At the end of the audio version of Ramble Book, there is a conversation between the pair in which Cornish brings up that comment, which he had long forgotten: “I think I was probably looking for the most provocative answer. My brain issues the true standard answer and then thinks, well, that’s a bit boring, what would be more interesting?” You can hear Buxton gasp, re-evaluating 40 years of casual banter. “I think the relationship worked creatively because we are very different, but I never understood that,” he says now, smiling. The confluence of the Delaware River and Neshaminy Creek, in Croydon, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Jana Shea/Alamy Our interview has very much turned into a ramble chat. When I first arrived at his house, I worried that Buxton was weighed down by the past. But now it feels more that he simply surrounds himself with happy memories; he loved his parents, he loves his friends – why shouldn’t he keep mementoes from them? Where an autobiography has been written by an actor or other public performer, it’s not uncommon for them to also narrate the audiobook. This is true of Adam Buxton with Ramble Book, Michael Cashman with One of Them, Miriam Margolyes with This Much is True, and Stephen Fry with his various volumes of autobiography, including The Fry Chronicles, More Fool Me and Moab Is My Washpot. Hearing the author’s words in their own voice brings another dimension to the work, and lets you take them with you wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing. Thing is, you’re unlikely to strike up a heart-to-heart chat with your son for the first time while he’s standing over you until you’ve finished your smoothie, getting annoyed when you don’t take your pills or hoisting your nappy on before bed. Also you’re more or less deaf. And you’ve got cancer. In the end we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own.

Today, as the host of The Daily Show, Noah has been named as one of the most powerful people in New York media. To have reached such heights after so difficult a start in life makes this story all the more remarkable. Mirror Book Club members have chosen My Name Is Why by Lemn Sissay as the latest book of the month.Earned or not, Theroux has more than proved his right to grace our screens in the years since, through a series of groundbreaking documentaries exploring, and sometimes exposing, the less often represented.

The result is an intensely moving conversation between two pals, by turns silly and tearful, with Cornish mildly guiding Buxton to talk through his grief (“But hey, how are you doing, man? What’s the weather like in your head?”). “That was never really the basis of our relationship,” says Buxton. “Joe’s not someone who rings up for a long, deep conversation. He’s someone who’s probably closer to my mum’s way of thinking – ‘Come on, man. Don’t waste time doing all this introspection, just get on with it.’ I thought it might be a good antidote to how I was feeling, which was very caught up in it and isolated.” You describe yourself as “a chronic over-thinker”. Have you become even more introspective this past year? Even at school, Louis and Joe were the two funniest people to hang out with. I can see why he went down the serious documentary route – good for you, enjoy your Baftas – so it’s nice to showcase his stupid side. It’s an account of his life but constantly interrupted by nuggets of trivia, puns, and musings on films and music. That was the thing that really crushed him. I found his notebook after he died and it was semi-coded, and the code he had for feeling depressed or like a failure was ‘Haileyburyitis’. I felt terrible for him because, really, Dave’s totally fine,” Buxton says.While Buxton and Cornish have both found success individually, for a certain kind of fan (me), the real joy comes from listening to them talk to one another, as on their former XFM and 6 Music shows. They have the kind of joyful, natural conversational style that only comes from a 40-year friendship between two people on the same wavelength. They started making films together when they were teenagers – including my personal favourite, one of Buxton, Cornish and Theroux dancing to Groove Is In The Heart when they were about 20. Later I may have been aware that the same two geezers had a show on radio six music but never managed to tune in. Only much later, in the era of the podcast did Buxton reappear. Technological advances meant The Adam Buxton podcast could be saved in Spotify and played on the car stereo. On long journeys my wife (my wife) and I could be entertained and informed while having our spirits lifted as we sing along to the insanely catchy jingles, "give me little smile and a thumbs up, nice little pat when me bums up" is a personal favorite. I certainly cried as I was writing. I regretted things, felt ashamed, thought of things I should have said. I’m not sure how useful some of that wallowing was, but overall it did me good. It also encouraged me to find out a lot more about my parents. We never talked about emotional stuff, about their pasts or families. So it was fascinating digging into all that. They had become virtually estranged until Nigel was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and Adam took him in during his last months. Jan Morris was born James Humphry Morris in Somerset in 1926, and died in Wales in 2020. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1972, after travelling to Morocco for the procedure. Two years later, she wrote Conundrum, in which she told the story of her transition. It was re-released in 2018.

You were an early adopter of podcasting. Do you get fed up with all these Johnny-come-lately copycats? Well, it doesn’t much matter. But that’s why we make things and organise things, isn’t it? Otherwise, of course it’s all meaningless.” Soon after, we met with the local GP and it was agreed that there was little to be gained from any aggressive treatment for his cancer. The GP explained that if he took his various pills when he was supposed to, Dad was unlikely to be in any pain and the main challenge would be keeping his energy levels up. To that end, a nutritionist at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital encouraged him to load up on noodles, butter, cheese and other foods that for most people might be considered naughty.

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We went and sat in the living room. I made some tea and set it down for Dad with a couple of milk chocolate Hobnobs, hoping to refocus his mind on a simple pleasure. “Have you ever dunked a biscuit?” I asked, prepared for him to tell me that dunking biscuits was vulgar, barbaric or grotesque. The nutritionist also arranged for a regular supply of smoothie supplement drinks and stressed the importance of consuming at least one a day. They came in a wide range of foul flavours and only ever acted on Dad as a powerful emetic. Between the smoothies and the cheese, one of us was gagging most of the time. That was bad news for me. I’m not fond of dairy products, and cheese makes me especially sad. In the months that followed, I found cleaning up after toilet accidents infinitely preferable to preparing cheesy noodles, cheesy scrambled eggs, cheesy liver and other cheese nightmares for Dad, which, more often than not, he didn’t even eat. He plays me – with delight – a new jingle he’s been working on. It’s about Covid-19 and contains the lyric “I have to wear a mask because IIIIIII am toxic/ Terrible things are spilling out of me…” When he played it to his eldest son, Natty, he told him it could be funnier. “And I had to resist the temptation to say, ‘You don’t know anything! Play me some of your funny jingles, 18-year-old!’ I didn’t say that, I just said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right…’”

Plus, there are clear benefits to being able to relive the past. Buxton always knew his father was baffled by his interests – that was the whole joke of BaaadDad. Recently, he has been watching old outtakes from The Adam And Joe Show. “We shot absolute hours of stuff with my dad, making him go to places that he hated, and he was always game. It was heroic. I used to think, ‘Why isn’t he more proud of me?’ But he was proud. I can see that now.”I ask, finally, what his father would have made of Ramble Book. “He would have thought it was, as he said about many of my efforts, pretty rubbishy.” He is still not sure whether he should have been so honest; it was certainly not his father’s way. “He thought that, if you just keep that upper lip stiff, then you’ll be surprised by how much you can cope with. There’s some truth to that but what won out for me was a sense that it is valuable to talk about difficult things,” says Buxton. “I’d rather be talking than not.” Recently I watched an Adam and Joe show on the 4Player and was surprised that his dad appeared on the show. I mean, his dad must have been alright to have been willing to be on his son’s comedy TV show playing a posh, grumpy old man doing unlikely things for the audience’s amusement.