Free Phillip Adams by Philip Luker

Late Night Live takes you to a high perspective of the world. It’s a sort of mateyness or comradeship where you go on a journey of the mind together, not too far from the sermons his hated father preached. It’s no accident that some great communicators like Enoch Powell, David Frost and Francis James had parsons as fathers. You sit there as a little boy and watch your father with a hundred people behind you, and you pick up a few tricks.’
    Phillip Adams is also good at taking credit for past achievements. He takes credit for great shifts in civilisation and repeatedly tells his listeners and readers that he warned them about global warming more than twenty years ago. Like many other people who fear the effects, I wish that not only Adams’ listeners and readers but also politicians, who are supposed to lead us, had acted on his advice twenty years ago.
    Adams is always a bit premature. Like Peter Ustinov, he looked fifty when he was twenty-two and stayed that way, except that he lost more hair. He is impatient to a fault and his attention span is about forty-one seconds, after which he looks over his shoulder at someone else in the room, or at the door, so he can escape. He very rarely drinks liquor, and I suspect the reason is that he never wants to lose control over his mind. Another mystery is how he manages to do all he does, at his age, on a minimum of sleep. He’s an insomniac. Bob Ellis said, ‘Phillip has never learnt to sleep, and it’s a great affliction. Wayne Swan, Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann have also never learnt to sleep. It gives you more time to do things but also makes you more paranoid, more jumpy and more indecisive.’
    Another enigma: Adams is humble but strident in his opinions, a charming person who doesn’t try to be social. He is best either one-on-one or addressing a large crowd, not a large social group. In his advertising life, he had to be gregarious but writing is a solo job. Peter Faiman, a film and television director, who has known him since the 1960s, told me, ‘Phillip is a loner and enjoys being one. Both of us like one-on-one chats or small groups. Phillip is as much a listener as a talker and that’s been an essential part of our friendship. He has tremendous mental capacity and an extraordinary memory but he doesn’t use his magnificent brain against you.’ But sometimes Phillip Adams is a smart arse, and a few times I saw evidence of it in our regular conversations over three years when, in spite of what Peter Faiman said, Adams wanted me to realise he has a superior brain. I never doubted it.
    In spite of getting to know him quite well, I didn’t once feel I could take the mickey out of him or crack a joke at his expense. He doesn’t react well to criticism or jokes about himself, which I believe is a large reason why he has refused many other biographers’ requests for co-operation — he fears what they might write. Maybe he thought I was too nice or straight a person to write uncomplimentary things about him. I have just tried to paint an honest picture.
    Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute and a weekly columnist in The Sydney Morning Herald , told me at the institute’s heritage terrace in Sydney, ‘With Phillip, everything is laughable except Phillip Adams. He jokes about everyone, but the minute you make a joke about him, he gets upset. He gets upset at me mainly because I laugh at him the way he laughs at everyone else, which you’re not supposed to do. I get criticism all the time and I don’t know what I’d do without it. Many journalists are thin-skinned, especially Phillip, and I think he is insecure. Many journalists also have large egos and Phillip is no exception. If you read or listen to him, he’s always talking about himself and how well he’s succeeded in spite of his hard childhood. There’s always this self-regard. He is like a priest in a