With Successpod! Adam Buxton proves he can’t fail

Adam Buxton’s interview show, which he started in 2015, is now a stalwart of the UK podcasting scene. It’s loved for many reasons, but mostly because Buxton is Buxton, no matter who he’s interviewing: witty, interested, over-prepared. His anxious nature means he’s determined to get it “right”, whether he’s talking to David Byrne or Kathy Burke, and the result is revealing and personal. Plus – and you don’t usually get this on an interview show – there are his chats with his dog Rosie, excellent homemade jingles and heart-warming into-your-ear musings as he tramps the fields around his Norfolk home. Buxton is a podcasting don.

He doesn’t think so, of course, and it’s his worries that are the trigger for his new, separate podcast series, Successpod!, on Audible. As a middle-aged man, Buxton is concerned about his relevancy, as he explains to Rosie, who responds in her usual gruff and cynical manner (yes, he does the voice). He doesn’t do social media. His podcasts aren’t visualised. He’s going bald. Should he do something about any of these worrying disadvantages to staying relevant? “I’m squinting at the sonic mediasphere and considering if I still fit,” he sings in an explanatory jingle. “So I’ll discuss the trends with some podcast friends and waffle like a navel-gazing tit.”

Buxton has a different guest on each of his six-part series, ostensibly to help him push his way through his middle-aged slump to contemporary cultural significance. Romesh Ranganathan tells him he doesn’t need to try quite so hard: “Just let a fart be a fart,” he advises. “You don’t have to make an actual song out of it.” Buxton tries out some AI hosts on Louis Theroux, which descends into silliness when neither AI person can pronounce the word “lasagne”. Sam Campbell, an Australian comedian, mostly spins off into silly side discussions about the loneliness of goalies or keeping abreast of things: “Do you actually keep a breast at home?”

In between these very funny chats, Buxton gives us some songs and faux podcasts, mickey-takes of the many types of shows out there. So we get a man-in-a-shed-style show, two Americans laughing about nothing, a serious man talking seriously to another serious man about his career triumphs. In the Theroux episode, there is a skit that is so close to a “clever people talking politics” podcast that I thought it might be real (until one guest insisted that Trump was 8ft tall). The songs are madly catchy, a cross between nursery rhymes and indie hits.

If you find Buxton funny (I definitely do) then this series is for you. Very few podcasts make me actually guffaw on the 159 bus, but this one did. The format allows him to stretch his comedy wings, a la his first outings with Adam Cornish, use his stupid voices and mad obsessions. He’s a lovely interviewer, of course, but this series showcases his very particular sketch talents and quirkiness of mind. And honestly, it’s a delight.

Just as delightful is an audio event that took place yesterday evening, on the shortest night of the year. Radio 3, still the most experimental of the BBC’s main stations, gave us an entire night of out-there adventures in a nine-hour special called Midsummer Dreaming. The shows, which were chosen by Falling Tree’s brilliant producers Alan Hall and Eleanor McDowall, originated in all eras of audio, from 1950s radio by Delia Derbyshire (composer of the Doctor Who theme tune and poster girl for every UK electronic music nerd ever) right across the decades to work made by Hall and McDowall themselves, especially for the evening.

Verity Sharp talked quietly to us in between, with a lovely script. “The veil between natural and supra-natural is at its thinnest. Nine hours of sound, music, poetry, field recordings,” she intoned, a wise witch at the centre of the stone circle, conjuring up the spirits that were about to dance.

The shows’ topics were built around love, memory, other people. In Where Silence Sings, we heard a deaf woman speak, her accented voice recalling Björk explaining her production techniques, or Rickie Lee Jones on Little Fluffy Clouds. “Now I cannot live without my quiet moments,” she said. “I seek them every day, it is as if they help me to breathe.” Portraits in Absentia made music from answerphone messages – “call when you’ve got a spare mo” – that built to a moving symphony. Imagined women, recalled in genuine interviews with the men who conjured them, made up the fairytale of Heartsong, created by Sarah Woods.

In between there was music from string quartets playing pieces dedicated to particular trees, a Ringo Starr sample looped and stretched into mesmerising repetitions. Everything was there and not there. You could listen concentratedly, enjoying the tiny, thoughtful details; you could let your mind tune itself in and out, letting the moods drift over you, dreaming while awake. Accompaniment for a long drive, a night walk, a sort-of sleep, a sensory shift. Like music, each programme offered its own perfect song, and then joined its compadres, strung like gems on a necklace.

In the run-up to the night, there were short shows from audio artists such as the inimitable Axel Kacoutié, the Charles Parker award-winning Jenny Davies and Redzi Bernard, who made the brilliant County Lines. These snackettes were all Between the Ears commissions and I recommend them, too. It is so moving and thrilling to hear experimentation and art on the radio, to be given a portal into familiar-but-not-quite worlds with the connection of documentary and the soul-lift of music. We need more of this sort of thing.

Photograph by Paul Stuart for The Observer