Adam Buxton

BUG, a television version of Adam Buxton's very hip BFI showcases, is a triumph of personal character above all. The elements of the programme are dead simple. He shows music videos he's found on YouTube, cueing up all the visuals from his laptop. Then he reads out a selection of the comments underneath. Essentially that's it. It's not easy to capture the delicious flavour but this might help. Buxton brightly cued up one of the self-made films which each show includes like this: "Now, the video involves a lot of real explosions... all of which were very easy and fun to set up. So why not try something similar at home?" The onscreen title read: "MORON WARNING: DON'T. OBVIOUSLY". I'm laughing typing it, but not nearly as much as when I watched.

The simplest ideas are often the best and so it is with Adam Buxton's new Sky Atlantic show Bug.

Taking the received wisdom that 'the best way to form an opinion, on anything, is to go online' and spinning it into a comedy series, Bug consists of Buxton (Adam minus Joe) ripping the mick out of the nutty stuff people write under YouTube videos.

Easy pickings, you're thinking, and you'd be right. But Buxton makes it sing. By which I mean he actually does sing. I really hope he does a karaoke spin-off inspired by the daft handles people use every week.

Thus WineProneCowboy became, you guessed, Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy, Buxton mangling the lyrics with giddy oblivion.

It was such a winning idea I wasted a good half hour looking for my own but the best I came up with was Flipyodeezy - Call Me Maybe could work with that, right? Yes, I know it needs refining.

This goes to show the time and effort that has gone into an apparently simple show like Bug. Weaving your wit around a selection of music videos and then trawling through the comments section might not sound like hard work - but it's clearly a labour of, if not love, then a slightly unhealthy obsession.

Lifted by Buxton's facility for daft voices and keen eye for the absurd, Bug is probably the best fun you can have with just a laptop and a galaxy of crazy people for company.

Sky's tasty trio of Alan Partridge, Veep and Walking and Talking has become a fizzing comedy fixture, now bolstered by Adam Buxton.

As well as being Alan at his wincing worst, Mid Morning Matters - highlights from 2011's webisodes - is a painfully funny dissection of regional radio. Dead air, hopeless digression, jocular over-enunciation, they're all here.

Laughing at the idiotic things people write under YouTube videos could be seen as facile but Adam Buxton (the beardy one from 6Music's Adam and Joe) has refined it into an art form. In this adaptation of his cult stage shows he showcases innovative and inventive music videos, then rips apart the comments posted on the internet about them, with a dazzling array of funny voices, off-the-wall humour and silly songs. I was crying with laughter.

The videos are great, too, highlighting why so many promo directors turn to making films. But Adam's own bonkers collaboration with director Garth Jennings for a Japanese heavy-metal riff on Eddie Cochrane's Summertime Blues takes some beating.

YouTube comments. You can shake your head sadly and bemoan our hellbound-handcart ride. Or you can laugh - probably the only sensible response to the internet's inexhaustible supply of risible spelling, barely believable pedantry and grotesquely inventive bullying. Adam Buxton's been mining the rich seam of comedy presented by the online disinhibition effect on radio and on stage for a while now. And predictably, a version has found its way on to Sky Atlantic; music videos accompanied by the deranged ramblings of the online world's millions of real-life Beavises and Buttheads. It's a limited gag, but extremely good fun in small doses. Buxton stays just about the right side of smug throughout and presents a video of his own at the end, as if challenging the mocked keyboard-bashers to do their worst.

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