Yo! Open up the doh, muthafucka,’ called a voice through the raised flap of my parents’ letterbox.
Dad bent down and loudly demanded, ‘TRANSLATE.’
‘Oh, sorry, Nigel, I thought you were Adam,’ said Joe.
It was Christmas Eve 1993 and I was home from art school and looking forward to seeing Cornballs and Louis for what had become a traditional festive get-together at my parents’ place in Clapham.
Though I was 24, my relationship with Dad was still very much closer to naughty student and stern teacher than adult son and father. Sitting around in the front room enjoying glasses of sparkling wine and Sainsbury’s finest middle-class nibbles, Joe and I found it hard to keep a straight face when talking to Dad, but Louis was a master at supplying what my father craved: first-class Oxford-undergraduate banter with sprinkles of history, politics and current affairs, i.e. the kind of thing he was unlikely to get from his eldest son.
The Glenn Miller played, the sparkling wine flowed and Joe and I did our best to make Louis laugh as Dad regaled him with stories of his glory days at Worcester College, becoming more pompous and animated as the evening wore on. Despite our low-level piss-taking, it was great to see Dad showing off to Louis like this, money worries and rows with Mum temporarily set aside as he played the posh, worldly bon vivant for someone who actually got most of the references.
Three years later Louis was making a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic as a reporter on Michael Moore’s TV Nation, but whenever he was in town we’d get together, hang out and talk about what we were up to. When Joe and I told him about our pilot for The Adam and Joe Show Louis said, ‘Ads, you should get your dad in it. He’s funny. You could get him to review gangster rap records.’
RAMBLE
HOW WE GOT INTO TV
For the first half of the Nineties, Joe and I spent much of our free time pissing about and making videos.
We’d imagine we were the presenters of edgy youth TV shows – ‘Today on Interlog 10, we talk to film director Marvin Gaye about his new film Star Wars’ – we’d wander round galleries pretending to be critics, reviewing fire extinguishers, emergency exit signs and anything else that wasn’t supposed to be art, and we’d make spoof commercials for invented products like Bigot Beer, Pro Labia moisturiser and Books – ‘The words are all bunched up together! Try finding your way through them with a pen. Come on! It’s time to Book!’
Meanwhile back at art school in Cheltenham, I was making more of my own videos in between half understanding books about post-modernism and the media, and getting into work by any artist who seemed to have a sense of humour, especially Nam June Paik, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and William Wegman.
When a new local radio station called CD 603 opened up in Cheltenham, I sent in a tape of some songs and sub-Chris Morris news parodies I’d been recording. They gave me a job as the traffic and travel reporter for the breakfast show, cycling round Cheltenham dressed as a cowboy on a Sinclair battery-powered ‘Zike’. I was also given a three-hour slot on Sunday nights between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. where, without the pressure of anyone actually listening, I was able to play sketches and songs I’d recorded.
In early 1994, during my last year at art school, I saw an ad in the NME asking for ‘weird, funny and original’ home videos for Takeover TV, a new public-access-style clip show on Channel 4. I sent in a VHS of things I’d made with Joe as well as some of my own efforts, including a video for one of my songs about a fictional New York performance artist called Randy Tartt.
Back in Clapham that summer I got a call from World of Wonder, the production company that was making Takeover TV. Fenton Bailey, who ran the company with his American partner Randy Barbato, had seen my tape and liked it. In fact, he described my Randy Tartt video as ‘genius’.
‘Perhaps he’s just fond of the name Randy,’ I thought. When I met Fenton at World of Wonder’s office above The Body Shop in Brixton, it turned out he was mainly fond of the word ‘genius’, which he used about everything from the coffee a researcher brought him, to the incredibly annoying recent chart hit ‘Doop’ (by Doop). I liked Fenton and it turned out that he and Randy had made several TV shows that I’d loved when I was at art school, so I was delighted when I was offered a job on Takeover TV as a researcher watching and logging tapes that people like me had sent in.
Takeover TV went out on Channel 4 in early 1995. My Randy Tartt clip was shown along with some videos I’d made with Joe. Fenton also invited me to present a couple of episodes, and when the show was recommissioned I got the job of presenting the whole series, though this time I tried to get Cornballs more involved.
One of Joe’s ideas was to use our childhood toys (including my old Star Wars toys that Mum still had safely stored in the attic) to make parodies of movies and TV shows. Our first one was a two-minute version of Apollo 13 featuring three stuffed toys in a bin (called ‘Appallo 13’), and when it was finished we knew we’d hit on something incredibly special that would propel us into the very margins of cult micro stardom.
Peter Grimsdale, Takeover TV’s commissioning editor at Channel 4, suggested Joe and I come up with some ideas for our own show. After many false starts and tense conversations with Joe, whose frustration that he wasn’t yet working on films I failed to properly appreciate at the time, we began putting together The Adam and Joe Show, and an incredibly small footnote in the annals of DIY television began to be written.
I wasn’t sure I was up for having my dad as part of our show. After all, he’d spent the whole of my adolescence taking a series of dumps on every TV programme, film and piece of music I enjoyed, plus he was my dad, and aside from the odd booze-fuelled family get-together, I still found it hard to relax when he was around, but we needed material and Joe convinced me to give it a go. Dad agreed to help as soon as I asked and was only a little disappointed when I explained we didn’t have the budget to actually pay him anything. ‘I imagine there’ll be other rewards when I become famous,’ he reasoned.
On a grey day in August 1996 we loaded a mini DV tape into the Sony DCR-VX1000 camcorder (mandatory for every cheap TV production in the Nineties) and made our way over to the Olympia Exhibition Centre in West London where we were shooting the first footage for our pilot at the launch of the new-look Action Man doll. It was the first of many items we shot while we were still in the process of figuring out what the show actually was, and our producer Debbie would send us off to random events in the hope that they might provoke some solid-gold tomfoolery from me and Joe. The highlight of the Action Man launch was interviewing a human model who looked exactly like the new Action Man. We asked him to look surprised by something off-camera and then said, ‘Nice reaction, man!’ It didn’t make it into the show.
From Olympia we headed over to Clapham and, with Dad sat in his favourite Christmas Eve pompous pontification chair, we recorded his first music review.
Feeling that gangster rap might be too narrow a remit, we’d given him a mix of genres to comment on, starting with ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ by Josh Wink, ‘Men in Black’ by Frank Black and ‘Natural Born Killaz’ by Dr Dre ft. Ice Cube.
Dad’s initial response to the screeching techno of ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ was to recite from memory the poem ‘In No Strange Land’ by the Victorian writer and mystic Francis Thompson. It was a beautiful poem and Dad recited it movingly, but we were after something a bit pithier and a bit funnier.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ I thought, but Joe persevered, asking Dad questions until he came out with something funny or interesting, at which point he’d ask him to repeat it in soundbite form. The finished piece with the soundbites appearing inside old-fashioned picture frames over the music videos went down well with everyone we showed it to. Back in 1996 it was still a novelty to see a plummy-voiced septuagenarian analysing youth culture in that way.
The name BaaadDad was a nod to another late-night Channel 4 show around that time: Baadasss TV, hosted by Andi Oliver and the rapper Ice-T, who proclaimed it a ‘fly and funky’ look at ‘the idiosyncrasies of black culture’. So yeah, perfect for Dad.
When the first series of The Adam and Joe Show went out, it was the toy movie parodies and the BaaadDad segments that people seemed to respond to most enthusiastically, and the fact that he was my real father meant we ended up doing quite a few interviews together. These were fun. Dad liked the attention and I liked showing him that all those years of mainlining pop culture might not have been a total waste after all. ‘Perhaps this is the moment when Dad and I start to become best pals,’ I thought.
When The Adam and Joe Show was recommissioned in 1997 we decided that, as well as continuing with the music reviews, we should take BaaadDad out and about to explore various aspects of youth culture. Now that TV shows featuring comedians going on adventures with their parents has become a well-established genre, it seems odd that I didn’t appear on screen with Dad in these segments. But back then I felt our relationship was too fraught to be entertaining on screen, and anyway, there was a danger it would have unbalanced things with me and Joe. Ensuring that one of us didn’t get significantly more attention than the other was something we had started paying attention to after a few exchanges on the subject in which our breathing went weird and our voices got wobbly.
So Joe and I tended to stay behind the camera for Dad’s segments and concentrated on getting the best out of him, something that Cornballs was particularly good at. In addition to his phenomenal, award-winning skills as a director, Joe had the advantage of being unencumbered by awkwardness around Dad and was happy to encourage him to do things on camera that I would have been too embarrassed or too protective to suggest.
We visited the Tribal Gathering dance music festival in 1997, and Joe got Dad to strike up a conversation with a woman in her early twenties who claimed to be tripping on acid (though as far as I could tell she was just Australian), and when she rolled a joint, Joe got Dad to take a couple of drags. I wasn’t sure what to make of the footage when I watched it back. The sight of my 73-year-old father smoking drugs and turning on the charm with the young woman, saying to her at one point, ‘You know, you’re very beautiful,’ made me uncomfortable, not least because he and my mum were getting on so badly at the time and I knew the footage would make her cringe.
Our editor Jon cut the piece so that Dad’s ‘you’re very beautiful’ line came immediately after his toke on the joint, and it worked well, as if being high (though he claimed not to have inhaled) had instantly made him talk like a hippy, rather than the line just being something a sleazy old guy might say. However, I worried that, in the course of trying to get the best out of Dad while managing the less palatable aspects of his personality, we were turning him into a caricature. Occasionally he, too, would sense that happening and resist. On those occasions, choosing between what was best for the show and what was best for Dad gave me a massive emotional wedgie.
In 1998 we flew to Ibiza to immerse BaaadDad in the island’s culture of clubbing and hedonism. It was not a relaxing week. Dad spent half the time grumbling about how loud, loathsome and grotesque the music, the clubs and most of the people were, and the other half trying not to make it too obvious that he was ogling topless women on the beach. He was entitled to his opinion and perhaps even his ogling, but it had the effect of making me less protective and tolerant of him.
The tension between me and Dad came to a head early one morning in Trade nightclub. The music was particularly hard and loud, the lighting intense and disorientating, and he was in a bad mood. There was a muscly man in a loincloth dancing on a podium and Joe asked him whether he’d mind if my dad gave one of his glistening buttocks a quick kiss or possibly a lick. ‘OK,’ shrugged the muscly man over the din of the music and Joe leaned close to give my father the good news.
‘Absolutely not,’ replied Dad.
‘How about you just touch his bum then?’ said Joe. ‘It’s a beautiful bum.’
‘No,’ came Dad’s flat reply.
‘He’d be fine if it was a woman’s bum,’ I thought, somewhat redundantly.
When we got outside I told Dad he was being ‘unprofessional’.
I was thinking this might be the wrong thing to say as I was saying it, and it turned out I was right. Dad got angrier than I’d seen him since I was 12 and I made my sister cry by excluding her from a game of Cheat with some children we’d met on holiday. And no wonder.
Whatever hang-ups I had about our relationship and his ogling tendencies, he was a man in his mid-seventies being asked to engage in buffoonery for the cameras from morning till late at night, often in an environment that was just about bearable if you’d had an E. The only pills Dad was popping were for his blood pressure. As if to prove how unfair I’d been, the next couple of days were spent filming Dad at a Club 18–30 resort where he joined in with activities that included go-kart racing, swigging Schnapps on a packed coach as the passengers cheered and a karaoke party that ended with about 100 semi-naked revellers chanting, ‘BAAADDAD IS OUR LEADER! BAAADDAD IS OUR LEADER! LA LA LA LA! OOH! LA LA LA LA! OOH!’
The truth was that whether he was joining in with a plastic-bottle battle in the mosh pit for the Foo Fighters at V97, being taught to rap by Coolio or being coached to become a Young British Artist by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Dad never let us down and was 100 per cent professional. OK, let’s say 95 per cent.
None of that changed his opinion of the show itself, however, or most things I did professionally from then on, which he referred to as ‘pretty rubbishy, on the whole’. He disliked the bad language and the toilet humour, and it didn’t help that whatever I did was usually stuffed with references he didn’t get. Despite that, Joe and I managed to capture a few moments that supplied everything I’d hoped for when Dad started helping us with our TV nonsense.
We had a segment on The Adam and Joe Show called Vinyl Justice, in which Joe and I dressed up as policemen and ‘raided’ the homes of music artists in search of ‘criminal records’ in their collections. I always thought of it as an excuse to meet a few of my musical heroes and over the years we spent strange afternoons filming with Thomas Dolby, Nick Heyward of Haircut 100, Tim and Lætitia of Stereolab, Mark E. Smith of the Fall and, most exciting of all for me, Frank Black of Pixies, whose music, once I’d stopped being intimidated by it, had become as familiar and important to me as Bowie or Talking Heads.
We did Vinyl Justice with Frank at his Los Angeles home in late 1998, but earlier that year when he was in London playing some shows with his new band the Catholics I asked our producer if she could get us some time with him. It wasn’t practical to do Vinyl Justice while Frank was touring, so we decided it might be funny if BaaadDad interviewed him instead, and ten years after I’d cycled round London listening to ‘Here Comes Your Man’ for the first time, Frank Black was sat opposite Dad in the front room of Joe’s flat in Clerkenwell.
Frank and Dad got on famously, chatting about wine, Armagnac and their favourite stretches of road in France, which would have made a great segment for a show about indy music and European travel aimed at Telegraph readers, but it didn’t fit in The Adam and Joe Show. I was just excited to meet Frank Black, so I didn’t care, but I felt bad about wasting his time, so when we were finished we took him for tapas across the road at the newly opened Moro restaurant (then co-owned by our friend Mark). ‘I wish all my interviews were like this,’ declared Frank, beaming at Dad.
A few weeks later Frank got in touch and asked if Joe and I would be interested in making a video for his new single ‘Dog Gone’. Joe thought of doing an E.T. parody with Frank as the extra-terrestrial, munching Reese’s Pieces in a garden shed, but Frank was still on tour, so we suggested using my dad somehow. ‘Perfect,’ said Frank, going on to explain that, whether or not it was useful for the video, ‘Dog Gone’ was written from the point of view of a meteorite on a collision course with earth. We decided that Dad would play not only the meteorite, flying through space as he sang, but a character a bit like Stanley Green, the man with the ‘Less Protein’ sign who we used to see wandering the West End of London in the Eighties.
I made a sandwich board for Dad that said ‘THE END IS NIGH’ on the front, and ‘I AM HERE’ on the back and printed out flyers with Frank Black’s face on them for him to hand out. Then we spent a couple of afternoons filming around the West End and outside Brixton Tube where Dad fearlessly interacted with members of the public as they ignored, tolerated and abused him. Unfazed, Dad would look over to where we were filming from time to time, sing a few of the lyrics to ‘Dog Gone’ and get on with his Prophet of Doom duties, looking for all the world like just another crazy old irrelevant guy.
Chances are you haven’t seen the video, and even if you look it up on YouTube you may think, ‘I liked Adam’s dad better when he smoked a joint at that music festival,’ but the finished video for ‘Dog Gone’ is one of my favourite things Joe and I ever did together. I love the reactions of some of the people we filmed – the young woman in Brixton who takes a flyer from Dad then smiles sweetly at him; the wiry homeless man who dances round playfully taunting Dad with a toy dinosaur; even the bloke in the lift at Covent Garden Tube who responds to Dad’s offer of a flyer by flicking a ‘V’ sign at him, a gesture Dad accommodated with a look of weary resignation. Mostly, though, I love seeing two worlds so important to me collide as Dad sings along to a song by the lead singer of Pixies.
Speaking of worlds colliding, in early 2016 I made a podcast about the way myself and others had reacted to David Bowie’s death, and one of the people I spoke to was Dara O’Kearney, an Irish fan who had become email pen pals with Zavid. They corresponded regularly from the late Nineties onwards and would talk about what they’d been listening to, reading and watching. It turned out Bowie had watched The Adam and Joe Show. His favourite part was BaaadDad.