A life on air: farewell to the ABC

Over the decades there’s been a number of attempts to get rid of me from the ABC. For a while I became unsackable. Now I’m calling time on my own terms.

Thanks, beloved listeners. Thanks, guests. And my thanks to the best team of producers in the business. Picture: Peter Stoop

Since starting a new career in wireless 40 years ago my weekly commute from farm to studio has equalled two round trips to the Moon. Now, nudging 85, I’ve decided it’s time to retire from Aunty and give my beloved listeners a break.

I’ve interviewed tens of thousands of guests – plutocrats, PMs, presidents, philosophers, poets, historians, scientists, Indigenous leaders, whistleblowers, weirdos, comedians, war criminals and sundry ratbags. Were name-dropping an Olympic event like shot-putting or javelin-tossing I’d win golds, silver, bronze.

When our budget was bigger, Late Night Live would go on the road – broadcasting from post-Katrina New Orleans, New York, Timor, the Solomons (during RAMSI), pre-BJP India, Cambodia, Vietnam, China. We were in Hong Kong for the handover and in Germany for the fall of the wall. In recent times Xi, the Donald and Modi have refused us visas.

To list all the good, the great and the ghastly I’ve been able to interview in my long tenure would take all the space, cover to cover, in this magazine. Even the list of honoured regulars would need a lot of space – Christopher Hitchens (appearing in my very first), Laura Tingle (15 years of “mingle with Tingle”) and Bruce Shapiro talking about the Failed State.

LNL wasn’t the original plan for PA. At the time I was working at 2UE – shock-jock central – with such loveable colleagues as John Laws, Alan Jones and my special favourite, Stan Zemanek. Dr Norman Swan – then boss of Radio National – was originally plotting for Pru Goward (John Howard’s bestie) to double-head RN Breakfast with left-wing loony me. Pru and I decided the left/right idea would lead to madness. The listeners’ and ours. Hence LNL as Plan B.

Previously Late Night Live leaned to the legal rather than the left. My predecessors were lawyers – Richard Ackland and Virginia Bell, the latter being appointed to the High Court, a promotion unavailable to me. With my arrival, the LNL team began to cast a wider net for topics and guests. The widest in the business, including the quirkiest we could find.

Phillip Adams is calling time on his Radio National show.

Over the decades there’s been a number of attempts to get rid of me. Amazingly my future was secured when PM John Howard was asked to define what was wrong with the ABC. John posed the rhetorical question, “Where’s the right-wing Phillip Adams?’”

Overnight, at least for a year so, I became unsackable – and a succession of right-wing me’s were hired … including Tim Blair, Tom Switzer and Amanda Vanstone. Thus achieving perfect political equilibrium.

Naturally I hope the ABC will maintain the balance by replacing me with someone of appropriate right-wing credentials. Gerard Henderson, boss of the Sydney Institute, would be perfect – a devout Catholic and a card-carrying conservative.

Or perhaps a Pru/Phillip style double-header with Gerard and David Marr?

Thanks, beloved listeners. Thanks, guests. And my thanks to the best team of producers in the business. Not only the current crop but the hundreds in the past who made my time at “the little wireless program” so congenial and, for someone who left school at 15, so educational. Over and out.