The writer and comic Adam Buxton’s first memoir, Ramble Book, dug into his childhood and his relationship with his father, who featured as the cantankerous BaaadDad in Buxton’s 1990s pop culture series The Adam and Joe Show. I Love You, Byeee is the follow up in which he remembers his late mother, Valerie, and reflects on his TV career which began with him landing a job at Takeover TV, a showcase for new talent on Channel 4, where he brought in his childhood friend Joe Cornish.
Fans of The Adam and Joe Show will find reminiscences about the pair’s toy movies, where they recreated films such as Titanic and Trainspotting, and their radio shows on XFM and 6Music. Buxton is candid about the strain of their working relationship and his feelings of insecurity when Cornish went off to direct his first film, Attack the Block, without him.
Buxton’s audiobooks tend to do extremely well, in part due to the author’s chatty, self-deprecating style that is fun on the page yet transmits more effectively in audio. His vocal delivery is warm, whimsical and underpinned by a gentle melancholy. But key to their success is the way that Buxton approaches them less as a straightforward narration than a fully fledged sound project, using similar features to those on his pod, The Adam Buxton Podcast. Along with his trademark songs and jingles (which could be annoying but are not), I Love You, Byeee has two bonus chapters. The first is an essay on the author’s love of David Bowie that was cut from the book, and the second is a bracingly honest conversation between Buxton and Cornish in which they recall the highs and lows of their friendship.
• Available via Mudlark, 10hr 13 min
Further listening
Bless Me Father
Kevin Rowland, Penguin Audio, 11hr 19min
The Dexys frontman’s blunt memoir looks back on his religious childhood, his troubled relationship with his father, his meteoric rise to fame and his tendency to self-sabotage when things are going well. Read by the author.
Shy Creatures
Clare Chambers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 11hr 48min
Lucy Scott reads this novel about a woman who works as an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital and who is having an affair married colleague. Events take a turn when she meets a new patient with a flair for drawing.
