Writing columns is a funny old business

As The Australian celebrates its 60th year – and me my 85th – things have changed just a little. And perhaps a little for the better.

Writing columns is a funny old business, writes Phillip Adams.

Columns used to mean columns, as in things that propped up buildings. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Whereas in the late 20th Century columns propped up newspapers.

When I started writing for papers and mags there weren’t many columns. Or for that matter columnists. Indeed bylines of any sort were rare – newspapers were written namelessly. Readers showed little interest in the identity of journalists, except perhaps for a sports writer or film critic. Journos were “clerks of fact”. God forbid they might express an opinion.

Now those lines are blurred, or non-existent. Most mastheads have more columns than the Parthenon. And I remember how and when it happened. I was writing for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald at the time, and the role of daily papers was under attack from the telly. People didn’t so much read the news as see it. On the box. The press couldn’t compete with that immediacy, that urgency, so its new role was to interpret the news, contextualise it. In a conversation with legendary editor Graham Perkin I suggested that “newspapers are now viewspapers”.

The earliest columnists wrote on one topic, like cricket, politics, or reviews. Having started off as a 14-year-old film critic for the communistGuardian I’d become a theatre critic for The Bulletin, then TV critic for Rupert’s newie, The Australian. And soon I was free – encouraged, in fact – to write about anything and everything.

And columns were thousands of words long in those days, as opposed to thissy at just 580. So I indulged myself by writing endlessly on philosophical matters. As one of a very few professed atheists I would quill sermons on God or thelack thereof – on life and death and meaninglessness.One reader fulminated against “the unwholesome waffle of the unspeakable Adams”. I liked that. The Unspeakable Adams became the title of a bookful of unwholesome waffle. And yes, people actually bought books of columns. For decades I published them regularly.

Columnists of all types squabbled among themselves. For example, when I returned to the Oz I shared a broadsheet page with Max “Angry Penguins” Harris where we happily insulted each other. As I do these days with Gerard Henderson. Or Andrew Bolt.

At one time I was writing three or four columns a week. The trick became thinking up topics. Paul Hogan and I joked we could get a telly sketch or a column out of anything – and demonstrated this by using our mums’ kitchen drawers for inspiration. Paul found humour in a collection of salvaged rubber bands, me in hoarded Lan-Choo tea coupons.

These days columnists are perhaps losing their clout. The commentariat, the opinionista, is being replaced by the “influencers” on social media. Hardly surprising with print media – paper print media – in its dotage.

My first job in media, 72 years ago, was as a yodelling paperboy risking his life jumping on and off moving Melbourne trams. OHS? Forget it. It was akin to sending little kids down coal mines. As The Australian celebrates its 60th year – and me my 85th – things have changed just a little. And perhaps a little for the better. And I have just belted out another column. See you next week?