Phillip Adams, the long-time host of Late Night Live on the ABC, is pulling up stumps this month after 33 years and The Boss will miss him — in the same way he might miss an old pair of boots, even though they never quite fit him.
I’ve had to get used to his gravelly voice too because The Boss prefers to catch up with Phillip’s shows on the podcast in the car, rather than listen to him at 10pm, or 3pm the next day.
Adams started out in advertising and was behind famous campaigns like Slip, slop, slap and Life. Be in it, when he was a partner in Monahan, Dayman and Adams — later MojoMDA. He was a key figure in reviving the Australian film industry in the 1970s and helped produce films like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don’s Party and We of the Never Never.
The Boss first came across him as a columnist for The Australian soon after it launched in the late 1960s, when the paper was fresh and enthusiastically finding its feet as a national daily; Adams has written for it (and plenty of other papers and magazines) ever since.
He’s written about 20 books, including several joke collections for Penguin in conjunction with his wife, Patrice Newell.
Like that old pair of boots, The Boss finds him mildly irritating at times: he is constantly reminding listeners that he’s an atheist, despite being the son of a Congregational Church minister; and of his few years’ membership of the Communist Party of Australia, which gained him an ASIO file.
He’s an old leftie and wears it on his sleeve, often interrupting his guests to tell them something about himself and he has a weakness for puns and plays on words. But for a bloke who had to leave school before completing secondary school, he has become a ‘Living Treasure’ of the National Trust and one of our foremost public intellectuals.
What The Boss really likes is the range of guests and subjects he covers in Late Night Live, from politics, science, philosophy, history and culture. One night he might explore the history of hitch-hiking, or of global opium, or the history of the chair; on another it will be developments in Myanmar or some Pacific Island that no-one else talks about; and on another the superpowers of trees or a defence of the exclamation mark.
Most programs — they happen four nights a week — have something interesting in them, including his regular guests like Bruce Shapiro, his ‘voice from America’ since the late 1990s.
Bruce has helped Phillip and listeners make sense of what is happening in what Adams likes to call “the failed states of America”, with informed and insightful comment; Adams has similar commentators in the UK and Europe as well as India, Africa and the Middle East.
And his range of interviewees has been astonishing: over the past 30 years his guests have included Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Gerry Adams, Arundhati Roy, David Frum, Isabelle Allende, Oliver Stone and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as the late Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, Jessica Mitford, Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam to name just some.
Despite making no secret of his own political preferences, Adams has maintained friendships with interesting characters with political and religious views far from his own and asks the kinds of questions we would want to ask.
He turns off the microphone on June 27 and The Boss reckons the last few programs will be worth listening to. Woof!