My father, Nigel Buxton, aka BaaadDad, died at the end of November 2015. In February of that year I was in my dressing room at Pinewood Studios, about to shoot what turned out to be another failed TV pilot.
RAMBLE
I now have so many of these to my name that I’ve been awarded a Failed TV Pilot’s Licence. This allows me to board any project and cruise at a low altitude, nearly breaking through the clouds before plunging back down to earth and crashing underwhelmingly.
I was taking selfies that made me look handsome when my sister called and said she’d just accompanied our dad to a meeting with the doctor. He’d been told he had mesothelioma (cancer of the lining of the lung). ‘Could be worse,’ I thought. How important is a bit of lung lining? After all, if you have a favourite jacket and the lining gets knackered, you can still wear that jacket, right? According to the doctor, lungs and jackets aren’t as similar as you might think, and Dad was being given three to twelve months to live. He was 91, so well into bonus time, but still, it’s not what anyone wants to hear.
Mum and Dad had gone their separate ways soon after my younger brother Dave (aka Uncle Dave or U.D.) had left home in the late Nineties. I’d suggested to my parents that they get divorced years before, but they didn’t want to ‘let anyone down’. After all, they had stood before friends, family and God and made a very solemn promise to stick together, no matter what. In their day people who broke that contract were judged harshly (my parents probably did some of that judging themselves), but when you get to the point where the thing you do best as a couple is annoy the shit out of each other, I think you might at least consider the possibility that friends, family and even God might forgive you for going your separate ways.
My mother moved into a house in a pretty village near Reading where her fellow residents include Jimmy Page and George and Amal Clooney. For any burglars reading this, Jimmy’s usually home; George and Amal, not so much (also, everyone in the village knows that the code for their security system is 2580).
My dad got a place in Newhaven, Sussex, not far from where he grew up. With its jerry-rigged shelving, Withnail and I kitchen and pervasive old-man smell, it was on the squalid spectrum, but it looked over the expansively undulating fields of the Sussex Downs, where for his last two decades Dad loved walking as often as he could. Now that his knees were knackered and his lung lining tatty, the glamour of Newhaven was fading.
Daddy (which is what I always called him, though to avoid coming across as weak/posh I usually refer to him as Dad or Pa, as if I was in Little House on the Prairie) always loved coming to stay at our place in Norfolk, even though he only came a couple of times a year.
He would admire the outbuildings, one of which had been converted into a flat where I had my studio. ‘That would make a very nice flat for me one day,’ he would say, only half joking, and I would shudder at the thought.
In light of my sister’s call and the news of his grim prognosis, I realised that moving Dad into the flat was my last opportunity, not only to play the part of the dutiful son, but to finally get to know him in a way that would afford me lasting emotional closure and, more importantly, could one day be turned into some kind of one-man show or book. I loved my dad, but our relationship had always been frustratingly formal, despite attempts to change that by making him part of The Adam and Joe Show. He was from a generation that valued keeping it all tucked in over letting it all hang out. That was also his policy on shirts and willies.
I spoke with my wife (
MY WIFE), and when she agreed on Dad coming to live with us, I began making plans for Nigel.
RAMBLE
The MY WIFE thing, with me saying ‘ MY WIFE’ in a weird voice after I mention my wife on the podcast, is not, as some people have assumed, a reference to Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, but something that started after I complained to Joe Cornish about my wife’s tendency to misplace her keys (ADAM BUXTON PODCAST EP.12). I think Joe felt the way I kept saying ‘ MY WIFE’ sounded robotic and clichéd – a lazy characterisation of men as rational and organised and women as the opposite. He started saying ‘ MY WIFE’ in a robot voice, which made me laugh so I joined in. Now it’s become a semi-catchphrase on the podcast and some people get annoyed when I don’t do the voice after mentioning my wife ( MY WIFE). OK, that’s the last one for this book or it just gets annoying.
Supplementary Ramble
The story of my grumpy dad coming to live with us in Norfolk would be very different were it told from my wife’s point of view, but until she starts up her own podcast in which she says ‘ MY HUSBAND’ in a robotic voice and gets a book deal, she’s going to have to keep that to herself. Nevertheless, I do worry about the extent to which my wife has to just go along with the version of her that pops up in my ramblings from time to time. I’ve just emailed her at work to ask her about this and this is her reply: ‘I really don’t care what you say – I think I trust you not to make me look either like a pathetic pushover or a heartless Nazi (that’s the worst kind of Nazi) – either way I will know what really went on, despite your insistence (as ever) that your version of events is true as you wrote it down in your bloody diary. Xxxxxxx’
Around April 2015, a few weeks before he was due to move in with us in Norfolk, I travelled to Dad’s place in Sussex with my brother Dave. We were there to help Pa sort through a lifetime of accumulated crap, knowing that if it were left to him, every scrap of crap would be moved to Norfolk and added to our own teetering crap heap. The celebrated psychologist Amos Tversky maintained that ‘unless you’re kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you’re not throwing enough away’. That philosophy would have baffled and appalled my dad. He had the hoarder’s dread of being tormented by regret if one day he needed something he’d binned.
Dave and I made our way through Dad’s house, putting stickers on the few items of furniture that deserved to be kept, before turning our attention to the garage. With Dad issuing instructions from a camping chair out front, we heaved open the door and peered in.
I exchanged glances with Dave. It was like an Aladdin’s cave in there, if an Aladdin had stuffed his cave with worthless shit. As we picked our way through, box after box revealed mouldering variations on similar themes: broken electrical items waiting vainly for that trip to the repair shop, box files exploding with damp paperwork, old articles and magazines Dad had once contributed to, and lidless Tupperware containing foreign coins, washers, keys, screws, fuses, hinges and hooks, all congealed by layers of rust and grime. Dave passed me an old cigar box with a label in Dad’s handwriting that read: ‘Pieces of string. Too short to be of any use.’
Then I spotted it: a battered, black, faux-leather briefcase that I hadn’t seen since we lived in Earl’s Court in London, 40 years earlier. In those days Dad was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph’s travel section, and when he was at the office in Fleet Street or travelling abroad, as he was frequently, I would poke about in his cluttered study, hoping to find something cool or weird in among the filing-cabinet drawers filled with hotel toiletries, airline amenity kits and other travel freebies waiting for their moment of usefulness.
RAMBLE
Around this time I went through a phase of emulating the cop shows I saw on TV, but tended to play the part of the criminal rather than the cop. When my parents were out I’d go into the kitchen, lay out sheets of cling film, pour mounds of icing sugar onto them and wrap them into neat little packets. Then, using a big pointy knife, I’d cut a little hole in one of the packets, scoop out a bit of icing sugar with the knife tip and place it on my tongue before rubbing the sugar around my gums. I was eight.
One day, when I was beginning to worry that I’d discovered everything worth discovering in Dad’s office, I spotted the black briefcase on top of a filing cabinet. I managed to get it down but found it tightly secured by two combination locks. There was a label on the lid, on which Dad had written in caps: ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE CONTENTS OF THIS CASE SHOULD BE DESTROYED, UNOPENED.’
I think Dad realised I’d been trying to open it because the next time I got into his office the case had disappeared. I wondered about the mysterious contents of that case from time to time, but when I moved out of my parents’ place I forgot all about it. Years later, when I was in my twenties, I had a drink with Uncle Dave who was still living at home. We were talking about Dad’s eccentricities and Dave said, ‘Did you ever see the black briefcase?’
‘Oh man, yes!’ I said, and together we chanted, ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE CONTENTS OF THIS CASE SHOULD BE DESTROYED, UNOPENED.’
‘What the hell did he have in there?’ said Dave. Our top guesses were: pornography … actually just pornography.
And now, here was the mystery case again, though the label had gone. I stuck on a new one and wrote in Sharpie, ‘MOVE TO NORFOLK.’ A few weeks later, I finally discovered what was inside. You could flick to the end and find out what it was now, but to be honest it’s unlikely to blow your mind. Better if you get to it naturally.