh, don't worry about it.

I screwed up my exams and I'm fine now because it does matter rightly or wrongly. But it is so unfair. And you do also want to communicate to them that, like, mate, life goes on and the sat-nav recalibrates and it's not all over and i really felt so strongly when i was at school like i'm gonna screw this up and it's all gonna be over if i don't get into this university or that university you know and it just isn't but my parents thought that and it was sad to see them feeling that but they were cool cool. You know, you get over it. Everyone gets over it. Everyone recalibrates. So it's not like they sort of turned their back on me and they were like, oh, that's

our failure, son. But man, I look back on my behavior around that time and I do cringe and I do feel sorry that I put them through a lot of it and seemed so blithely to just glide through all these random options when they were trying so hard to create a path for me that was more secure. But yeah, later on, they saw that I was doing okay and I was able to earn a living and support myself and I was doing what I wanted to do. And I was very lucky and I was with Joe and we were on TV and we were having fun. And the main thing is that you're happy, right? And I was happy. I was doing what I wanted to do. And I was very lucky. And I was with Joe and we were on TV and we were having fun. And, you know, the main thing is that you're happy. Right. And I was happy. I was having fun. And it didn't totally ruin my life when I dropped out of Warwick at all. And I had fun at art school and I did pretty well there and got lots of good ideas. And it was great. And so they could appreciate that. And the subject never came up again. I think it becomes clear at a certain point, like, oh, of course, you weren't going to go to Oxford. You're not that kind of person. And you find your place elsewhere. You mentioned your sons there and your own parents and your third failure fits beautifully into that, which is your failure to become a mature adult. These are your words, before having children, brackets, or after?

I've talked to people about this before on my podcast. I talked to Simon Pegg about it because I think that he is exactly the same kind of baby man that I am. the 80s, embraced popular culture, and also were able to kind of make a career out of that love of popular culture and take it seriously. And then a generation of directors like Quentin Tarantino were bringing that culture into the mainstream and treating it in quite a serious way and turning it into something that had to be taken seriously, or at least was taken seriously by a lot of people. It wasn't just throwaway. It wasn't all disposable. And it was this kind of postmodern sense of being able to appreciate high and low art, a kind of flat plane of appreciation. So you could love The Simpsons and Truffaut and you were still a serious person.

But I think you pay a price for that. And I think maybe that price is a kind of maturity and equanimity or a seriousness that is sometimes very useful in adult life for seeing you through certain situations and relationships and dealing with knockbacks and things like that. I'm not saying that all people that love pop culture are silly and immature. I'm sure I'm just a silly and immature person who happens to love pop culture. But when you are in your 20s and you're making a living from filming your star Wars toys that your mom kept in the attic and you're doing silly voices and making fart jokes for a living, it's sort of

stunts certain aspects of your personality. And it takes the emphasis off just growing up in certain ways. And there's lots of ways in which I value that. And I'm grateful for that because it's fun and it keeps you youthful, I suppose, in some ways. But then other times you just run up against things that you can't deal with by just being silly. Do you mean like pensions or do you mean adult interactions where you have to be a disciplinarian or something like that? adult interactions where you have to be a disciplinarian or something like that? Both. I mean, I did my best to try and get those important grown-up things dealt with by other people, either by my agent or, you know, anyone. I just gravitate towards people who could help me out with grown-up things. And as it turns out, this is not the only reason I'm with my wife,

but luckily she shoulders most of that burden. She deals with a lot of that grown up admin. And that's one of the gifts that she's given me is the opportunity to, and the ability to carry on being a silly man in a lot of ways, because she's taking the responsibility for some of those grown up things, but also just being a grown up, by which I mean treating people properly and being considerate and manners, I suppose, is another way of saying it. Perhaps like going around to someone's house and appreciating the fact they've done a lot of work to make dinner for you and maybe ringing them or emailing them or writing to them afterwards to say thank you and things like that. Things that I had just never done, really. Even though my parents probably encouraged me to,

I just managed to avoid it and never really grew up in that way. And then gradually started realizing, oh, I feel free and I feel like I'm a free spirit and I'm just a fun guy who does what he wants and I'm nice, so it doesn't matter. But I started realizing, oh, actually, I'm a bit of a dick in some ways. And it would be nice to be a bit more considerate and, yeah, just take things a bit more seriously in some ways and be a bit more grateful. And I don't know, just observe some of those old ideals that I just associated with my parents and thought were stuffy and boring. And what about the kind of dad you are?

The way you're describing yourself jokingly as a baby man. Are your children sometimes, do you feel more mature than you? Oh, yeah, definitely. My daughter, especially. Sometimes I find it baffling that she is actually my daughter. Yeah, she's very thoughtful and grown up. And so is my eldest middle one. Not so much.

No, I'm kidding. But he has, actually, he's very sort of coldly analytical, the middle one sometimes. And able to sort of rationalize in a way that I never was. And I just tended to throw my toys out of the pram a lot. And I would panic emotionally. You know, it's like we were saying before about the being in relationships and not getting what you want from the other person. And it would really throw me into a spin.

And that was so unhelpful in so many ways. And so gradually, I've been trying to be a bit better about that kind of thing. But as a dad, it was alarming to suddenly be a parent at a certain point after a few years, because I'd gone into the whole thing without thinking really very hard. I was very much someone who thought, oh, I do everything from the heart. And that's why I'm so great. I'm not like one of those cold automatons that goes around thinking really hard about things. Boring. I just follow my heart. And so I love my wife. She loves me. We're going to have children and we'll love them and I'll be their best friend and I'll play them obscure indie albums from the 90s and we'll watch Star Wars together and it'll be great because that's how I grew up and I was happy.

So fine. And so that's really how I went into parenthood. I mean, I'm being glib, obviously, but there was a lot of that there. being glib, obviously, but there was a lot of that there. And you can sort of bluff your way through for a few years before their personalities really start to form. But once they get beyond around seven or something and they start having their own problems, maybe they've started having their problems before. But the thing is, there's so many phases with children and for every bad phase, you kind of get through it and you think, that's fine they're through that phase but then their personalities start to harden and solidify a little bit and come more into focus and then along with the good points

you start realizing like oops there's a couple of things that we might need to pay attention to there and a lot of the time they're very similar to your own hangups. And it's like, oh, surprise, surprise. Philip Larkin was right about that. And then you really are forced to examine your own shortcomings and think like, shit. Then you get into the whole nature nurture thing again. Like how much of these were programmed into them already?

And how many of these are environmental factors? And how much of this is down to how I've behaved as a parent. And then you really get into the mire. The cliche is that you're only ever as happy as your unhappiest child or whatever. But it's really very true. I mean, it's very hard to feel carefree and light in the way that I remember feeling in the olden days when one of your children is unhappy it's torture and you can blame yourself too much and you can believe that it's all down to you too much it's not some of it's out your hands you just have to get on with it and be nice and be there for them it's very worrying I'm a worrier I think you probably are a bit of yes

absolutely so we'll worry about anything that's available. And worrying that you're screwing up another human being that you love so much is hard and frightening. And I didn't have any conception of that when I went into it. And I just thought, oh, my God, I'm criminally negligent. But, you know, again, luckily, my wife is not like that and she manages to fill in a lot of the blanks and i do bring some positive aspects to the table and some of those fantasies i had and listening that you know my son sometimes in the evening will hook up the bluetooth speaker and start djing and saying have you heard this dad and i just discovered this and playing me lots

of weird stuff and that is fun you know and sitting there listening to music with my sons and enthusing about stuff they've just discovered is the fantasy i always had and it's wonderful we watch movies and yeah we watch star wars and all those moments did come true and and were wonderful but the ongoing worry that you're just not up to the job and one day they're just going to look back and go jesus christ what the hell was he thinking he's just a silly man and no i don't know i mean if i may i don't speak as a parent myself but the very fact that you worry about it and that you question whether you're doing it well enough makes you a good parent what makes you a kind of a good parent it maybe makes you not the worst kind of parent i

mean there's loads of ways that i could be worse you know people grow up in all sorts of very sad environments where they're being abused in terrible ways and i'm not thank god that kind of person but there's a line in a robin hitchcock song there's so many ways you can screw up a child and that's true you know there's all sorts of ways one way or another they're going to get hung up right and i suppose you have to make peace with that to a degree and just stay focused on loving them and making sure they know that you love them. I guess that's the other thing is you can forget as a parent, you can kind of go, well, yeah, obviously they know. And because you've said it so many times when they were little, you know what I mean? Like when they're just little blobs and you're just saying, I love you, I love you all the time. all the time when they grow up and the conversations are less easygoing and they're teenagers and they don't really want to talk to you anyway it's much harder to say hey you know remember I love you but I think I do manage to do that and I think they do know that so I'm glad about that I'm sure they know that and I'm sure they know how to organize the cut redraw and I'm sure they know that. And I'm sure they know how to organise the cut redraw. And I'm sure that's one of the many things that you've bequeathed them, Adam Buxton.

Let me tell you, they don't. And that is not one of the many. And is there respect for the ceramic knives on the rack? No. Actually, that's not true. My eldest son is so respectful. But to the extent that it sometimes makes me guilty like oh no i've just infected you with my it's kind of heartbreaking it is it's like i'm sorry and sometimes i say hey listen man it's the holidays you don't have to put do what you want with the ceramic knives all right just throw it on the floor if you want i'm easy going i'm a fun dad oh adam it has been such a delight talking to you. I can't thank you enough for being so

funny and open and willing to be vulnerable and introducing me to the idea of sat-nav mode and also for doing everything that you do in the podcasting world. And, you know, just thank you so, so much. And thank you for blessing my tiny little podcast with your enormous presence. blessing my tiny little podcast with your enormous presence thank you for that extremely overboard praise i appreciate it very much now thanks elizabeth it's very nice to be i like the podcast i'm in awe of the conversations you've had with extraordinary people on there and i'm honored to be a part of that roster. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe.

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