Phillip Adams (23 page)

Ellis believes that it will be five years before the Labor Party gets out of the mess it got into over the Tampa. ‘It was a shocking matter,' he said. ‘Those couple of months turned many Labor voters into Greens supporters.

‘Because Phillip was of that camp, he was regarded as unrealistic and unable to count the number of seats we would lose. He said he didn't care how many; we had to save our integrity. It did matter. If we had lost Rudd's seat — which we would have, if we had followed Phillip's advice — we would still be in the Howard era and festering in a squalor of self-contempt and we would maybe not have got out of it.'

Ellis paused to take a sip of water.

‘His double act with Barry Jones was wonderful, over films and over ideas. I wish he'd done more film production. He was brilliant at it. He became a film bureaucrat rather than a producer. During his expensive divorce from Rosemary and his acquisition of most of the antiquities of Egypt, plus a great deal of money (from selling his share of Monahan Dayman Adams) and a Rolls-Royce, he lost perspective until he became a full-time ABC broadcaster. There was a gap of six or seven years when he became self-indulgent. He was a womaniser and a quite successful and secretive one for a good few years before he met Patrice. I heard it so constantly that he had affairs towards the end of his first marriage that I believed it. I first met him in about 1966 and went to the house in Melbourne where he lived with Rosemary. She was not intellectual.' It was a cruel way to dismiss Rosemary.

‘Everyone feels intimate with him but no-one really knows him,' said Ellis. ‘He doesn't go to parties much, never carouses, never drinks.
Late Night Live
is a gift. But we'll be surprised by the strangers at his funeral because he has so many relationships, conducted by phone, letter and email. In friendships, he skips like a stone over the water. And like many great men, he dominates any conversation he's in. Kenneth Tynan once said about Ernest Hemingway, “Ernest not only closes the subject but sits on the lid”, and Phillip is the same. He is driven by a tormented childhood, a hated father, a curious upbringing with his grandparents, and a lack of formal education. What do these people have in common with him: Charles Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Judy Davis, Noel Coward, Tom Stoppard and Alfred Hitchcock? No university education, although each of them seems to have one. People without a university education often have a
Brideshead Revisited
vision of what they've missed. So Phillip is constantly striding through his undergraduate years long after others have left them behind. He's still an undergraduate. It's like an ongoing tutorial that he's in, every night.

‘No-one treats interview subjects as well. We're in an age when very shallow women ask you about your sex life, or something, by way of interview. If you're ever unfortunate enough to turn on Channel Nine, you'll see what I mean. Phillip is the majestic exception to the others. He's comfortable in his own skin and confident of his abilities. But he's aware that he's not an artist in the usual sense, although he's perhaps the most-read columnist in our history. He's never done what he threatened to do, go to Sardinia and write a great big bloody novel or something like that. I think he's a little ashamed of his spiflicated attention span in that he doesn't last long in any one place or discipline. His ideal venue is to be out of town chairing an ideas festival and having coffee afterwards with the speakers. He's secretly convivial and doesn't know it. He actually enjoys crowds but he's so infrequently in them that it doesn't occur to him that it's what he most enjoys. He likes to be the life of the party but doesn't go to parties. He's a gregarious recluse. I'm like that, too. I'm never happier than when I'm alone in a Chinese restaurant reading a book review. But if I go to a writers' festival, I'm over the moon with the company.

***

‘Phillip preaches to the converted but every now and then a person he has interviewed changes our thinking. There are fewer fundamentalist Christians around because of him: the people who listen to him talk to their families, and so on. Today I have been re-reading
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins came into our consciousness through Phillip. These are subtle influences but they are real. We are immensely a better country because of Phillip. And we're a worse country because of John Howard. The rollback of decency is happening partly because of Phillip and largely because of the extraordinary impact and reach of the ABC which, especially in country towns, has civilised Australia over the past fifty years.

‘Phillip once made an interesting concept and it has passed into the language. He said a referendum on capital punishment might be won by the people who want capital punishment, but you had to measure the intensity and the thoroughness of the thought that went into the votes. And the votes from the left would always, by that measure, be greater. The total intensity of belief and intellectual wrestling would always outweigh that of the right, which was always shallow.'

Ellis and Adams were both contributors to
Nation Review
, the weekly newspaper which was founded by the quixotic transport magnate Gordon Barton and from 1970 caught a wave of left-wing, anti-establishment feeling until materialism (and a materialistic shortage of advertisers) killed it in 1981. Other left-wing contributors to
Nation Review
included Mungo MacCallum, Michael Leunig, Germaine Greer and Francis James.

‘Phillip and I meet from time to time over the years,' Ellis said. ‘He is always over-amusing. He treats our meetings as if he was compering a comedy show. One night I got really drunk and we had a whole hour on
Late Night Live
. I can't remember what was said but Bob Carr, who was not yet the New South Wales premier, rang up and said it was the best night of radio he had ever heard. Clearly we did something right. I've never been as good with Phillip since and I get a little irritated by his man from America' (he means Bruce Shapiro) ‘who talks at such length over matters of no great significance. There is a kind of intimacy. Some friends who don't see each other for years on end have an instant intimacy. I see Germaine Greer maybe once every five years, but the conversation resumes at the same level. There is little diffident politeness at the beginning of our conversation. We just pick up where we left off. Phillip and I are like that.

‘Phillip is a year and a half older than me, or something.' In fact, Phillip was born in 1939 and Bob in 1942. ‘We're both overweight and aware of our mortality. We're both privately scared of death. I wish I saw more of him, but these days you can catch up just by pressing a button on a computer. I feel unworthy to interrupt whatever he's doing. He's very abrupt. He ends the conversation when he wants to. But consider what he might have done. Imagine he was in the Senate and he was the font of ideas. It's also true of Kerry O'Brien. These broadcasters, who are touched by the best minds, are always the best-informed people. They're not just well read, they've done this brow-to-brow thing, and what a loss they are to politics! In Britain, there are some people who are both broadcasters and politicians.

‘But you have to address the question as to whether Phillip is lazy or not. You can be active and also lazy. He's never written a significant book, and I've written twenty.' I smile at this small evidence of hubris. ‘He's not a writer in the way you understand writing. He doesn't enjoy words as much as he pretends to do. His
Australian
columns don't have as much impact as
Late Night Live
has, because no-one in his camp reads
The Australian
. If Phillip would still be writing for
The Age
and also for
The Sydney Morning Herald
, it would have improved his attack and his impact. Writing for
The Australian
is like not writing at all, because it's so corrupted by Rupert Murdoch's will to reduce the western world's intelligence. Phillip gets lost in the wash.'

Bob Ellis abruptly handed back my tape recorder and shuffled off out of the building. I felt a little bit like I'd been mugged, but, like George Negus, I hope Bob Ellis goes on being Bob Ellis. He is a good writer, sometimes a bit hard to take, but he adds a distinctive taste to Australian society.

Chapter Fifteen:
Late Night Intercourse

Phillip Adams aggressively flatters his highly-qualified
Late Night Live
guests, in spite of what The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy, ‘Professors have no more brains than other people, but they have a Diploma, and generals have a Medal.' In 2011, Phillip Adams has been presenting the program for 20 years and the ABC will all the year promote the anniversary on-air and hold functions attended by Adams in all capital cities. Gail Boserio,
LNL'
s acting executive producer, issued a statement late in 2010 outlining celebrations of the ‘extraordinary milestone', stressed that the program is ‘all about ideas' and added: ‘Phillip Adams' experience as a broadcaster, his innate curiosity, his passion for ideas and wicked sense of humour have not only guaranteed compulsive listening but ensured an impressive rapport with people from every walk of life.'
LNL
's audience of more than 350,000 people is rising. Worldwide it's a unique program. This chapter tells how it's done.

Adams is too nice to his guests and interrupts them too much although no-one is better at making their audience feel the presenter is talking only to them. But the program
works
and the internet is taking it around the world. Adams told me, ‘I assume familiarity and try to make people laugh, no matter how serious the subject is. Once people have even chuckled, they're human again.' There are not many laughs on
Late Night Live
. Certainly there are some chuckles and many smiles and Adams tries (sometimes too hard) to turn them into laughs, thus giving the program a cheeky irreverence, even when discussing topics that are important, as most of them are. He believes being light about serious subjects does not diminish them, but makes them bearable. James Lovelock, a scientist and environmentalist, was once on-air with Adams to discuss potentially millions of people dying from global warming. It was so depressing that Adams started to laugh. Then Lovelock laughed with him.

The best
Late Night Live
sessions are conversations, not interviews, and this has been a big reason for its success, plus Adams' ability, knowledge and devotion to the program (even after twenty years), the wide range of usually provocative subjects and guests chosen by his producers and his ultra-conversational style. Adams tries hard to break down barriers, to himself, to whoever he is talking to and to their audience — as if two people are talking to a third at dinner.

***

The third person became known as Gladys one night when Adams said on-air that he had only one listener, Gladys, and they were going around to her place. Some ABC executives chastised him for talking down to the audience, but he made Gladys such a permanent feature that he often introduces programs by saying, ‘Hello to all the Gladdies and Poddies.'

‘Gladdies' have nothing to do with the ‘gladdies' (short for gladioli) which Dame Edna Everage throws to theatre audiences. ‘Poddies' are the rapidly-increasing number of
LNL
podcast listeners. Adams once welcomed another listener, a one-year-old baby whose mother told Adams by email that she listens in Hobart while suckling her new son, George. Adams called the new listener category, ‘Titties'. In 2010, he added another listener, ‘Noddy' after a young boy sent him an email. With Gladys apparently the only listener to what Adams often calls ‘our little wireless program', inevitably some people invited to speak ask how many listeners
LNL
has. In 2010, the cumulative audience (the number of people who told Nielsen Research they had listened to the program in the past week) was 98,000 for the night session and 135,000 for the repeat, a total of 233,000, in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. But Radio National is also broadcast in 220 other cities and towns rarely or never audited such as Canberra, Hobart, Newcastle, Wollongong, Ballarat, Albury-Wodonga, Townsville and Rockhampton. So
LNL
's total audience would be more than 350,000. Only two Australian daily newspapers, the Melbourne
Herald Sun
and Sydney
Daily Telegraph
, have bigger circulations.
Late Night Live
is the top program on Radio National, with 7.8 per cent of audiences in the five mainland state capitals, and is only third in all ABC Radio programs in spite of ABC Local Radio having a much broader audience than Radio National.

Who are
LNL'
s listeners? It's very interesting. Ninety per cent are aged 40 or more; 55 per cent are female; a massive 65 per cent hold university degrees; 36 per cent have annual household incomes of up to $50,000 while 20 per cent have incomes of $110,000 plus; 40 per cent are in ‘AB' (high level) occupations (for example, white collar professionals); and 45 per cent are not in the workforce — they have retired or have home duties but are not unemployed. Melbourne has a slightly bigger audience than Sydney. But the boom in
LNL
'
s
podcast listeners is the big news and has turned it into an international program. In August 2010, the program was downloaded 217,463 times, third among all ABC programs after
New Music
on Triple J and
AM
on both Radio National and Local Radio. Three-quarters of the downloads are in Australia, 6 per cent in the USA and 3 per cent in Britain. The ABC management is impressed.