Phillip Adams has spent a lot of time pondering life's big questions — meaning and mortality among them — so how does he feel about turning 80?

"Surprised," he replies with characteristic humour.

"It's incredible how short life is, and it doesn't take long to get there.

"I'm reconciled to death, I've had half a dozen very near-death experiences and it's not death that concerns me — I've always been concerned by the denial of death.

"Humans have a tendency to deny mortality and dress up non-sensical after-lives and religions, which is absolute folly.

"You need to enjoy [life] intensely and not waste a minute of it. It doesn't come again, this is it!"

As a powerful creative force in Australia over six decades, Adams has packed a lot into his "short" life.

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He's been a widely-published columnist in scores of newspapers and magazines, an advertising executive responsible for successful campaigns such as "Life. Be In It", an award-winning filmmaker (twenty movies including Don's Party, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and We of the Never Never), architect of the Australian film industry and chair of numerous state and federal bodies (from the Australian Film Commission to the National Australia Day Council), a board member of dozens of organisations (from Wikileaks to Greenpeace), the author of more than 20 books, and a broadcaster, presenting Late Night Live, or LNL as he prefers to call it, on the ABC's RN for almost 30 years.

Traversing politics, science, philosophy and culture, LNL is the dream job for a man with an insatiably curious mind.

"There is no other job in radio which has such extraordinary breadth. We can talk about anything to anybody, anytime, anywhere in the world. God bless it — and that comes from an atheist."

Phillip Adams has been presenting Late Night Live since 1991. ( RN: Roi Huberman )

Before joining the ABC, Adams had a few stints on commercial radio, including a memorable show on 3AW in Melbourne when an interview with author Alan Marshall, who was wheelchair-bound after suffering polio as a child, strayed into a conversation about the need for sex workers to satisfy the desires of people with disabilities.

"You can imagine what a shocking idea this was at the time when this kind of candour was unusual," recalls Adams.

"I said to Alan we should call it 'feels on wheels' and we both had a great laugh.

"When I went off-air, the station manager was standing outside the studio and said we've had 600 phone calls of complaint, it's an all-time record.

"I said sorry about that, then he smiled and said it's wonderful and I think on that day I was accidentally involved in the birth of shock-jockery."

Such edgy cheekiness alongside serious inquiry has been his hallmark and it appealed to Dr Norman Swan, a keen listener to Adams' late-night show on 2UE, who recruited him to Radio National in 1991.

"Norman [initially] made me an offer to present Breakfast with Pru Goward," says Adams.

"His idea was to have a leftie and someone from the right and we'd do a sort of 'Punch and Judy' show on Breakfast — it was a radical idea.

"Pru and I met and decided it couldn't possibly work, [we] couldn't get on for more than ten seconds without a blazing argument.

"So, Norman offered me LNL and I found myself doing something that was magic."

Norman Swan says at the time Radio National was struggling for relevance and audiences were in freefall.

"I came on to radically overhaul Radio National and I couldn't think of a better fit for LNL than Phillip Adams.

"We needed high-profile, intelligent broadcasters — like Phillip and Geraldine Doogue — to turn Radio National from the backwater it was then to the prime source of news, current affairs and information that it is now, and Phillip has been a key to that.

"He came on board and it was transformative, I think.

"He's a natural communicator and broadcaster, the show has gone from strength to strength and he's been on air now for almost 30 years."

Over that time, Adams has done many thousands of interviews with the world's most influential politicians, historians, writers, theologians, and philosophers — big names from Mikhail Gorbachev to Gore Vidal.

Adams interviewing composer Elena Kats-Chernin earlier this year. ( RN: Roi Huberman )

At times he's been controversial.

Norman Swan says Adams' first program launched at the start of the first Gulf War and promoted an interview with prominent war critic, academic Dr Robert Springborg, which brought furious complaint from the Hawke government before it even went to air.

"Phillip's never shied away from controversy," says Swan.

"But he's also wanted to present a diversity of views. Gerard Henderson was also on the first program, in fact, LNL was the first place to give Henderson a voice."

Adams has been a lightning rod for critics of the ABC.

In 1996, when asked what was wrong with the national broadcaster, then-prime minister John Howard questioned where was the "right-wing Phillip Adams" and others have echoed that criticism in the years since.

But Adams is unapologetic about nailing his colours to the mast.

"When I was first invited to join the ABC by Norman Swan I was a known quantity. I was known to be of the left.

"I believe that everyone has their biases but they are simply not aware of them. I state mine up the front.

"As a show, we do our best to ameliorate my bias, we have a great many people, including some regulars, of the right, but it is true the program is left-liberal bias.

"Any number of 'right-wing' Philip Adams's have been hired over the years, so in a way I've given employment to a lot of conservatives.

"You can't have completely neutral journalism. It doesn't exist. I think it's best if journalists admit to their beliefs and values."

Books an escape from a stepfather who tried to kill him

Adams had a traumatic childhood, which he says he survived but never really got over. ( Supplied: Phillip Adams )

Phillip Adams was born in 1939 in the country Victorian town of Maryborough to Congregational pastor Reverend Charles Adams and farmer's daughter Sylvia Smith.

He says the most defining moment of his life was as a child, when he went looking for and found no comfort in his father's religious teachings.

"I was terrified of death, I was terrified of the infinite, of the eternal and even more terrified that I found I couldn't believe in God.

"So, by the time I was five, a decade before I would hear the term atheist, I was an atheist.

"I think that was the most significant moment in my entire life because everything that happened to me later was an attempt to give meaning to what was to me a meaningless universe."

Disillusionment was compounded by disadvantage.

While his father served as an Army chaplain in New Guinea, Adams' mother abandoned her young son to be raised by his dirt-poor grandparents on a farm outside Melbourne.

Adams left school at the age of 15 and has been largely self-educated. ( Supplied: Phillip Adams )

At the age of 12, his mother, divorced from his father and remarried, "reluctantly" took him back but any hope of a happy reconciliation was shattered by an abusive stepfather.

"He was a sociopath or psychopath or both, who I would later discover had driven his own daughter to suicide and set about trying to encourage me to do the same thing," says Adams.

"I had four years of hell, which included attempts to kill me. I have vivid memories of him trying to run me over in his car, for example, so there I am, a small child trying desperately to protect my mother and me from his violence."

Such childhood trauma has destroyed many young lives, but not his, so how did Adams overcome it?

"I'm not sure I ever did. If you have a horrific childhood of abuse, and the worst abuse in my case wasn't physical it was psychological, it does long-term damage," he says.

"You don't ever entirely recover from it. All you can do is make sure you don't hand it on to your own children. [He has four daughters.]

"To live in constant stress, to live in danger produced in me various medical issues — I started developing very significant heart problems at an early age because of this constant threat coming from a maniacal stepfather but it taught you to survive.

"In my case it also forced me into introspection and I started more and more to read and read and read and then to write and write and write."

Finding a creative haven in an advertising agency

Adams dropped out of school at the age of 15.

Outraged by institutional injustice after reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, he briefly joined the Communist Party and wrote film and theatre reviews for the Communist Guardian and The Bulletin, respectively.

Then, paradoxically, he landed a job as an office boy in an advertising agency.

Advertising agencies in the 50s and 60s were a creative hothouse and Adams thrived, later making a fortune in his own ad business.

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"You have to understand that at the time there was no Australian film industry, no Australian theatre, there was very little outlet for anyone who wanted to have a career in the arts," says Adams.

"So, people like Peter Carey, Fred Schepisi, any number of people who would later become significant in the arts worked in ad agencies.

"It was also interesting because it was at a time when TV had just arrived in Australia and because no one knew a damn thing about it my generation had a free hand — we used advertising to train ourselves.

"Before I made a film about Vietnam with the great Bruce Petty, we made TV commercials together and Schepisi, who's gone on to make scores of films, was making commercials for Lipton's jigglers.

"Oddly enough most of the agencies in Melbourne were run by ex-communists — they were almost sheltered workshops for people with cultural ambitions and we were lucky to have them."

The Godfather of Australian film

After making the Vietnam documentary, Adams attempted a feature film: Jack and Jill: A Postscript.

He did everything — scripting, directing, producing, cinematography, sound and editing.

It took five years and $6,000 to make and became the first Australian feature film to win the AFI Best Film award and took out the Grand Prix prize at an international film festival.

Adams' first feature film, Jack and Jill: A Postscript, was about a star-crossed love affair between a bikie and a kindergarten teacher. ( Supplied: Phillip Adams )

Adams produced 20 movies but it was his work with Barry Jones lobbying the Gorton and Whitlam governments to invest in film and his role establishing or steering a host of film and arts organisations that led to Adams being called the "Godfather of the Australian film industry".

"It was an extraordinary thing [in those days] that Australian actors could live and die without ever playing an Australian, that in the 1960s, for example, only one Australian play was professionally produced in the decade, and that Australians were more familiar with the streets of Los Angeles than they were with those of Sydney or Melbourne," says Adams.

"I wrote a one-page report to Gorton [which] said: 'It is time to see our own landscape, hear our own voices and dream our own dreams.'

"Gorton was persuaded as was Whitlam and they implemented every architectural suggestion I made for the establishment of a new industry.

"Within a couple of years Australia had gone from deathly silence to being one of the most energetic and influential film industries in the world. It was magic."

Adams participating in a 1973 debate on ABC TV on whether adults should be able to see, hear and read what they wish. ( ABC Archives )

Passionate about the discussion of ideas

While his role in the growth of the film industry was a significant achievement, Adams says he's most proud of his work as a columnist — he continues to write for The Australian newspaper.

"I got jobs working for almost every major newspaper in the country in my early twenties — The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The National Times, Nation Review — there was hardly a paper in which you didn't see one of my columns and what set them apart was that instead of writing about the sort of topics that were common in newspapers then — most columns were political issues and secondly sport — I wrote about all sorts of abstract ideas.

"I wrote about life, death, meaninglessness, religion, atheism.

"I used newspaper columns to raise issues that were alien to the tradition of newspapers and it triggered a sort of quiet revolution and suddenly there were people writing columns like mine across the board.

"It happened so long ago no one remembers but I remember it vividly as being as transformative in terms of its impact on media as the [work I did in the] film industry".

Norman Swan, though, believes Adams' latest work will be his greatest legacy.

"If we had this conversation 20 years ago it would be dominated by what Phillip had done in the film industry," says Swan.

"But I think what he will be most remembered for is what he has done on-air and for his contribution to the discussion of ideas in Australia and I think that's been more important."

In the early days of LNL, Adams joked he had but one listener who he called Gladys — now his loyal audience is known as Gladdies and, in the podcast era, Poddies.

He corresponds with many of them directly and even has fans who tune in from the other side of the world.

Jude Kirkham from Williams Lake, Canada has been listening for a decade: "Initially, it was the high calibre of guests like Gore Vidal that caught my eye," he writes.

"The host is pretty good too! Warmth, humour and intelligence adds up to basically the polar opposite of a certain kind of radio shock jock one encounters.

"It's difficult for me to think of a time Phil let me down, although to his credit he routinely challenges me.

"Domestic Australian developments, political, ecological and otherwise, can be a bit impenetrable to a foreign audience like myself but he always manages to place them in a universal context.

"In a nutshell, Phil is living proof that Australia matters."

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The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step.

In an era of hyper-partisan argument, social media and fake news, Adams despairs at the standard of the "national conversation".

"All of us now live in a bubble of choice, we choose our media bubble and all you hear are your own views reinforced or amplified.

"There is no 'conversation', people are simply sitting in an echo chamber and they are not learning a damn thing. You find your bubble, you climb inside it and you are safe from outside influences and impervious to [broader] information and dialogue."

Born just before the start of the Second World War, he's witnessed enormous political and social change.

When asked his view on the state of the world today, Adams likes to quote Pablo Casals, the famous Spanish cellist and one of the world's greatest musicians, who lived through the Franco era and the Spanish Civil War and was asked a similar question at the age of 80.

"They had a press conference in Spain for Casals [for his 80th birthday] and he talked about all the problems of the planet and, like old men tend to do, he got glummer and glummer and gloomier and gloomier until he obviously heard himself and fell silent.

"A few seconds passed then he said two things, two sentences that don't seem to fit together, in fact they couldn't fit together and yet they do.

"He said: 'The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step.'

"And that's my view. Whatever situation you look at whether it's war and peace, appalling social attitudes and bigotry, or whether it's the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change, you name it, the situation is hopeless but that does not justify inaction. We must take the next step.

"And if LNL has a subtext, has a secret message embedded in its heart, I thinks it's that.

"The situation IS hopeless and every night we explain how hopeless, but we must take the next step and every night we ask our guests to make positive suggestions about a way forward."

"Love, friendship and compassion can fill the void" of a meaningless universe says Adams, pictured with partner Patrice Newell, getting her PhD at Newcastle University in 2015, and their daughter Aurora. ( Supplied: Phillip Adams )

Hoping to die at the microphone

After a lifetime of contemplation, Adams believes the universe remains devoid of meaning but "love, friendship and compassion can fill the void".

No doubt so too does his work and on that front, he plans to follow Casals' advice and keep taking the next step until he can no more.

"I have expressed the hope of dying at the microphone and that could come at any moment," says Adams.

"For the time being I shall sit at that [studio] desk, grip the knobs and keep talking. In fact, I intend to keep broadcasting posthumously. We're working on an app for that."

Phillip Adams reflects on his life in conversation with Richard Fidler on Late Night Live on the eve of his 80th birthday, Thursday at 10pm and also on ABC listen or wherever you get your podcasts.