Like the cartoon and the dance of the flaming arseholes the monologue is a great Australian form and it is either dying … or not. ‘There was this bloke came out of the sunrise and cripes he was looking done in,’ Lawson, Humphries, Oakley, Hibberd, Kenna, Blair, Frank Hardy, Bill Reed, Bill Harney, Les Murray, Paul Hogan and the unsung librettists of Gunston and Gillies have in their finest writing embellished and gilded the spadework done by a hundred nameless bushies on pub verandahs in the long afternoons with melodies for one voice that will dance in the firelight of our race memory long beyond our century and our culture’s absorption into the Greater Indonesian Co-Prosperity Sphere. ‘We parked the vehicle, made our way inside, sat down, watched the instrument and shortly after midnight, went to bed.’ And in the contiguous medium and commonest perversion of the monologue form, the newspaper column, John Hepworth, Ron Saw, Sam Orr, Ross Campbell, Lennie Lower, David Dale and Barry Dickins have achieved such haikus and sonatas of inward laughter as will not soon fade in the mind of our race, or am I talking utter bullshit. Well, it’s possible. What worries me of late is commercial television’s compression of the attention span of the young to the brisk length of a rock clip, or is it four bars of a rock clip, and the loss therefore and thereby and thereto and therefrom of such errant and detailed richness, the air and colour and sadness and how the weather was as will sap their souls and their old age of all remembered delight. Les Patterson, The Christian Brother, Scanlan, Tales of Benson’s Valley. All gone to the mental shredder not to return. An Evening Alone at Bunyah. The purpose of life, said Henry Miller, is to remember. Delight takes time to blossom. The monologue has it. The quick gag has not. 

The monologue has the form and passion and substance of a novella sometimes or an oratorio; it is a considerable undertaking. It is not alas the forte of Phillip Adams, whose recent takeover of all forms of the media except the fortune cookie and the singing watch has of late so distressed so many civilised patriots of my acquaintance that there is furtive talk of a skyhook for his stomach staple. A harsh reprisal perhaps, but in his premeditated daily and hourly murder of the English pun and his agile substitution of a kind of mental musak for the long and honourable tradition of consecutive human thought this agreeable, pudgy, well-meaning, world-promising, axe wielding, Henry VIII of our cinema and back pages has shown himself ripe, I think, for counter monologue, embargo blockade, and someone else who loves the form should take him on. Not I, alas, since I am his closest friend.