MY first ever glimpse of The Adam and Joe Show was all a mistake. Programming the video recorder in haste I hit the wrong buttons. Days later, instead of the expected classic film I got classic mayhem and serious, inspired lunacy.
I got Baaadad - Adam's father - giving a codger's gruff rating on the current top singles and groups of the day. And yes, he mostly reckoned they were noisy, repetitive rubbish . . . Guess what? He was mostly right. And then there was Vinyl Justice - where all those really awful LPs came out of the victim's closet and the shameful secrets of some pop star's record collection were exposed to us, the public with a right to know. Yo!
But best of all - because it was the worst of all gags made sublime - was the film remake. Who did Adam and Joe cast? Not themselves - they were a tad shy of being on camera then. No - they cast their collection of cuddly toys.
There's just something about a glove puppet, or a stuffed furry animal, that makes
ridiculous fun of everything -
especially cult hits like Trainspotting (where the toys got high on sherbet) or Seven. So, maybe sick jokes do get even sicker - but they also get sillier. Anyway, I spent half an hour laughing like a drain. And then another half-hour checking old TV pages to find out what I'd been watching.
Next time I pushed all the right buttons and taped The Adam and Joe Show.
Tonight - after the success of that first series - the lads return in a prime-time slot: 11pm on Channel 4. More money has, apparently, been filtered into production, but luckily it hasn't been at the expense of the show's essential scatty and scatological character: Adam and Joe may drop in on Hollywood or cruise Sunset Boulevard, but the show's spiritual home is still a grotty, cluttered bedroom where the twosome watch too much telly, hatch fantasies, and pull pop culture apart at the seams.
Twentysomethings Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish initially saw the show as recreating ''what it was like to go round to your mate's house on a Saturday night and talk about anything, just going from one subject to another. Just totally randomly talking about pop culture and pop stars and films and music and books and all kinds of stupid bollocks.''
Friends from teenage schooldays - they shared the same obsessions, the same tastes, including a fondness for Monty Python's Flying Circus - Adam and Joe started off, like many others, just fooling around with Adam's dad's camcorder.
Joe admits there's an incredibly embarrassing early archive that includes a Jackanory spoof, himself (aged 14) doing a Boy George impression, while Adam does his chosen thing as Michael Jackson. But such notions might have stayed in the can forever
if Joe hadn't answered an advert in the NME for Channel 4's
new public access programme, Takeover TV.
By now Adam had completed his degree (in sculpture) and Joe had finished film school in Bournemouth - and both were on the dole. There was nothing to lose, except possibly a few blushes, so they submitted a spoof pop video featuring a performance artist called Randy Tart (inspired, shall be say, by the likes of Lou Reed and Henry Rollins). The tape clicked with the Takeover TV production team and almost as fast as you can say ''Stars'R'Us'' Adam and Joe were en route to a show of their own.
Part of their appeal lies in the (cunningly deceptive) hand-knitted, ad hoc feel of the show. It's as if you'd stumbled into the bedsit den full of trashy pop icons and Boys' Own fetishes - and then, you get to go a bit further.
You get to surf Adam and Joe's wild ideas. They put into practice the kind of ludicrous wheezes that many of their
peers had to give up when they grew up and the only items
coming through the letter box
in big brown envelopes were
tax demands.
At times, there's a gleeful eruption of stonking bad taste - last time round
the Daily Telegraph opined: ''Very offensive, the time-slot may not be late enough'' - but there's also this most marvellous sense of unchained mischief that is vastly entertaining, and doesn't actually offend even those it spoofs.
''I bumped into Ewan McGregor at the Brixton Academy when I went to see Beck,'' laughs Adam. ''He told me that he thought our spoof was excellent and that it was spot-on.''
Ralph Fiennes, too, has given their endeavours the thumbs up - or at any rate a letter saying how much he had enjoyed the toy version of The English Patient which features in tonight's programme. Fiennes's part is played by a large teddy bear, the Kristin Scott Thomas role is filled by a large fluffy bunny.
Other cult films that are ''toyed with'' include Shine and Crash along with TV favourites like This Life and Friends. And - purely in the line of duty, you understand - Baaadad takes in some of the major music festivals and (gasp!) encounters his first joint. His opinions, however, remain unaltered - ''he's still a crusty old bugger,'' observes Adam.
''A lot of his preconceptions about how rubbish pop music is have been completely borne out by what he's seen. He still thinks it's all rubbish and that it all sounds the same and that the kids are being conned, basically.''
And is pop culture a con? If so, Adam and Joe are now getting their own back rather neatly. As children of the eighties they were absorbed not just by it, but into it. TV gameshows, synthy pop groups, John Hughes movies - they watched, listened, talked nothing else.
Now they're spinning it around, making a career of turning pop culture on itself - and the results are wicked and wonderfully funny, though teddy bears of a sensitive disposition might find it rubs their fur up the wrong way.
n The Adam and Joe Show returns to Channel 4 tonight, 11pm.
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