Adam Buxton's Kernel Panic: Invisible Dot in the West End

Cult fool and Sony Gold-winning radio host Adam Buxton is likely the most passionately-adored comedian on the circuit. The Invisible Dot has just announced five sell-out-in-a-flash West End nights in his long-running festival of videographic fun Kernel Panic, and you’d better snap these tickets up while they’re hot off the press.

A Pied-Piper for lovers of the whimsical and charmingly puerile, you may already know and love Adam as one half of the fiercely beloved TV and radio partnership Adam and Joe. More recently he's carved a niche as frontman of the BFI’s legendary BUG nights: bi-monthly celebrations of the music video genre which were televised for Sky Atlantic HD in 2012. 

Kernel Panic evolved from the BUG strand and takes the same format. Essentially an exploratory rifle through Buxton’s laptop, from which the entire show is powered, the show veers merrily from animated videos of Buxton’s own to parodic hijacks of TV ad-campaigns to masterpieces of form that have made it into Buxton’s list of all-time favourites. It’s a tour through the most exciting, contentious, technologically imaginative work in the genre, amateur and professional alike, with frequent stops along the way to digest the ever-measured responses of the international Youtube community.

Traditionally, a large part of the BUG experience has been Buxton presenting other people’s work, and this new show is an attempt to address that. So while it includes a fair bit of material from BUGs of the past year or so (prepare for a bit of deja-vu if you’re a Buxton aficionado), Kernel Panic is more personal and gives Dr Buckles more opportunity to speak his brain. Occasionally the show stops short of the analysis that much of the content deserves, and you're left yearning for a bit more. But Buxton's company is so utterly joyful as to make up for this in spades. New and veteran Buxton-fans alike, roll up, for this will be a delight.